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The German skinhead who had been run down by his friends out on the salt had been diving from a cabin cruiser he and his friends had stolen from a berth in Biloxi.
Hippo Bimstine's friends had broken up a meeting of a hate group with baseball bats and expropriated their Nazi film footage in a cinder-block house north of Pascagoula.
I lowered the bar to my thighs, then curled it into my chest, released it slowly again, pausing in midair as the muscles in my arms burned and filled with blood. The air felt as cool as a knife blade in my lungs.
Maybe the circle was starting to tighten on Will Buchalter.
Before we went to bed, Bootsie and I ate a piece of pie at the kitchen table.
'Is something bothering you?' she said.
'I thought Clete might call.'
'Clete has his own way of doing things.'
'You're right about that.'
That night the wind blew hard out of the south, and I could hear our rental boats knocking against the pilings in the dock. Then it began to rain, and in my sleep I heard another sound, a distant one, metal striking methodically against metal, one pinging blow after another, muffled by the envelope of water it had to travel through.
In my dream I saw a group of Nazi sailors huddled in a half-flooded compartment, salt water pinwheeling through the leaks above their heads, their faces white with terror in the dimming light while they breathed their own stink and the coldness crept above their loins and one man kept whanging a wrench against the bulkhead.
I woke from the dream, my chest laboring for air. Through the clicking of the rain in the trees, I could still hear the rhythmic twang of metal hitting against metal. I slipped on my loafers and khakis, pulled a raincoat over my head, and, with a flashlight in my hand, ran from the back door to the collapsed barn by my duck pond. A sheet of corrugated tin roofing, purple with rust, was swinging from a broken beam against the remains of my father's old hay baler.
I pulled the broken beam and sheet of tin loose from the pile and threw them out int
o the field.
But I couldn't shake the dream. Why? What did I care about the fate of Nazis drowned fifty years ago?
The dream was not about submariners. Someone close to me was in trouble, maybe because of information I had given him, and I was trying to deny that simple fact.
Where was Clete Purcel?
* * *
chapter twenty-nine
Tommy Lonighan had turned up the heat inside his glassed-in sunporch, even though it was seventy-five degrees outside and he was wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. My face was moist with heat, but his skin looked dry and gray; almost flaccid, as though his glands had stopped secreting; he sat forward on his reclining chair, his eyes still trying to follow the action in a movie playing on his VCR, a furious conclusion working in his face.
'This is a piece of crap,' he said, pulled the cassette from the VCR, and flung it clattering into a pile of other cassettes. 'You saw that movie Reservoir Dogs? It's sickening. A bunch of made guys are beating up and torturing a cop. No mobbed-up guys would do something like that. The guy who wrote this don't know dick about crime. You know what I think, it's the guy wrote this is sick, not the fucking criminals.'
'Can you help me find Clete or not?'
'Where do you find an elephant? You go to the circus. How should I know where he is? Ask his punch, the one getting in my face about Jews.'
'I went by Martina's apartment this morning. No one's seen her in two or three days.'
'Cause she's with Purcel. 'Cause he's got a warrant on him, he don't wake up with a boner?'
'You're unbelievable, Tommy.'
'If Max or Bobo did something to him, I'd a heard about it, and I ain't.' He freed something from a nostril and sniffed dryly. 'Can I tell you something? I don't give a shit, either. I wish the Caluccis would try to hit somebody now. Maybe they'd get taken down like they deserve.'
'You're talking about my friend.'
'I should worry about Purcel? I got maybe three, four months, then the doctor says he'll start me on morphine. Maybe it ain't gonna do the job, either. You know why I got all this grief in my life? It's punishment 'cause I got mixed up with those fucking greasebags. They're immoral, they got no honor, they—'
'Then why not dime 'em and be done with it, Tommy?'
