Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“Why is it I feel like you’re telling half of something?”

“I want to be a good cop. I’m seeing this Cajun girl, Babette. You know her. At the bar-and-grill. She’s a nice girl.”

“You’d better treat her as one.”

“Lay off it. I’m hurting enough. I’ve been hitting the sauce a little too hard. I know you’re A.A. I thought I could go to a meeting with you.”

I brushed at my nose. “You don’t need me to do that.”

“Like get lost?”

“The hotline is in the phone book. Dial them up.”

“Forget I came in here. That guy out there. I got a funny feeling about why he’s here. I mean the real issue.”

I leaned back in my chair and spun my ballpoint on the ink blotter. “What feeling is that?”

He squeezed his temples, his eyes crossing. “He’s got a list of people to pop. Jimmy Nightingale is one of them.”

“What do you base that on?”

“Nightingale is too smart, and he knows too much. He’s also got a reputation for shitcanning his friends after he gets what he wants. Don’t you get it? These people are like a bunch of scorpions in a matchbox. They kill each other all the time. Why should they care about us? They use us and throw us away.”

I had never seen a man more tortured by his own thoughts.

“You’re just going to stare at me and not say anything?” he asked.

“I think you need to talk to a minister or a psychiatrist, Spade.”

“I could have been your friend. Except you don’t want friends. You’re a hardnose. You think everybody has to cut it on their own.”

“Take it somewhere else, partner.”

He stood up. His skin was gray, the way people’s faces look when they see the grave. “I need help.”

I hated what I had to do. I wrote my cell phone number on a memo slip and handed it to him. “There’s a meeting at seven o’clock. I can pick you up.”

He crunched the memo slip and bounced it on my desk. “I’ll stick with drinking. I may get popped, but I’m not going to crawl. I’ll still be me, for good or bad. What will you be? A big fish in a dirty pond.”

“You said Jimmy Nightingale knows too much. Too much about what?”

“How Frankenstein works,” he replied. “What’d you think?”

* * *

I THOUGHT THAT, one way or another, my life was moving away from the night T. J. Dartez died. I was wrong. Sleep is a mercurial mistress. She caresses and absolves and gives light and rest to the soul in our darkest hours. Or she fills us with fear and doubt and disjointed images that seem dredged out of the Abyss. If you’re a drunk, she can instill memories in you that may be manufactured. Or not. And clicking on a bedside lamp will not rid you of them; nor will the coming of the dawn. They take on their own existence and feed at the heart the way a succubus would.

In the dream, I saw the face of Dartez behind the window of his truck, illuminated by the passing headlights of a vehicle on the two-lane. His mouth was red and twisted out of shape, a rubbery hole trying to make sound. His forehead struck the glass. Then I was grabbing him and pulling him through the window, his body thrashing. I came down on him with all my weight, reaching with my fingers for his face. Was I trying to gouge his eyes, to drive a thumb deep into a socket, to break his windpipe?

I woke shaking and sat on the side of the bed in the moonlight. I had never had such a bad dream except for the ones I’d brought back from overseas. Alafair stood in the doorway, backlit by a red light on a clock flashing in the hallway.

“I heard you talking,” she said.

“What was I saying?”

“?‘Don’t fight.’ Then you said something in French. Maybe ‘Que t’a pre faire? Arrêt!’”

“?‘What are you doing? Quit!’?”