Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

She slid the night chain off the door and pulled it wide. “Sit at the dining room table. I’ll start the coffee. There’s a sweet roll on the plate.”

He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the table and sat in a straight-back chair. “You have two, don’t you?”

“Two what?”

“Children. That’s what I always heard. You’re a single mother. That’s what they’re calling it, aren’t they?”

She was at the stove. She looked sideways at him. “What was that?”

“They use the term ‘single mother’ these days. That’s not how we used to put it.”

“I changed my mind. I want you to leave.”

“Your robe isn’t tied tight. You got a piece of string wrapped around your waist so it hikes up your slip and don’t let it show below your hem. My mother learned that trick from a nigra woman we picked cotton with. Where’s your children at?”

“I told you to leave.”

He didn’t move.

“Don’t smoke in here,” she said.

He blew out the paper match he had used to light his cigarette and dropped it in the flower vase on the table. “You came out to my house with Dave Robicheaux and treated me like I was dirt. Now I’m in your house.”

“You stay back.”

“You ever have a white man in your house?”

“Don’t you dare put your hand on me.”

“’Fraid my color is gonna rub off on you?”

“You’re a sick man. And I pity you.”

“Not as sick as you’re fixing to be.”

He hit her across the face with the flat of his hand. His hand was large and square and as rough-edged as an asbestos shingle, and the blow knocked the light out of her eyes and the shape out of her face. He grabbed her around the neck with his left arm and turned off the burner on the stove with his right hand. Then he pinched her chin and forced her to look into his face. “Where’s your piece?”

Her left eye was red and watering where he had struck her. “You’re going to prison.”

“I doubt it. When I get finished with you, you’ll think twice about the story you tell.”

She spat in his face. He picked her up in the air, locking his hands behind her back, crushing her ribs, and slung her across the table. Then he wiped her saliva off his skin with a paper towel and lifted her to her feet and slammed her down in the chair where he had been sitting. “Want to answer my question? Where’s your piece?”

She was bleeding from one nostril, her face trembling with shock. “You’re a man and twice my size. But you’re afraid of me.”

He wrapped his fingers in the back of her hair and slowly raised her up from the chair, twisting her hair to get better purchase, making tears run from her eyes. He pulled his handcuffs from the back of his belt and bent one arm behind her and fitted a cuff on her wrist and pushed the steel tongue into the lock, then crimped the second cuff on her other wrist and squeezed the mechanisms so tight that the veins on the undersides of both wrists were bunched like blue string.

“You gonna yell?” he asked.

“No.”

“That’s what you say now.” He wadded up three paper towels and pushed them into her mouth. “See, that takes away all temptation.”

He walked her into her bedroom and opened a pocketknife and cut her robe down the back and her slip down the front and peeled both of them off her. Her eyes were bulging, sweat beading on her forehead, her breath starting to strangle on the paper towels that had become so soaked with saliva, they were slipping down her throat. He fitted his hand on her face and shoved her on the bed.

“Think this is tough?” he said. “Wait till we get to the main event.”

Then he began to hurt her in ways she probably did not know existed. But Jesse Leboeuf had a problem he was not aware of. He’d always considered himself a cautious man. As a lawman, he had taken risks only when necessary and had never felt the need to prove himself to his colleagues. In fact, he looked upon most displays of bravery as theatrical, as confessions of fear. When the Loup went after a barricaded suspect with a cut-down Remington pump, he had no doubt about the outcome: Only one man would walk out of the building. Most perps, particularly the black ones, would drop their weapons and beg right before he pulled the trigger. The equation had always been simple: He was better than they were and they knew it, and as a result, he lived and they died. People could call it bravery if they wished; Jesse called it a fact of life.