He was motionless, one hand resting on the corner of the stove, the other on a chopping table that had a single drawer. “The government is attaching the money I got from that failed bank. I worked over forty years for what I have. Now I’m supposed to live on a piss-pot state pension ’cause of what other people done? What would you do in that situation?”
I saw two fingers on his right hand jerk involuntarily, just inches above the metal handle on the drawer. I said, “I think I wouldn’t fault myself for a situation I didn’t create. I wouldn’t try to correct the past by serving the interests of the same people who cheated me out of my life savings.”
His jaw flexed, the skin on half his face wrinkling as coarsely as sandpaper. “You reckon hell is hot?”
“Since I don’t plan on going there, I haven’t speculated on it.”
“This ain’t my way. But they didn’t give me no choice, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You open that drawer, I’m going to smoke your sausage.”
“No, sir, you’re not. You’re a trusting man, which makes you a fool. Sorry to do this to you.”
With his left hand, he lifted up a double-barrel chrome-plated .32-caliber Derringer that he had probably slipped from his back pocket. It was aimed at a spot between my chin and breastbone.
“People know where I am. They know I talked with you,” I said.
“Don’t matter. Twelve hours from now, I’ll be fishing off the Yucatán coast. Turn around. Don’t make this no harder than it is.”
I could feel my mouth going dry, my scalp tightening. When I tried to swallow, my breath caught like a fish bone in my throat. In my mind’s eye, I saw a nocturnal landscape and the flicker of artillery on the horizon, and seconds later, I heard the rushing sound of a 105 round that was coming in short.
I forced myself to look at the Derringer, its two chrome-plated barrels set one on top of the other. The muzzles were black, the handles yellow, lost inside Thigpin’s grip. My head felt like a balloon about to burst. “You’re typical white trash, Thigpin. You’re a gutless thrall who’s spent his life abusing people who have no power. Go on and do it, you motherfucker. I’ll be standing by your deathbed.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Robicheaux. When you get down below with the Kennedys and all the other nigger lovers, give them my regards.”
My vision went out of focus. I raised my hand to my holster, but I knew my gesture was in vain, that my life was over, that I was going to be executed by a brutal, mindless human being whose pathological cruelty was so natural to him, he did not even recognize its existence. Then, through the distortion in my vision, I saw a man standing thirty feet from the kitchen window, aiming down the barrel of an AR-15, his huge shoulders almost tearing the seams of his Hawaiian shirt. He seemed frozen in time and space, his breath slowing, the squeeze of his trigger pull as slow and deliberate as the tiny serrated wheels of a watch meshing together. The report was dulled by the wind gusting in the trees, but the muzzle flash was as bright and sharp and beautiful as an electric arc. The round popped a hole in the screen and blew through one side of Thigpin’s neck and out the other, whipping a jet of blood across the stove’s enamel.
I suspect the round destroyed his trachea, because I heard a gasp deep down in his throat as if he were trying to suck air through a ruptured tube. But there was no mistaking the look in his eyes. He knew he was dying and he was determined to take me with him. Blood welled over his bottom lip as he lifted the Derringer toward my chin. That was when Clete Purcel squeezed off again and caught Jimmy Dale Thigpin just above the ear and sent him crashing to the floor. The top of the coffeepot rolled past his head like a coin, devolving into a tinny clatter on the linoleum.
CHAPTER
22
I HAD MY CELL phone open and was about to dial 911 when Clete came through the back door, the AR-15 held at an upper angle, his gaze fastened on Thigpin’s body. Until I had seen him through the kitchen window, just before he fired, I’d had no idea he followed me to the camp. “You calling it in?” he said.
I waited. A pool of blood was spreading outward from Thigpin’s head. I stepped aside.
“Bag him as a John Doe,” Clete said. “Let the guys who sent him wonder what happened to him. Weingart already seems to be coming apart. Let the Abelards or Weingart or Carolyn Blanchet or whoever is behind this think Thigpin is about to rat-fuck them.”
I closed my cell phone. “You warned me about Thigpin. I should have listened.”
“Think of it this way. What happens when I listen to my own advice?” He laughed without making any sound, his shirt shaking on his chest. “I need a drink.” He opened a cabinet and found Thigpin’s bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured four inches in a jelly glass. He saw me watching him. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you,” he said. “But I need a drink. I’m not like you. I don’t have your control or discipline. I don’t have your faith, either. So I’m going to put the tiger in the tank. I’ll be a lush right through the bottom of the ninth. Bombs away.”
He drank all four inches of it as though it were Kool-Aid, gin roses flaring in his cheeks, his eyes brightening, the world coming back into focus, becoming an acceptable place again.
“You saved my life, Clete. You’ll always remain the best guy I ever knew,” I said.
“That second shot? The one that flushed his grits?”
“What about it?”
“It was supposed to be my first shot. The one through the neck was five inches below where I aimed. I could have gotten you killed, big mon.”
“You pulled it off, didn’t you? You always pull it off. You’ve never let me down.”
But I was caught in my old vanity—namely, that I could convince Clete Purcel of his own goodness and heroism and the fact that the real angels in our midst always have tarnished wings. He sat down in a straight-back chair and looked wearily out the screen door at the sun setting on the bay. “We can’t keep running on luck, Dave,” he said.
“We’ve done pretty well so far, haven’t we?”