Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“My money is on Smiley,” I said.

“But there’s something wrong, isn’t there? Cleaners don’t fire four rounds and leave their victims alive.”

“Want to come inside?”

“No. You think Labiche got to the shooter? Sent him off in a rage?”

“Psychotic people are psychotic for a reason,” I said. “They don’t deal well with confrontation.”

“Clete isn’t answering his cell. You know where he is?”

“He probably took Homer fishing.”

I saw the light fade in her eyes.

“What is it?” I said.

“Some guys in the department have a hard-on about Clete meddling in the Jeff Davis Eight case. They’re going to go through Homer to fuck him up.”

* * *

I KNEW WHERE to find him. It was an emblematic postage stamp out of the past on the southwestern side of the Atchafalaya Swamp, a reminder that our connection to the Caribbean and our neocolonial origins was only one hour away.

On the edge of the bay was a flooded woods strung with moss and dotted with hollow tupelos that reverberated like conga drums when you knocked on them, the lichen on the water undulating like a milky-green blanket in the wake of a passing boat. In a hummock that had been part of a plantation built in the late eighteenth century were former slave quarters made of cypress and roofed with corrugated tin that had been eaten into orange lace. There were palm trees in the hummock and depressions back in the trees where people born in Africa were buried, their names and histories lost. Supposedly, Jean Lafitte moored his boats here when he and James Bowie were transporting slaves from the West Indies to the United States in violation of the 1808 embargo. The story of the Mid-Atlantic Passage was here, as well as the story of the auction houses in New York, Jamestown, Charleston, and New Orleans, all of it now bleached by sun and rain and washed clean of memories that steal into your sleep, the scattered planks and logs as weightless and innocuous as balsa wood and the whitish-brown cylindrical stain in the soil that supposedly was the remnant of a whipping post.

I cut my outboard and drifted onto the bank. Fifty yards away, Clete and Homer were anchored in a channel that flowed out of a bay between two narrow islands thick with gum and willow trees. They were casting their lures at the edges of the lily pads on the shady side of the islands. The time of day was equally wrong for big-mouth bass and sacalait and goggle-eye perch and bream, but catching fish wasn’t the issue for Clete. He had become Homer’s father, and I didn’t want to think about the travail and injury that awaited both of them.

The sun was white in the sky, the surface of the bay gold and brown and wobbling with light, the breeze out of the south, smelling of salt and distant rain. I went into the shade and propped an air cushion under my head and went to sleep. I dreamed of a scene out of T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, though I don’t know why. Bedouins on camels and in open-air motorcars were charging down a sand dune, the early-morning sun at their backs. Down below was a hospital train that had been dynamited and jacked off the tracks. The motorcars were equipped with Vickers machine guns, the muzzles flashing, sand rilling from the balloon tires. The train cars were filled with typhoid victims. The cries and moans of the dying were louder than the Vickers.

I woke with a jerk, a weight like an anvil on my chest, pushing me into a dark pool.

“Hey,” Clete said. “You’re having a dream. Wake up.”

I held my head. I looked at my watch. I’d been asleep fifteen minutes. I didn’t know where I was.

“Must have been a whameroo,” Clete said.

I looked at Homer and tried to shake the train from my mind. He had put on weight, the right kind. His hair was long and straight, mahogany-colored like an Indian’s, his skin coppery, his eyes blue. I had the feeling he would be a tall boy, maybe a soldier, an underwater welder, a chopper pilot flying out to the rigs, but something out of the ordinary, something that required courage and paying dues. The restoration of his life was due to one man only, and that was Clete Purcel.

Homer was holding a huge mud cat on a stringer that was wrapped around his wrist.

“Is that yours or Clete’s?” I said.

“I caught it on a throw line with a piece of liver,” he said.

“You know how to skin one without getting spiked?”

“Yes, sir.”

I opened my Swiss Army knife and handed it to him backward.

“I don’t have no pliers,” he said.

“Any pliers,” Clete said.

“Any pliers,” Homer repeated.

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