The back door was shut, the yellow linoleum floor glistened with sunlight from the window, water ran from my hair and drenched shirt like ants on my skin, my own breathing sounded like air being forced through sand. His hand moved down my sternum over my stomach, toward my loins, and he shifted his weight on his knees, cupped the knife palm up in his right hand, and moved his eyes slowly over my face. I clanged the handcuff chain against the drainpipe, tried to twist away from him, then jerked my knees up in front of my stomach as a child might, my voice strangling in my throat.
He took his hand away from my body and looked at me patiently.
"Come on, man. Trust me on this one," he said.
A shadow went across the glass window in the back door, then the handle turned and Clete came through the door as though he were bursting through barrel slats, flinging the door back against the wall, knocking a chair across the linoleum, his.38 revolver aimed straight out at the handbill man's face. He looked ridiculous in his old red and white Budweiser shorts, T-shirt, blue windbreaker, crushed porkpie hat, loafers without socks, and nylon shoulder holster twisted across one nipple.
"What's happening, Charlie?" he said, his face electric with anticipation.
"Throw away the shank or I blow your shit all over Streak's wallpaper."
The handbill man's vacuous blue eyes never changed expression. The white threads of light in them were as bright as if some wonderful promise were at hand. He set the knife on the floor and grinned at nothing, resting comfortably on one knee, his right forearm draped across his thigh.
"Charlie almost got away from me," Clete said.
"Sal told me he took his rental back to Missoula and caught a flight last night. Except Charlie's been getting some nook up on the lake and his punch told me she's supposed to meet him at the airport tonight. thought you were a pro, Charlie. You ought to keep your hammer in your pants when you're working. Roll over on your stomach and put your hands behind your neck."
Clete knelt behind him and shook him down, patting his pockets, feeling inside his thighs.
"Where's the key to the cuffs?" Clete said.
The handbill man's face was flat against the floor, pointed at me. His eyes were bright with light.
"Hey, you got problems with your hearing?" Clete said, and kicked him with the point of his loafer in the rib cage.
Still, the handbill man didn't say anything. His breath went out of his. lungs and he breathed with his mouth open like a fish out of water. Clete started to kick him again, then his eyes went to the top of the kitchen table. He slid the knife across the linoleum with his foot and picked up the handcuff key from the table. He knelt beside me and unlocked one of my wrists. I started to raise up, but before I could he snapped the loose cuff around the drainpipe.
"Sorry, Streak, not just yet," he said.
"Get the tape off your mouth and dangle loose a minute while we talk to Charlie here." He picked up the canvas sack by the bottom and shook it out on the floor. The Instamatic, a roll of pipe tape, and a.22 revolver clattered on the linoleum among the scatter of handbills.
"Sal wanted some pictures for his scrapbook, huh? And it looks like we got a Ruger with a magnum cylinder. Streak, we're looking at your genuine, all-American psychopath here. I got a friend at Vegas PD to pull Charlie's sheet for me."
I had the tape worked loose from my mouth now. I sat up as best I could under the lip of the sink and pinched the skin around my mouth. It was stiff and dead to the touch. I could feel a swollen ridge through my hairline and down my forehead.
"What are you doing, Clete?" I said. My words sounded strange and outside of myself.
"Meet Charlie Dodds. Vegas says he's been tied to five syndicate hits they know about, and maybe he iced a guy on the yard at Quentin. His finest hour was whacking out a federal witness, though. The guy's fourteen-year-old daughter walked in on it, so Charlie took her out, too."
"Give me the key," I said.
"Be mellow, Dave." He had put the.22 in one of the big pockets of his Budweiser shorts. He started to lean over the man on the floor.
"Call the locals, Clete."
He straightened up and looked at me as he would at a lunatic.
"You think you or I can keep this guy in jail? What's the matter with you?" he said.
"He'd be out on bond in three hours, even if these hicks would file charges. No matter how you cut it, he'd be back doing lines with the corn holers before the five o'clock news. I'll tell you something else, too, Dave. The mortician told me a tear was sealed inside Darlene's eye, he couldn't clean it out. You know what she must have gone through before she died?"
His jaw flexed, the skin of his face tightened, the scar that ran through his eyebrow and across his nose reddened, and he kicked the man on the floor hard in the rectum. He kicked him in the same place again, then leaned over him and whipped the barrel of the.38 across the back of his head. Then he said "Fuck" as though an insatiable rage had released itself in him, put his revolver in his other deep pocket, hoisted the man to his feet by his belt, as if he were made of rags and sticks, threw him against the wall and drove his huge fist into his face.
Then Clete held him erect by the throat, hit him again and again, until his knuckles were shiny and red and the man's eyes were crossed and a bloody string of saliva hung from his mouth.
"For God's sakes, cut it out, Clete!" I said.
"The guy's all we've got. Use your head, man."
"Bullshit. Charlie's no sissy. Our man here is a stand-up con." And with that, he wrapped his hand around the back of the man's neck, ran him across the room, and smashed his head down on the side of the stove. I saw the skin split above the eye; then Clete threw him to the floor. The man's eyes had rolled, and his straw-colored hair was matted with sweat.
Clete stuck his wrist down at my face.
"Feel my pulse," he said.
"I'm calm, I'm copacetic, I'm fucking in control of my emotions. I don't have a hard-on. I'm extremely tranquil. I saved your fucking ass this morning. How about a little gratitude for a change?"
"You unlock me, Clete, or I'm going to square this. I swear it."
"You'll never change, Streak. You're unteachable."
Clete picked up the roll of pipe tape and the survival knife from the floor and knelt next to the unconscious man. He ripped off a ten-inch length of tape, sliced through it with the knife, and wrapped the man's mouth. Then he pulled his arms behind him, wrapped each wrist individually, made a thick figure eight between both wrists, and sliced the tape again. The knife was honed as sharp as a barber's razor. He wrapped the man's ankles just as he had done the wrists.
"I don't know what your plan is, but I think it's a bad one," I said.
"I'm not the one up on a murder charge in Louisiana. I'm not the guy cuffed to a drainpipe. I don't have a knot on my head. Maybe I do something right once in a while. Try some humility along with the gratitude."
He went into the front of the house, and I heard him pushing furniture around, tumbling a chair or a table to the floor. A moment later he came back into the kitchen, dragging my living room rug behind him. His face was flushed, and sweat ran out of the band of his porkpie hat. He ripped off his windbreaker and used it to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The powder-blue sleeves were flecked with blood.
"Sorry to fuck up your house. See if you can write it off on the IRS as part of Neighborhood Watch," he said.
He kicked the rug out flat on the floor and began rolling the man up in it.
"Clete, we can bring Dio down with this guy."
But he wasn't listening. He breathed hard while he worked, and there was a mean bead in his eye.
"You got out of that murder beef in New Orleans. You want them to stick you with another one?" I said.