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"What's happening, Dave?" His eyes squinted at me out of the glare, but they didn't actually meet mine. He looked as though he were focusing on a thought just beyond my right ear.
"I brought in the Nicaraguan. Didi Gee's people dumped him on my dock."
"The fat boy is rat-fucking the competition, huh?"
"I thought you might want to check him out."
"What for?"
"Maybe you've seen him before."
He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out into the sunlight.
"You know you got blood on your right hand?" he said.
I took out my handkerchief and wiped my knuckles with it.
"What went on?" he said.
"Nate Baxter had an accident."
"You punched out Nate Baxter? Jesus Christ, Dave, what are you doing?"
"Why'd you do it, Clete?"
"A lowlife is off the board. What do you care?"
"A bad cop would have used a throwaway. He would have just said Starkweather came up in his face with it and he had to smoke him. At least you didn't hide behind your badge."
"You once told me yesterday is a decaying memory. So I got no memory for yesterday. I don't care about it, either."
"Confront it or you'll never get rid of it, Clete."
"You think all this bullshit is political and involves principles and national integrity or something. What you're talking about is a bunch of perverts and heroin mules. How you take them out is irrelevant. Bust 'em or smoke 'em, all anybody cares about is they're not around anymore. My uncle used to walk patrol in the Irish Channel back in the forties. When they caught some guys creeping a place, they broke their arms and legs with baseball bats and left one guy to drive the rest of them out of town. Nobody complained then. Nobody would complain if we did it now."
"These guys don't hire part-time help."
"Yeah? Well, I'll worry about that when I have the chance. Right now my home life is like living inside an Excedrin ad. I got a little heat rash and Lois thinks it's the gon."
"Don't you think you've been working that domestic scam a long time?"
"Sorry to tire you with it, Streak."
"I'm going to take those guys down. I hope you're not there when I do."
He flipped his cigarette off the back of a passing truck. A sign showing a woman in a bathing suit was on the side.
"Why would I be?" he said. "I'm just the guy that carried you two flights down a fire escape while a kid tried to notch our ears with a .22 rifle."
"You can't win on the game you pitched last Saturday."
"Yeah? Sounds like an AA meet. I'll see you around. Stay off the booze. I'll drink it for both of us. It's a lousy life."
He walked back toward his automobile, his sandals flopping on the pavement, a big, lumbering man whose boiled, stitched face reminded me of a bleached melon about to explode in the sun.
I pretended to be a pragmatist, a cynic, a jaded war veteran, a vitriolic drunk, the last of the Louisiana badasses; but like most people I believed that justice would be done, things would work out, somebody would show up with the Constitution in his hand. That afternoon I kept the phone on the deck table while I washed down the houseboat, polished the brass and windows, and sanded and revarnished the hatch. I put on flippers and goggles and cooled off in the lake, diving down into the yellow-green light, feeling the power in my lungs and chest that were now free of alcohol, bursting to the surface with a ringing in my ears that was never the telephone.
Finally, at six-thirty Captain Guidry called and said that the Nicaraguan remained in custody and that he would question him himself in the morning and also contact Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.
