“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.”
“Can you get in touch with him?”
“A guy who wants to kill me?”
“How about cooling it on the irritability?” I said.
“Dave, you’re not hearing me. Pickins is the bottom of the septic tank. Whoever hired him did it because he’s a sadist and bat-shit crazy. He’s also disposable. Know what I think?”
“No.”
“If Delmer Pickins is our guy, he’s after both of us. Or the guy who hired him is.”
I knew where Clete was going, but I didn’t say anything.
“I know Adonis Balangie and Mark Shondell would like to take you off at the neck,” he said. “You got it on with Adonis’s wife — sorry, his companion he never sleeps with — and with his regular punch who he bought a house for. You also took time out to slap Mark Shondell’s face in public.”
“So I’m the one to blame?”
“You didn’t let me finish. I think this is about money. Or power. Adonis isn’t going to hire an ignorant peckerwood like Pickins. This Confederate-statue stuff is the issue. Look, Eddy Firpo had neo-Nazis in his house. Mark Shondell is an elitist and closet racist if I ever saw one. We’re living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn’t mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“What, about the Herd?”
“Yeah. People are better than that.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” he said.
He got up from the bed and opened the icebox. He pulled out two cans and threw one to me. It was a Diet Dr Pepper. He popped his can and drank from it. “You know how many times you’ve said maybe the South should have won the Civil War?”
“I wasn’t serious.”
“You fooled me. Come on, noble mon. You hate political correctness as much as I do. How about the poor fuck who lost his job because of affirmative action? Here’s a guy who gets a bolt of lightning in the head because of somebody else’s mistakes.”
“I’m the target because of my influence on Johnny Shondell?” I replied.
“No, because you’re intelligent and you’ll give Shondell a hard time politically. Not many people can do that. Plus, he’s a scorpion.”
I sat down next to Clete on the bed. I hadn’t opened my cold drink, and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.
“So why would Shondell send a hitter after you?” I said.
“To get me out of the way so they can go after you unhampered.”
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Gideon was sent to burn you alive, Clete. Now this creep Pickins is in town. It’s you they’re after. There’s something in you that’s a threat to them. We just don’t know what it is.”
“Yeah, they’re jealous of my waistline. Where do you dig up this stuff, Dave?”
That was Clete, never able to understand the repository of virtue that lived inside him. He went to the sink and poured his Dr Pepper down the drain. “I’ll get some sheets and a blanket for the couch. You need to get some rest, noble mon. We’ll watch a film. I just rented The Passion of Joan of Arc, made in 1928. I’ve seen it three times. God, that girl was brave.”
Most neuroscientists believe that 95 percent of the human mind is governed by the unconscious. I believe them, because that is the only way I have ever been able to understand the behavior of my fellow man. Jonathan Swift said man was a creature “capable” of reason. I think he had it right. I believe that most human activity is not rational and is often aimed at self-destruction. I also believe that ordinary human beings will participate in horrific deeds if they are provided a ritual that will allow them to put their conscience in abeyance.
I have many memories I can suppress during daylight but which come aborning at night: a battalion aid station in a tropical country, helicopter blades thropping overhead, the raw smell of blood and feces, a man calling for his mother, his entrails blooming from his stomach as though it had been unzipped. The garish images from the aid station are to be expected. But I have another kind of dream, one that frightens and depresses me far more than my experiences in Vietnam.