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"He's not going to get away with it. I'm going to fry that bastard."
"You probably will. Even if you have to take everybody down with you. You might give that some thought," she said.
I opened and closed my mouth and felt my ears popping, the horizon tilting slightly, a buzzing sound inside my head, as though my old companion the malarial mosquito was having its way with me again.
Helen cupped her hand around my upper arm and kneaded the muscles in it. "Come on, Loot, give a girl a lift," she said.
"What? What did you say?" I said.
She looked at me strangely, her eyes filled with a mixture of pity and sadness.
Not far away, just outside the little town of Jeanerette, Clete Purcel drove down a back road past three antebellum homes that were so stunning in appearance, the tree-shaded lots they sat on so perfect in arboreal and floral arrangement, they looked like Hollywood movie fabrications rather than homes that people of enormous wealth actually lived in. He turned at the green, embanked property corner of the last house in the row, crossed a steel bridge over the Teche, and passed, within fifty yards of the last antebellum home, a rural slum composed of rusted trailers, desiccated sheds, and junker cars that could have been replicated from a photograph taken in Bangladesh.
He removed a pair of binoculars from his glove box and went inside a cafe from which his line of sight allowed him to see the trailer slum that spilled haphazardly to the edge of the bayou. It had not been a good day for Clete. Early that morning he had picked up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine in Opelousas and was about to transport him back to New Orleans, when the skip began jerking against the D-ring anchored on the floor of the Caddy, his face twisted with visceral pain, threatening to soil himself and the convertible if he wasn't allowed to use the bathroom. Clete cuffed him to a pipe next to the toilet in a filling station and waited outside. In less than two minutes the skip managed to put seventy-five cents in a sexual-enhancement dispenser, smear his wrist with a desensitizing lubricant, slip the cuff, and escape out a window.
Score one for the meltdowns, Clete thought.
A half hour later a woman did a hit-and-run on his convertible in a church parking lot; the investigating traffic officer gave him a citation for an expired inspection sticker; and while Clete argued the situation a flock of robins lit in a tree above his car, the top of which was down, and defecated all over the seats and upholstery.
He drank coffee and focused his binoculars on a trailer that was broken in the center and had vinyl garbage bags taped across the windows It was the home of the skip's one-time fall partner, an Angola parolee who had been down twice for sexual battery against children. There was no movement inside the trailer, but next door a woman in faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and peroxided hair that was waved on only one side walked down to the school-bus stop and waited for her child. Then she escorted the child, a boy of about eight, back home and closed the door behind her.
A moment later she reemerged with a tall, equestrian-looking man who had a hard, flat stomach and a purple birthmark that seeped from his hairline to the corner of his eye. They kissed on the mouth and the man put on a yellow hard hat and got into a waiting car driven by another man wearing an identical hard hat. The two men parked in front of the cafe and came in and sat down in the booth next to Clete's.
"Kid come home a little soon?" the driver of the car, a truncated, moon-faced man, said.
The man with the birthmark didn't reply but instead snapped his fingers repeatedly for the waitress's attention. After she took the order and went away, he said, "This guy Robicheaux is a walking hemorrhoid. You should see the old man's property. It looks like a bombing zone."
"Tell me about it," the other man replied. His blond hair was combed straight back from a receding hairline, and he kept leaning forward, reverentially, each time the other man spoke. But the man with the birthmark was silent now, not interested in whatever the blond man had intended to say. The blond man, who wore a pair of electrician's wire snips in a leather case on his belt, tried again. "His house was so dried out a popcorn fart could have set it on fire but he blames me for it. He tried to screw me with the Better Business Bureau and get my license pulled."
But the man with the birthmark, whom Clete had now connected with the name Will Guillot, only sipped his coffee and looked out the window at the bayou and the antebellum home on the far side of the steel bridge.
"You think he sent that doctor to your house?" the moon-faced man said.
"Probably."
"You're a mean machine, Will."
"Nope."
"The guy came at you with a sawed-off shotgun?"
"He thought he could go into a man's house and kick ass. He lost. End of story," Will Guillot said.
"Pow!" his friend said.
Both men became silent, eating slices of apple pie, drinking their coffee, picking their teeth. Clete went to the rest room, then waited for his check. The men in the other booth were talking about football now. Go home, he thought. You don't need any more bad luck today.
He looked out the window and saw the child of Will Guillot's girlfriend playing on a swing set, a cheap one that was probably bought at Wal-Mart. The skip's fall partner, the sex predator, pulled up next door, talked to the boy briefly, tousling his hair, then went inside his trailer.
Clete paid his check and started toward the door. He paused, thinking to himself, then reset his porkpie hat and walked back to Will Guillot's table. He grinned without speaking, his Hawaiian shirt partially unbuttoned on his chest, his eyes flicking sideways as though he did not know how to introduce himself.
"Help you?" Guillot said.
"You guys were in the Crotch?" Clete said.
"The what}" the blond man said.
"I heard you say something about a 'mean machine," so I thought you were talking about Mother Green's Mean Machine. See, jar-heads call "
