Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“You think you’re funny?” Clete said, and hit him with the flat of his hand on the ear. “Tell me you’re funny. I want to hear it.”

“Clete,” I said softly.

“Butt out of this, Streak.” Then he said to Jefferson, “You remember those three elementary kids got shot at the playground off Esplanade? The word is you sold the Uzi to the shooter. You got something to say about that, smart-ass?”

“Free enterprise, motherfucker,” Jefferson said, evenly, grinning, his tongue thick and red on his teeth.

Clete knotted Jefferson’s T-shirt with his left hand and drove his right fist into Jefferson’s face, then pulled him from the couch and threw him to the floor. When Jefferson started to raise himself on his arms, Clete crashed the sole of his shoe into his jaw.

“It looks like you just spit some teeth there, Garfield,” Clete said.

“Get away from him, Clete,” I said.

“No problem. Sorry I lost it with this outstanding Afro-American. Do you hear that, Garfield? I’ll come back later sometime and apologize again when we’re alone.”

“I mean it, Clete. Wait for me in the truck.”

Clete went out into the yard and let the screen slam behind him. He looked back at me, his face still dark, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. I helped Jefferson back onto the couch and found a towel in the bathroom and put it in his hand.

“I’m sorry that happened,” I said.

“You the good guy in the act, huh?” he replied.

“It’s no act, partner. Clete will tear you up.”

Jefferson pushed the towel tight against his mouth and coughed on his own blood, then looked up at me, this time without the grin, his eyes lackluster with the banal nature of the world in which he lived.

“I didn’t sell the piece to the cracker. He wanted one, but he ain’t got it from me. He got some wicked shit in his blood. I don’t need his grief,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“He do it for hire. But if there wasn’t no money in it, he’d do it anyway. You say he fucked up a hit? I don’t believe it. He gets off on it, man. Somebody done reamed that dude good.”

Clete and I drove into the French Quarter, then across the river into Algiers. We talked to hookers, pimps, house creeps, stalls, dips, strong-arm robbers, fences, money washers, carjackers, petty boosters and addicts and crack dealers, all the population that clings to the underside of the city like nematodes eating their way through the subsoil of a manicured lawn. None of them seemed to know anything about Johnny Remeta.

But an ex-prizefighter who ran a saloon on Magazine said he’d heard a new button man in town had bought a half dozen clean guns off some black kids who’d burglarized a sporting goods store.

“Who’s he working for, Goldie?” I asked.

“If he waxed Zipper Clum, the human race,” he answered.

At dusk, when the sun was only an orange smudge over the rooftops and the wind was peppered with grit and raindrops, we found one of the kids who had broken into the sporting goods store. Clete pulled him out of a fig tree down the street from the St. Thomas Welfare Project.

He was fourteen years old and wore khaki short pants and tennis shoes without socks. Sweat dripped out of his hair and cut lines in the dust on his face.

“This is the mastermind of the group. The ones who got away are younger than he is,” Clete said. “What’s your name, mastermind?”

“Louis.”

“Where’s the guy live you sold the guns to?” Clete asked.

“Probably downtown somewhere.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“ ’Cause he drove toward downtown. The same direction the streetcar go to.”

“Pretty smart deduction, Louis. How much did he give you for the guns?” Clete said.