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He pushed the point of the commando knife into the skin behind his chin, forcing his head back until his neck ached. What if he shoved the blade to the hilt? Would it reach the brain? What was the poem she used to read to him? He could remember only pieces. Tiger! tiger! burning bright. In the forests of the night . . . What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?
He had thought she was talking about him and why he was different from other children.
“Oh, no, no,” she said. “You’re a good boy, Chester. This poem is about bad people, the kind who have hurt us.”
At that moment, he knew no power on earth would ever separate them.
He replaced the rubber band around the index cards and flipped through the images with his thumb. Two more targets, people he knew nothing about. What had they done? Actually, he didn’t care. If they were on the cards, there was good reason. They knew it, too. He saw the regret in their eyes before he sent them to that place where they couldn’t hurt people anymore, and he felt no guilt about their passing. He gave ice cream to children with a glad heart. That’s who Chester Wimple was.
But something else was bothering him. He was losing his objectivity, and his motivations were becoming impure. For personal reasons, he wanted to do the man with the convex face and the peroxided shoe-brush haircut and the muscles that glistened with suntan oil. The man in the pool with Emmeline Nightingale, the man whose body fluids floated in the water and touched hers. He wanted to do this man on his own, up close with the commando knife, or with a rifle from afar so the soft-nosed, jacketed round would be toppling when it keyholed through the face, all of it caught inside the cylindrical simplicity of the telescopic sight.
Chester turned on the television set and stared at cartoons for the next two hours, sitting on the side of the bed, his mouth open, his face as insentient as a bowl of porridge.
* * *
CLETE WAS NOT only a member of our family, he would lay down his life for Alafair or me. Which also meant he inserted himself into situations without consulting anyone. On Tuesday, he and Homer went fishing in St. Mary Parish, then drove top-down to the movie set behind Albania Plantation. Levon and Rowena Broussard were standing behind a camera down the bayou. The actors and the crew were just breaking for lunch. Tony Nine Ball was nowhere in sight. Clete removed his porkpie hat. “My name is Clete Purcel, Mr. Broussard. Got a minute?”
“You don’t have to tell me who you are,” Levon said.
Clete put his hat back on and looked at the bayou and the hundreds of robins in the trees. “This is my pal Homer.”
“Homer Penny?” Levon said.
Homer looked at his feet.
“I’m his guardian,” Clete said. “Unofficial but guardian just the same. He’s never seen a movie set.”
Clete could hear the wind in the silence.
“How are you, Homer?” Rowena said, and extended her hand. The scars where she’d cut herself were red and as thick as night crawlers.
“Dave and Alafair Robicheaux don’t know I’m here,” Clete said.
“You’re on a mission of mercy?” Levon said.
“I was an extra and did security on a couple of films but didn’t have my name on the credits. I did
n’t think you’d mind. I mean us being here and all.”
“Welcome,” Levon said.
“I wanted to ask a favor, too.”
“I never would have guessed,” Levon said.
“I have a Frisbee over there on the table, Homer,” Rowena said. “Why don’t you and I toss a couple?”
Homer looked down the slope at a row of cannons and actors in kepis and butternut uniforms. “That’d be great,” he said.
Levon waited until they were out of earshot. “You’re here about Alafair?”
“She worked hard on the script,” Clete said. “It wasn’t for the money, either.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Tell her you want her back.”
“She can come back any time she likes.”
