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“What the hell! Who are you?”
“A guy you caused a lot of grief.”
“Grief? I got no idea who you are.”
Clete picked up a pillow. “Look at the gun I’m holding. It’s a throw-down. No serial numbers, no history. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll pop you and in one minute be down the road and gone, and the cleaning lady will smell a strange odor in the morning and you’ll be bagged and tagged and in a meat locker. Diggez-vous, noble mon?”
“Noble wha
t?”
“You got loose from death row in Texas. I thought you had some smarts.”
“Tell me who are you, and maybe something you say will make sense.”
“I’m a guy who already cut you slack you didn’t deserve. I was fishing by the trestle over the Mermentau River when you bailed off the freight car. I should have dimed you, but I didn’t, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“You got the wrong room.”
Clete stuck the .25 semi-auto in the back of his belt and grabbed Tillinger by the T-shirt and swung him into the wall so hard the room shook. Tillinger fell to the floor. His expression looked like someone had crashed two cymbals on his ears.
“Next stop is the toilet bowl,” Clete said.
Tillinger pushed himself up on his arms. “Do your worst. Then put yourself on a diet. You got a serious weight as well as a thinking problem.”
“Why were you hitting on Hilary Bienville?”
“You a cop?”
“I used to be,” Clete said. “You been putting shit in Hilary’s head? It takes a special kind of white man to do that to a woman of color.”
“I was a friend of Lucinda Arceneaux. Lucinda told me how some colored women were being used by some bad cops. You know who Travis Lebeau was, right?”
“He was in the Aryan Brotherhood,” Clete said. “He got dragged to death.”
“I’ve been trying to find out who killed Lucinda. It’s got something to do with prostitution.”
“Who shoved the baton down the throat of Axel Devereaux?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Can I get up?”
“An SUV like yours was seen hauling freight down the road right after Devereaux shuffled off.”
“I was there. But he was already dead. You got a beef because I messed up your fishing?”
“Where’d you get the wheels?”
“Boosted them.”
“Why’d you go to Devereaux’s house? You already creeped it once.”
“I was going to beat it out of him.”
“Beat what out of him?”
“The name of a movie guy Devereaux was scared of. That’s what a couple of stagehands said. Devereaux even got slapped around by this guy. The guy threw him off the set.”
“Because Devereaux was pimping?”
