Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“Did you hurt a child? If you lie, you know what will happen.”

“I’m sorry, Chester. Don’t be mad. I didn’t hurt no kids.”

“Let’s have no more ugly talk.”

“No more. I promise.”

“That’s a good boy,” Chester had said. His nostrils were flaring, his breath out of control.

In the pouches of his folder were his index cards wrapped with a rubber band. The cards were in numerical order. Each one had a drawing on it depicting the stages of the job he had been assigned. The system never failed him. If you had no connection to the target, and if the target deserved his fate—which they all did—it was easy to walk up on the target with a smile on your face and click the off switch on the side of the target’s head and walk away. He’d done it with an ice pick to a rapist on a subway in New York City, and had covered the dead man’s face with a raincoat and sat in the next car until the train pulled in to the station and the body tumbled out of the seat.

Of course there were occasions when he did it in self-defense, when people decided he was a half-grown man they could tease and torment, like the two drug dealers in Algiers or the deputy who gave him a bad time for simply walking down a backroad by the bayou. Chester didn’t like to think about those kinds of people. They made him grind his teeth, which were as small and rounded as pearls and loose in his gums because of the untreated abscesses that were his constant companions in the orphanage. When a dentist warned him about grinding his teeth in his sleep and his obvious need to wear a guard during the nocturnal hours, Chester told the dentist he ground his teeth in the daylight, and the dentist had better watch his greedy mouth and concentrate on keeping his fingernails clean and washing his hands after he went to the bathroom.

Chester sat down on a rolled tarp and rested the rifle across his thighs. The sun was white in the sky, the bayou a dirty chocolate color, dragonflies hanging over the cattails. A dead catfish floated upside down past the boathouse, its stomach as bloated as a softball. Then he saw a woman emerge from the back of the house. She was wearing a bathing suit that was as black as her hair; it fit her as tightly and smoothly as molded rubber. He released the box magazine from the rifle’s frame and lifted the telescopic sight to his eye. Suddenly, the face of the woman was a few feet from his. Her body was an artwork, a landscape of valleys and hills and mysterious places that yearned to be discovered and touched. He felt an erection tightening against his underwear.

She walked slowly down the tile steps into the pool, one hand gliding along the hardness of a chromium rail, the water sl

ipping over her knees and thighs and the secret place he knew it was wrong to think about. Through the telescopic sight, he could see the sweat on her neck and the tops of her breasts, and he had to rest the rifle butt-down and clench the stock and kiss the barrel to stop his hands from shaking.

He closed his eyes and began counting backward from a hundred to make his erection go down. Inside his head, he saw himself strapped to a bed, his underwear soaked with urine, his bare chest and legs crisscrossed with welts from a switch the operators of the orphanage had made him cut for himself. Then the kindly face of someone not much older than he was appeared above him. Her loving hands unbuckled the straps and removed his soiled underwear and washed his body and stroked his forehead.

He forced himself to breathe slowly until he regained control. He wiped his saliva off the gun barrel, his desire reduced to little more than a guttering flame. He must not have impure thoughts, he told himself. They made him want to hurt people. Others enjoyed forbidden things, and he could not. The thoughts followed him around, and the more he tried to keep them out of his head, the more they enticed him. When nothing else worked, he wanted to hurt someone the way his friend the hitchhiker did, and he never wanted to be like the hitchhiker.

He waited for the quivering in his shorts to subside completely, then he dared look at the swimming pool again.

A man in a yellow bikini and flip-flops emerged from the house and walked toward the pool. A towel hung around his neck. Chester lifted the telescopic sight to his eye again. The man’s hair was peroxided, his artificially tanned torso plated with muscle, his phallus shaped like a fat banana inside the bikini. Chester put the crosshairs on the man’s face. There was something wrong with it. It was sunken in the center, the eyes and nose and mouth too small. It was a stupid face. Chester did not like people with stupid faces. He felt himself grinding his teeth again.

Naughty boy, he thought gleefully.

The man with the perfect body and stupid face dove into the pool and swam on his back. The woman joined him, then the two of them rested by the gutter in the deep end, closer than they should have been, perhaps their legs or stomachs touching. Chester fantasized about parking a big one at the base of the man’s brain. It would leave his head floating in chunks, dissolving like red smoke in the turquoise depths. Chester ran his tongue across his lips at the thought.

The woman pulled herself up on the ladder and got out of the pool, her rump dripping. She seemed very angry and shook her finger at the man clinging to the pool gutter, his face turned up to hers.

Chester wondered if the man with the stupid face had tried to put his hand somewhere he shouldn’t have. If that was true, Chester wanted to kill him. And not all at once. Bad men deserved bad things, and Chester knew how to do all of them. He began to breathe heavily again, frustrated with himself and with the restraints placed upon him. He shouldn’t have come here. Or wheeled his suitcase down the two-lane road by the bayou, thereby drawing the attention of the deputy he was forced to kill. The job and the places were always on the cards. There were no cards that showed him in a boathouse, gripping an M107 with both hands.

But these were things he had to do, whether others liked them or not. He had survived at the orphanage and on the streets of Mexican border towns where children were rented by the hour. Today he had power that he wanted to take back in time and use on all those who had exploited his little body. But that was not the way it worked. Time did not take away the pain; nor did it allow him to use his skills on people out of the past who waited for him in his sleep.

Chester got up and realized there was a wet spot the size of a quarter in his underwear. Although no one was in sight, he felt his face burning as he walked back to the car and dropped the rifle into the trunk. He drove straight to a Dairy Queen in Franklin and cleaned himself in a restroom, then sat at a wooden table in the shade and began eating a paper plate full of ice cream sandwiches.

Three teenagers sat in an SUV ten feet away, the doors open, the panels throbbing with rap.

“Turn that down, please,” Chester said.

A kid lowered the volume. “What was that?”

“That music. It hurts my ears,” Chester said.

“It grows on you,” the kid said. He turned the volume up full-blast.

Chester walked to the door of the SUV. The three kids were looking at one another and grinning, as though they intuitively knew a lifelong object of ridicule had wandered into their midst and they were free to do anything they wished to him.

“Why do you want to act smart-alecky?” Chester shouted above the roar.

“You like Dilly Bars?” said the kid in the passenger seat. “Strap on your kneepads in the restroom. I’ll bring you one.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“My father owns half this town. Now get out of here, freak.”