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“I hope you’re not mad at me,” I said. “It was never personal.”
“Please don’t come any nearer to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” the figure said. His voice had a lisp, a discomfiting wet one, like that of an oversize child nursing.
“I know it’s you, partner,” I said. “Tell me what you’re doing here. It’ll make us both feel better.”
“You made me do things I didn’t want to,” he said.
“You killed a female detective. A good woman who didn’t deserve to die.”
“That is not true. People were shooting at me. I did not ever aim in the woman’s direction. Do not make up stories.”
“She died just the same. Do you want me to call you Chester or Smiley?”
“My friends call me Smiley. But if you’re not my friend, call me something else.”
“You need to leave the area,” I said. “Then all this will be just a dream.”
“I’ll leave when my work is done.”
“What is your work?”
“You don’t know?”
“You get even for people who can’t defend themselves,” I said. “That’s a noble mission, Smiley. But you need to move on. Maybe back to Florida. Work on your tan.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“I know better.”
I was sweating inside my clothes. Smiley’s real name was Chester Wimple. He had no category. Not even a partial one. In a harsh light his body seemed to take on the translucence and flaccidity of a jellyfish. He sounded like Elmer Fudd and ate Ding Dongs for breakfast and Eskimo Pies and Buster Bars around the clock. He had done hits with an ice pick on a New York subway and in the box seats of a racetrack and at a chamber of commerce meeting in New Jersey. He had never spent one day in jail.
I heard his feet move in the leaves. I held up my weapon so it silhouetted in the moonlight. I released the magazine and stuck it into my pocket, then ejected the chambered round, letting it fall on the grass. “I’m no threat to you, Smiley. I’m suspended from the sheriff’s department. I’m going to walk toward you now. Is that okay?”
The wind died. The leaves on the trees were as still as stamped metal. I walked toward the place where Smiley had been standing; the fog enveloped the lower half of my body. I saw a pirogue glide away from the bank, a solitary man seated and stroking evenly in the stern. He waved goodbye without turning around, as though he knew I would follow him to the water’s edge but offer no more protest about his presence in Acadiana.
I could hear myself breathing in the dark.
Chapter Nineteen
THE SUN CAME up like thunder, a yellowish bloodred in the smoke of a runaway stubble fire. I did not tell Alafair or Clete about my encounter with Smiley, in part because they would think me unhinged. Also I did not trust my own perceptions. For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.
I did make a call to a former CIA agent I knew from the program. His name was Walter Scanlon. For forty years he pickled his brain and liver with a fifth of vodka every night while he moved like a threadworm through the underside of the New American Empire. Now he chain-smoked and attended the “Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker” meeting in New Orleans, sitting silently in the back with a face that looked as old as papyrus and eyes that were the color of raw oysters. Few had any idea of the deeds stored in the basement of his soul.
“Yeah, Chester Wimple,” he said. “He goes by Smiley or something.”
“Was he ever one of yours?” I asked.
“We didn’t use guys like that.”
“But you’ve run across him? You know about him?”
“We thought he took out one of our informants in Mexico City. A child molester. No big loss. You didn’t talk to the FBI?”
“They don’t know much more than we do.”
“Let me ring a couple of people.”
He called back that evening. “When’s the last time you had contact with this guy?” he said.
