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“Smart businessman that he is, Nig tells the broad that she either delivers up her brothers or he yanks her bond and she waits for her trial in the parish jail. Which is not what she envisioned for herself, because this broad is one beautiful hot-assed piece of equipment who the bull dykes will cannibalize. So Nig thinks he’s got her and she’ll have both her brothers in his office in twenty-four hours. But the broad pulls one on Nig that he doesn’t expect.
“She says if he messes with her bond, threatens her again, or gets in her face about anything, she’ll have a bedtime chat with Bobby Earl, and Willie and Nig’s state license is going to be hanging out in the breeze. Nig checked it out. She’s Bobby Earl’s regular punch across the river. Once a week he’s at her pad like clockwork. She brags it around among the lowlifes that she fucks him cross-eyed on the ceiling.”
“I’m not following you, Clete. Who cares? This doesn’t get us any closer to Fluck, Gates, or Raintree. Tell Nig to give his story to the Picayune about election time.”
“Here’s the rest of it. Nig says the broad’s brothers are bikers and they were both in the AB in Angola and Huntsville.”
“I don’t know if that’s a big lead.”
“You got anything else? It’s Thursday. Nig says Thursday is poontang night for Bobby in Algiers. We tail him over there and see what happens. Come on, Bobby Earl’s an amateur. We’ll make drops of blood pop on his forehead.”
I looked out at the rain denting the trees and thought for a moment. The rain was blowing across the truck awning of the black man selling strawberries and watermelons, and in the south, against a black sky, lightning was striking against the Gulf.
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“All right,” I said.
“Why all the thought?”
“No reason. I’ll be at your apartment in about three hours.”
Clete had enough problems of his own and didn’t need to know everything about a police investigation, I told myself. I called Bootsie and told her that I had to go to New Orleans, but I promised to be back that night, no matter how late it was. I meant it, too.
WE USED CLETE’S battered Plymouth for the tail. It was 7:30, and we were parked a block down the street from Bobby Earl’s driveway; the sky was still black with clouds and rainwater ran high and dark in the gutters. Out on Lake Pontchartrain I could see the lighted cabins of a yacht rocking in the swell. Clete smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out his window into the rain-flecked air. He wore his porkpie hat over the scalped divots and stitches in his head, and a purple-and-white-striped shirt and seersucker trousers that rode up high on his ankles. He kept rubbing the back of his thick neck and craning his head.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Yeah, there is. I hurt from head to foot. Man, I must be getting old to let punks like that take me down.”
“Sometimes you lose.”
“You’re always quoting Hemingway to me. Do you know what he told his kid when his kid asked something about the importance of being a good loser? He said, ‘Son, being a good loser requires one thing—practice.’?”
“Clete, we do it by the numbers tonight.”
“Who said different? But you got to make ’em sweat, mon. When they see you coming, something inside them should try to crawl away and hide.”
“There he goes. Try to stay a block behind him,” I said.
Clete started up the Plymouth’s engine. The rusted-out muffler, which was wired to the frame with coat hangers, sounded like a garbage truck’s. The white Chrysler headed up the street with its lights on and turned at the corner toward Lakeshore Drive.
“Don’t worry, he’s not going to make us,” Clete said. “Our man’s got his mind on getting his Johnson serviced. I’ve got to scope out this broad. Nig says she looks like a movie star. When I was in Vice—”
“He’s not going to Algiers. He’s turning the wrong way.”
“He’s probably picking up some rubbers.”
“Clete—”
“I didn’t drag you down here just to fire in the well. Take it easy.”
We watched the Chrysler speed down the wet boulevard along the lakefront, then slow and turn through the iron gates of the yacht club. The taillights disappeared down a palm-lined drive that led to an enormous white glass-domed building by a golf course. Clete pulled to the curb and stared glumly through the windshield. The waves out on the lake were dark green and blowing with strips of froth. He breathed loudly through his nose.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“The hell it is. I’m going to take that cocksucker down.”
“We don’t need him to talk to the girl.”
