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“Really?”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“I didn’t. You took on the Mob. Nobody has ever done that. You’ve probably got them dumping in their drawers. But don’t let them take you alive. You copy on that? Go out smoking.”
A gust of rain and wind swept across the roof; lightning that made no sound bloomed around the edges of the curtains.
“Will you try to follow me?” Smiley said.
“No.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“No, you do not know what I’m thinking,” Clete said.
“We’re alike.”
“Time to beat feet, podjo.”
“We’re two of a kind. I like you. I want you to be my friend.”
“You’re getting weird on me, little mon. Are you hearing me? Hello, Mars.”
“Little mon?”
“Take it as a compliment.”
“I’ll be in touch. So will she.”
“Who is ‘she’?”
“Wonder Woman. She looks over me.”
Clete sat on the edge of the bed, his hands cupped on his knees. He stared at the floor. “I’ve really enjoyed this. But I’m going in the bathroom now.”
“You took care of an orphan boy.”
“You can’t win on the game you pitched last week,” Clete said.
Clete continued to gaze at the floor, his head bowed. He heard the door open and felt the rain rush inside, then heard the door close. He got up from the bed and looked through the curtains. The driveway was black and shiny and empty. He went into the bathroom and retrieved his snub-nose from the toilet bowl and washed it, then dried it and oiled it and put it into its holster and lay back down and stared at the ceiling and listened to rain pattering on the roof, his eyelids stitched to his forehead.
• • •
HE WAS AT my back door early the next morning. Alafair and I were at the breakfast table. This was an old routine with Clete. At sunset he would begin deconstructing the world and himself, then at sunrise be at my door, forlorn and stinking of rut and weed and beer sweat and in need of my absolution, as though I had any such power.
I pushed open the screen. “I don’t hear any sirens.”
He brushed past me. “That’s not funny. Hi, Alafair.”
“Hi, yourself, big guy,” she replied.
“About to take off for the set?”
“Not for a while,” she said.
Clete’s eyes were wandering all over the kitchen. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were eating out of their bowls on top of a newspaper, their muddy tracks strung behind them. “I was just passing by,” he said.
I grinned at him. “Tell me what you did.”
