AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Clete pointed a finger at me. “I don’t want to hear that again. I’ve got enough crazy people in my life already.”
Other diners were starting to look at us. Clete bent in to his food. Then he wiped his mouth and said, “This stuff is sick, Dave. The deaths of the women, the subhuman cruelty. I can’t sleep. It’s like coming back from Nam. It’s like I’ve got tiger shit in my brain.”
“We’ll catch whoever is responsible, Clete. It’s a matter of time.”
“What about Alafair?” he said.
“What about her?”
“Somebody was stalking us with a scoped rifle at Henderson Swamp. Maybe the same guy was at Sean McClain’s house. If he can’t clip one of us, maybe he’ll find another target, one whose loss you’ll never survive.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, my face flushing.
“You know the future?”
“Knock it off.”
“Our guy won’t stop until we tear up his ticket. I’m going to do it, Streak. I’m going to paint the landscape with that cocksucker.”
The tables around us had gone quiet. I stared at my plate, my ears ringing, wondering where Alafair was at the moment.
• • •
WHEN I GOT back on the sidewalk, I called her on my cell. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey, yourself.”
“I’m just checking in on you, Baby Squanto.”
That was her nickname when she was little. She had a whole collection of Baby Squanto Indian books. “I’m at the set, down by Morgan City. We’re shooting some of the last scenes.”
“What time will you be home?”
“Probably by seven. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Clete told me about Lou Wexler getting into it with the guy at Red’s.”
“Lou doesn’t like white men who knock women or minority people around.”
“A man who cares for a woman doesn’t get into a confrontation in front of her,” I said.
“Lou is a good person, Dave. How about laying off the people I work with? Just for one day.”
“I didn’t know I was that bad.”
“I’m going to give you a recorder for your birthday.”
“See you this evening.”
I closed my phone. Clete came out of the cafeteria and crossed the street and got into his Caddy in the alley, where it was parked. He drove away without waving. I wanted to believe he hadn’t seen me. I watched the taillights of the Caddy disappear in the traffic, headed west, toward Lafayette and I-10. I felt even older than my years but did not know why.
• • •
CLETE DROVE FOR three hours to a brick church in the piney woods of East Texas. B
ehind it, headstones trailed like scattered teeth down a slope to a lake spiked with dead trees, the banks churned with the hoof prints of Angus that had the red scours. The foundation in the church was cracked, the broken panes in the stained glass replaced with cardboard. Clete parked his Caddy and got out. The trees in the distance were bright green, the light harsh. There was a rawness in the wind that chilled his bones.
The post-burial service, which Clete had indicated he would not attend, had just started. He knew none of the people there. They seemed to be simple people, out of yesteryear, with work-worn hands and faces, the kind of people who didn’t quarrel with their lot and accepted death as they would a shadow moving across a meadow, subsuming whatever was in its path. There was an innocence and shyness about them, like that of children, and he wanted to tell them that but didn’t know how.
