Varina had also gotten out of the car and was walking around to the other side, where Clete was standing with one hand on the half-closed driver’s door, his face as cold-looking in the wind as a bluish-white balloon.
“Are you there?” Catin said.
“Yeah, go ahead,” I said, getting out of the car.
“I thought what Leboeuf said might give away who the shooter was. I didn’t want to give up the person who saved my life.”
“Don’t worry about it. What are the words?”
“Jam, mon, tea, orange.”
“Say them again?”
She repeated them slowly. Though she had written down the words phonetically, if I was correct in my perception, they weren’t far off the mark. The words Jesse had probably spoken were “J’aime mon ’tit ange.”
“What do the words mean, Dave?”
“‘I love my little angel,’” I replied.
The moon broke from behind the clouds, and suddenly the lawn was printed with shadows and shapes that had not been there seconds ago. The leaves of the water oaks were scattered on the grass, each leaf dry and crisp and limned with silver, sculpted like a tiny ship. I removed the phone from my ear and looked at Varina. “Qui t’a pres faire, ’tit ange?” I said.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘What are you up to, little angel?’ You don’t speak French, Varina? You didn’t learn it from your father? You didn’t study it at LSU?”
“You think you’ve figured it all out, huh?” she said.
I put the phone back to my ear, then felt someone screw the muzzle of a revolver into the back of my neck. “Whoa, hoss,” said the man holding the gun. He reached out with his other hand and pulled my cell phone from my palm and closed it. His hair was thick with grease and combed straight back. There was a purple bump on his nose, and his eyes were wide-set and misaligned, as if he possessed two optical systems instead of one.
He was not alone. Four other men came out of the shadows, all of them armed, one with a Taser. One of them was a fleshy man we had seen once before, in the company of the man whose eyes looked like they had been cut out of paper and glued haphazardly on his face.
The man with the Taser pulled Clete’s .38 from its holster and threw it into a wall of bamboo that bordered the driveway. Then he pushed Clete against the side of the Caddy and told him to spread his legs.
“He has a gun strapped on his right ankle,” Varina said.
“She’d be the one to know. I porked her once,” Clete said. “While I was drunk.”
“You and Dave brought this on yourselves,” Varina said. “And you’re foolish if you think anyone cares.”
The man with the Taser ran his free hand under Clete’s armpits and down his sides. Then he felt Clete’s crotch and inside his thighs and pulled up Clete’s right trouser leg and unstrapped the hideaway .25-caliber auto.
“You put your hand on my dick again, I’m going to break your nose, Taser or no Taser,” Clete said.
The man straightened his back and smiled. “You’re not my type,” he said.
The man with the greased hair crushed my cell phone under his foot and removed my .45 from my clip-on holster, then told me to spread myself against the side of the car.
“I’m clean,” I said.
“I believe you. But you know the drill. We’re all pros here, man. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.” His breath made the side of my face wrinkle as he moved his hands down my sides. “You don’t like garlic shrimp with tomato sauce? That makes two of us. Remind me never to eat around here again.”
“Where’s my daughter?” I said to Varina.
“Out of my hands,” she replied.
“Don’t lie.”
“Dave, do you think you’re going to change anything?” she said. “There are billions of dollars at stake, and you and your rhinoceros of a friend who keeps his brains stuffed in his penis come along and fuck up everything for everyone. I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen.”