The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

I stepped inside. “Thanks.”

I shook the raincoat from the cut-down and slammed the stock across his mouth. I heard his teeth clack against the wood. He crashed against the wall, his lips gushing blood. When he tried to get up, I brought the butt down on his forehead and split the skin at the hairline. He rolled into a ball, his forearms clamped around his ears. I tossed the cut-down on the couch and peeled one arm from his head and mashed his head under my foot.

The inside of his house looked like a collection of synthetic junk someone had bought at the dollar store. There was even a plastic birdcage with a cloth canary in it.

“Who else is in the house?” I said. “If you lie, I’m going to crack your skull.”

“Ain’t nobody here.”

“Where’s the camera?”

“I don’t have one.”

I lifted him to his feet and shoved him across the coffee table, breaking it in half.

“Eat shit,” he said.

I lifted him again and threw him through a bedroom door. There was a desk against one wall with a computer and a camera on top. I picked up the camera. “Is this the one you used?”

“Fuck you.”

“I want to explain something to you. I couldn’t care less if you put photos of me on the Internet. But you did it to an innocent woman and made her an object of scandal and ridicule.”

“I’m getting up now,” he said, one hand raised in front of him. “I cock-blocked you. You’ll have to find a new knothole. I win, you lose. Now get out of here.”

“Better stay where you are, Frenchie.”

“My dick in your ear.”

I felt my old enemy kick into gear, not unlike a half-formed simian creature breaking the chains from its body. The transformation always began with a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping inside my head; then the world disappeared inside a wave of color that resembled the different shades of a fire raging in a forest. I was now in a place bereft of mercy and charity, drunk on my own adrenaline, the power in my arms and fists of a kind that, in certain people, age does not diminish.

When I finished hitting him and throwing him against the wall, I dropped his camera on the floor and smashed it into junk. Then I picked up a handful of parts and pushed them into his mouth and stepped on them.

He began crawling away from me on his hands and knees. Both my hands were bleeding. The wallpaper was splattered with blood.

“Get up!” I said.

He didn’t answer. I thought I heard him weeping. Then I realized he was probably choking to death. I dragged him into the bathroom and hung him over the rim of the bath

tub and hit him between the shoulder blades. I could hear the pieces of the camera tinkling in the bottom of the tub. I wet a towel and wiped his face and eased him down on the floor, his back against the wall. His whiskers were bright red, his shirt plastered with blood against his chest.

I squatted down in front of him. “You want an ambulance?”

He shook his head.

“If I was you, I’d call for one,” I said.

“They’re gonna clean your clock.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“People wit’ big money. More than you can dream about. Axel was gonna tap into it.”

“Axel Devereaux was into something besides pimping?”

“Something to do with Arabs and uranium,” he said. He spat a piece of metal off his tongue.

“This is southern Louisiana. We don’t have Arabs or sand dunes or centrifuges.”