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CITY AND COUNTY emergency vehicles were already at the scene when I arrived. Clete was sitting in the passenger seat of a cruiser, the door open, his feet outside on the gravel, while a plainclothes investigator interviewed him. His face looked poached, pale around the eyes. He was looking up at the investigator, who stood outside the cruiser. I could see Clete’s chest rising and falling under his oversize Hawaiian shirt. He reminded me of a guppy seeking oxygen at the top of a polluted aquarium. The paramedics had just zipped up a body bag on a corpse and were pushing the gurney toward the back of an ambulance. There was a stench in the air like smoke from burning garbage or a dead fire. The overhead lights in the parking lot glowed with a greasy iridescence inside the humidity, buzzing with a sound that made me think of blowflies. The two-lane highway the club was on threaded its way back through a place called Hellgate Canyon. The only good thing I could see in the entire scene was the absence of cuffs on Clete’s wrists.
I had to work my way through a large crowd of onlookers that had gathered behind the crime-scene tape, and show my Iberia Parish badge to a uniformed deputy to gain access to the sheriff, Joe Bim Higgins. The sheriff was not in a good mood.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Clete Purcel called me for backup,” I replied.
“He inserts himself into a criminal investigation and calls you instead of 911 just before he kills a man? That’s interesting. Is this the way you do business in Louisiana?”
“If Clete shot somebody, it was for a reason.”
“I’ve seen Purcel’s sheet. Your friend is rolling chaos. The victim is Quince Whitley, a guy your friend had a grudge against. Now Whitley’s brains are glued to a windshield. You think there might be a problem here?”
“Can I talk to Clete?” I asked.
“When my investigator is through with him.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t get the wrong impression. I’m fed up with both you guys.”
The ambulance made its way through the crowd and headed back through Hellgate Canyon, its siren off, its emergency lights pulsing in the darkness. I saw Candace Sweeney and Troyce sitting in the back of another cruiser, talking to a deputy in the front seat. The interior light was on, and I could see blood splatter like tiny rose petals on Candace’s blouse. Five minutes later, the investigator who had been questioning Clete put away his notepad and rejoined the sheriff. Clete walked toward me, his face empty, his green eyes locked on mine, like a drunk man who thinks the ground might cave under him at any moment.
“What happened?” I said.
“Whitley was going to toss acid in the girl’s face. J. D. Gribble threw his guitar case in front of her. Whitley pulled a hideaway and was about to drop her. So I parked one above his ear.” He widened his eyes briefly, as though his words were floating in front of him.
“Where’s Gribble?”
“He took off in Albert’s truck.”
“He doesn’t want to be a hero again?”
“He saw Troyce Nix coming out of the club. I think Gribble is the dude Nix has been looking for.”
“We need to get you a lawyer.”
“I’m clean on this one, Dave. The girl saw what happened. So did Nix. Gribble left his guitar case behind. There’s acid all over it. I’ve got a permit for the piece in five states, including Montana.”
“Higgins is pissed off. Don’t empower him. You made your statement. From this moment on, you’re deaf, dumb, and don’t know.”
“Forget Higgins. I need a drink.”
“You’re serious?”
“I just splattered a guy’s grits all over an SUV. So it’s time for a double Jack and a beer back, and that’s the way it is.” He started to walk away, then stopped and turned around. “You want a Diet Doc?”
“Tell Higgins where you’re going.”
“He’s got my piece and my keys. I can’t go anywhere. The way I see it, I’m the injured party here, not Higgins, not the dirt bag I just smoked. What’s the matter with you, Dave? You know the score. The locals can’t clean up their own shit, and they’re putting it on us. We were locking up the skells when these guys were in the 4-H Club.”
You’re wrong, Cletus, I thought. But I didn’t want to argue with him. For a lifetime, violence and the shedding of blood had been our addiction and bane. We had traded off our youth for Vietnam and had brought back a legacy of gall and vinegar that we could not rinse out of dreams. We had learned little from the past and were condemned to recommit most of its mistakes. This parking lot was perhaps just another stopping-off place in our odyssey toward the destruction of everything we loved. Clete’s cavalier attitude was a poor disguise for the ethos of blood and the heart-pounding adrenaline high of burnt cordite we had chosen for ourselves. Unfortunately, illusion is sometimes the only element that keeps us sane, and you don’t rob others of it when they need it most.
What’s the point? You don’t have to drink alcohol to stay drunk.
I saw two deputies finishing a search of the diesel-powered truck Quince Whitley had driven to the nightclub. I also saw Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans talking to them. She was not wearing the customary blue windbreaker with yellow lettering on the back that she and her colleagues usually wore when they investigated a crime scene, and she was obviously agitated by the way things were going. She made a call on her cell phone, then snapped it shut when the deputies tried to hook Whitley’s pickup to a tow truck.
“What’s the trouble?” I said, walking up to the three of them.
