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“I see, well, let me know when you're finished, sir.” He walked toward his car, averting his eyes to hide the anger in them.
“You're Emile Pogue,” I said.
“Why not?” The voice sounded like it came from rusted pipe.
“You get around a lot. Exercising out at Pecan Island, showing up at the house next door. What's your interest, Mr. Pogue?”
“I'm retired, I like the weather, I like the price on this house.”
“Why is it I think you're full of shit?”
“Be fucked if I know.” He grinned.
“I'd like to ask a favor of you, take a ride down to our jail with me, we had a little problem there.”
“I was planning on having an early dinner with a lady friend,” he said.
“Change it to candlelight. Put your hands behind your head, please.”
“You got to have a warrant, don't you, chief?”
“I'm not big on protocol. Turn around.”
When he laced his fingers behind his neck his muscles almost split his coat. I rotated his left hand counterclockwise to the center of his back and pushed it into a pressure position between his shoulder blades. His upper arm had the tension and resistance of a wagon spring.
“Move your right hand higher, no, no, up behind your ear, Mr. Pogue.
That's right,” I said.
I cuffed his right wrist and moved it clockwise to his spine and then hooked it up to his left. I could see the cruiser coming up the road under the oak trees. I walked him down the sloping lawn to meet it, past the realtor, who stared at us open-mouthed.
“Is it true Sonny Marsallus popped a cap on your brother?” I said.
“Sounds like you left your grits on the stove too long,” he answered.
I rode in the back of the cruiser with him to the department, then took him down to my office and hooked him to the D-ring inset in the floor.
I called the sheriff and Kelso, the jailer, at their homes. When I hung up the phone, Pogue was staring at me, his eyes taking my measure, one shoulder pulled lopsided by the D-ring. He gave off a peculiar smell, like testosterone in his sweat.
“We're going to have to wait a little bit,” I said.
“For what?”
I took out my time sheet from my desk drawer and began filling it in.
We'd had a power failure earlier and the air-conditioning had been off for two hours.
“Wait for what?” he said.
I heard him shift in his chair, the handcuff clink against the steel D-ring. Five minutes later, he said, “What's this, Psy Ops down in Bumfuck?” His sports coat was rumpled, his face slick with heat.
I put away my time sheet and opened a yellow legal pad on my desk blotter. I uncapped my fountain pen and tapped it idly on the pad.
Then I wrote on several lines.
“You were an instructor at an Israeli jump school?” I said.
“Maybe. Thirty years in, a lot of different gigs.”
