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“About what?”
“He thinks Iberia General isn’t up to his standards. He wants his wife transferred to Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge.”
“I’ll wrap things up here and head back.”
“What’s going on with Tony Nemo?”
“Trouble.” I looked through the restaurant window. Clete was gone from the table. So were JuJu and Maximo. “I’ll call you back,” I said.
* * *
CLETE WAS STANDING at the urinal when he heard Maximo and JuJu come through the door. A man wearing a suit was urinating next to him. The man zipped his pants and began combing his hair in the mirror.
“Go outside, man,” Maximo said.
“Why?” the man said.
“We got to unstop a pipe. You need to be somewhere else.”
The man took one look at the expression on Maximo’s face and went out the door.
Clete turned on the faucet and watched Maximo and JuJu in the mirror. “Don’t do this.”
“You got to come out in the alley,” JuJu said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Tony says we gotta talk,” Maximo said.
“Tell him to boogie, Max,” Clete said. “In six months the state of Louisiana will be installing a pay toilet on Tony’s grave.”
“What happens later don’t change nozzing now,” Maximo said. “What you got in your coat pocket?”
Clete squeaked off the faucet and jerked two brown paper towels from the dispenser and dried his hands. “Talk to him, JuJu.”
JuJu looked like someone had fitted a garrote around his neck. “I got my job to do, Purcel.”
“Bad choice of words,” Clete said.
“No, bad choice of everything for you, man,” Maximo said.
Clete put a hand into his coat pocket for his blackjack, one that was shaped like a darning sock and weighted with lead and attached to a spring and a wood grip. But Maximo had already clicked on the stun gun he held behind his back. He touched it to Clete’s spine, and more than fifteen thousand volts flowed into Clete’s body.
Clete felt a pain like a bucket of nails tearing their way through his insides, dropping into his genitals, buckling his knees, and making him speak in a voice he didn’t recognize. He pulled himself half erect and tried to swing the blackjack at Maximo’s head. It flew from his fingers into the toilet stall. Clete stumbled along the wall, knocking over the trash can, his eyes bloodshot and stinging.
“We ain’t finished, man,” Maximo said. “It don’t do no good to run.”
Clete felt the sharp edges of a condom machine. He fitted his fingers around it and tore it loose in a cloud of plaster and smashed it on Maximo’s head. JuJu was reaching inside his coat for a small five-shot titanium Colt .38 special he carried in a nylon holster under his coat. Clete drove the condom machine like a cinder block straight into his face.
Maximo lay half upright against the wall. JuJu was bent over the sink, teeth and blood and saliva stringing into his cupped hand. Clete wet a handful of paper towels and pressed them to JuJu’s mouth. “Jesus Christ, JuJu! Why’d you guys do this? What’s the matter with y’all?”
JuJu spat a tooth into the sink, unable to answer. The door swung back on its hinges. Fat Tony stood in the hallway, one hand propped on his cylinder cart, his lungs wheezing. Two uniformed cops stood behind him. “I got your balls in a vise, Purcel. Your new home is Shitsville. How’s it feel, Bl
impo?”
MAXIMO AND JUJU went to the hospital, and Clete went to the can. I called Helen and told her I’d be late getting back to New Iberia.
“What happened?” she asked.
