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“I’ll talk to your boss,” Carroll said. “Just tell us what happened, Miss Emily.”
“The man said—”
“Said what?” I asked.
“I don’t like using these words. I know his kind. They beat up on women, yeah.”
“What did he say, Miss Emily?” I asked.
“He said, ‘I want you to sit down and watch this, bitch. Then I’m gonna light you up. Oh, am I gonna light you up.’ That’s when I wet myself. The homeless man come out the bat’room door, and the man in the suit shot him t’rew the face. Then he went after Tee Boy.”
“That’s when you hid in the freeze locker?” I said.
“I couldn’t go out the front ’cause he could see me, so I run down the hallway to go out the back, where my car is at. But the Dumpster guy moved the Dumpster and blocked the door.”
“You could hear from inside the locker?” I said.
“Yes, suh,” she said. “Tee Boy couldn’t understand why the man was mad at him. He kept saying, ‘I ain’t got no truck wit’ you.’ Then there was five or six shots. The man said, ‘How you like that, nigger?’?”
I saw Helen’s cruiser pull up in front. I patted Emily Thibodaux on the back and went into the kitchen. Tee Boy was lying on his side, his face in the shadow of the stove. The wounds were tightly grouped in the center of his chest. The brass on the floor was probably nine-millimeter. The closest shell to the body was six feet away. I realized Helen was standing behind me. “What’s your witness say?” she asked.
“The shooter was asking about Clete,” I said. “He insulted her. She spat in his pie and bragged to the cook about it. Our guy overheard the conversation and went nuts and started shooting.”
“He shot the surveillance cameras, too,” Helen said. She looked at the grouping of the wounds in Tee Boy’s chest and the distance of the shells from the victim. “Think we have a pro?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Did you talk to Clete yet?”
“Haven’t had time.”
“This is his late-night hangout when he’s not in the slop chute. That means our guy knows Clete’s routine. Get on it. I’ll do the notification.”
“You know Tee Boy’s family?”
“For twenty years. Tell Clete we want this guy alive.”
* * *
I WENT TO CLETE’S cottage at the motor court. It was still raining, the oak trees dripping with it, the bayou high and yellow, the surface lighted by an arc lamp on the opposite shore. There was a boom of thunder that shook the water out of the trees. I wondered if, out in the darkness, Gideon was on his galleon, waiting to come back into our lives, adding more souls to his vessel of pain and despair.
I banged on Clete’s door. He answered in his boxer shorts and a strap undershirt. “Why don’t you wake me up in the middle of night?” he said.
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. “I would have waited till morning, but I thought you might be in danger.”
“How?” he said.
I told him every detail of the shooting: the terrorization of the waitress, the homeless man walking into a bullet that blew his brains on the restroom door, the five rounds pumped methodically into Tee Boy’s chest, the colorless eyes of the shooter, the ill-matched three-piece suit, the spit-shined boots, the language the shooter used to degrade Emily Thibodaux. I also told him about Mark Shondell’s attempt to involve his nephew Johnny with the people who wanted to undo nineteenth-century history.
“I can’t process all this,” Clete said. He was sitting on the bed, still in his underwear. “What does Shondell have to do with the Civil War, and how is that connected with the shooting at the café?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, forget Shondell for a minute. The shooter sounds like a guy named Delmer Pickins. He works out of Amarillo and Dallas and beats up hookers and does hits most pros won’t deal with. I saw him at Benny Binion’s World Series of Poker a couple of times. But I never talked to him, and he’s got no reason to be looking for me.”
“What do you mean by ‘hits most pros won’t deal with’?”
“He’ll cowboy anyone for five grand. He does revenge hits and takes pictures for the client.”
