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nbsp; “They’re in the tackle box,” Clete said. “There’s a nail on that gum tree by the water.”
We waited until Homer was out of earshot.
“Something happen?” Clete said.
I told him about the shooting at Labiche’s house. He listened quietly, showing no expression. Then he said, “It sounds like our guy lost his Kool-Aid. That is, if it’s the nutcase who steals ice cream trucks.”
“It’s got to be the same guy. He just got sloppy.”
“Like he’s losing control?” Clete said.
“That’s my guess. Sherry Picard was at the house this morning.”
“What for?”
“She didn’t know where you were. She also said some cops in Jeff Davis want to screw you over.”
“With the adoption?”
I nodded.
“Maybe this isn’t just about some pinheads wanting to do payback,” he said. “I’ve been making some calls about Nightingale. That bombing down in South America he told you about? Did he give you specifics?”
“He said he didn’t see the aftermath,” I replied.
“I bet. There were more than three dozen people maimed and blinded and killed. The government burned and bulldozed their village and moved them two hundred miles away. Nightingale’s family owned the company. Did he tell you that?”
“No.”
“I’m going to fix him. I mean legit. I know a couple of wire-service guys in New Orleans.”
I didn’t reply.
“That’s not going to slide down the pipe?” he said.
“How many people cared about the things you saw in El Sal?”
He went to his boat and opened his cooler and took out two cans. He sat down next to me on the mound of compacted dirt and broken bricks. “You were dreaming about ’Nam?”
“Not directly.”
He looked around at the cabins, the pools of heat in the corrugated roofs that had been added during Reconstruction, when the former Confederate colonel who owned Angola Plantation turned it into a rental convict farm to replace the slaves set free by the Emancipation Proclamation.
“It’s still with us, isn’t it?” he said.
“What do I know?”
He put a cold can of Dr Pepper in my hand. “Drink up, big mon. Let’s take it to these motherfuckers. Whoever they are.”
High above us, a burnt-orange pontoon plane was working against a headwind, frozen against a satin-blue sky, droning like an angry bee.
* * *
WE GOT THE ballistics back late Monday afternoon. The rounds fired in Labiche’s home came from the same .357 used to kill the St. Mary deputy and the two drug dealers in Algiers.
The same afternoon Alafair came home in a huff from filming in the backyard of a plantation east of Jeanerette. “I quit.”
“Because of Nemo?” I said.
