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“Dude’s finished. He’s bleeding from every hole in his body. You hear me? Back away. He’s not worth it. The guy may be hemorrhaging.”
I could feel the room come back in focus, see the faces staring at me in the gloom, their mouths downturned, their eyes marked with sadness, as though everyone there had in some way been diminished by the violence they had witnessed. Clete was standing between me and Lefty Raguza now, the shotgun still inside his coat.
“I just need a few more seconds with him,” I said. “Can’t just walk away and leave loose ends.”
“No, we bag it and shag it,” he replied, reaching for my arm.
I pulled loose from his grasp and knelt beside Raguza. I reached down in my raincoat pocket, then bent over him, my back obscuring the view of Clete and Raguza’s friends, my hands going down almost involuntarily to Raguza’s face and the blood that rilled back from the corners of his mouth. When I got to my feet, the ends of my fingers looked like they had been dipped in a freshly opened can of paint.
Clete stuck one arm in mine and pulled me with him, out the door, into the night, into the clean smell of ozone and trees that were dripping with rain. A crowd had formed around Lefty Raguza, and I heard a man in a Cajun accent say, “What’s that in his t’roat? Get it out of his t’roat. The guy cain’t get no air.”
There was a pause, then a second man, also with a Cajun accent, replied, “It’s toot’paste. No, it ain’t. It’s a crunched-up tube of bug poison. Holy shit, the guy done this is a cop?” Chapter 19
C LETE DROVE BECAUSE MY HANDS would not stop shaking in the aftermath of what I had done to Lefty Raguza. The wind had knocked an oak limb down on a power line by Four Corners, darkening part of the city, killing all the traffic lights. Clete sped through the black district, then skirted the university, splashed through the bottom of an underpass, and caught the four-lane to New Iberia. He made it as far as the first drive-by liquor store south of town.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Time for some high-octane liquids. I’m over the hill for this stuff. You want a Dr Pepper?” he said, getting out of the truck.
“Leave the booze alone, Clete.”
“You should have seen your face back there. You scare me sometimes, Dave.”
His words and their content seemed to have been spoken to me by someone else. I watched him walk inside the liquor store and put a six-carton of beer and a pint of Johnnie Walker on the counter. He bought a length of boudin, and while the clerk warmed it in the microwave, he went to the cooler and brought back a king-size bottle of Dr Pepper. I wanted to walk inside and ask him to repeat what he’d said, as though my challenge to him could take the sting out of his remark. Then I realized that my attention was less on Clete than on his purchase—the ice-cold bottles of Dixie, their gold-and-green labels sweating with moisture, the reddish-amber wink inside the Johnnie Walker. I rubbed my hand on my mouth and stared at the trees changing shape in the wind, a yellow ignition of light splintering through the clouds without sound.
Clete pulled open the driver’s door and got inside, wiping the rain out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. He handed me the Dr Pepper and twisted off the cap on the Johnnie Walker. He looked sideways at me before he drank. “This is rude as hell, Dave, but my nervous system is shot,” he said.
Then he took a deep hit and chased it with Dixie. The color bloomed in his face and his chest swelled against his shirt. “Wow, that’s more like it,” he said. “I swear that stuff goes straight into my johnson. Four inches of Scotch or gin and I need to lock my schlong in a vault.”
“What was that crack about my face?” I asked.
“I thought you were going to do the guy.”
“He deserved what he got. I’d do it all over again.”
“You want to lose your badge over a shithead like Raguza? This isn’t Iberia Parish. We got no safety net here, Streak.”
He drank again from the Scotch bottle and out of the corner of his eye saw me watching him. “Drink your Dr Pepper,” he said.
“Tell me that again and see what happens.”
He turned on the radio and began changing the stations. “The Cubs got a game on.”
I turned the radio off. “Where do you get off lecturing me, Clete?” I said.
He put his booze down and rested his big arms across the top of the steering wheel. “Here’s what it is. The problem’s not you, it’s me. I wasn’t kidding about leaving my big-boy in a safe-deposit box. I got myself in a jam with Trish. It’s not just sexual. I really dig her. But I think she and her friends are planning a serious score.”
He was obviously redirecting the subject, protecting me from my own bad mood and the darkness that still lived inside me. But that was Clete Purcel, a man who would always allow himself to be hurt in order to save his friends from themselves.
“A serious score where?” I asked.
“Maybe a takedown on a casino.”
“They pulled off that savings and loan job in Mobile, didn’t they?”
“If they did, they got lucky. They’re all amateurs. They get up each day and pretend they’re country singers or boxers or Hollywood screenwriters. It’s like being in a roomful of schizophrenics. Look, I may have a few bad entries in my jacket, but I’m not a criminal, for Chrissakes.”
“Get away from them.”
