"Dude I knew was hooked up with a gal by the name of Ida Durbin."
"You got me. Ask Lou. You like the hamburgers?"
"They're swell."
"You seem like a sweet guy. Look, I've got to check on my cousin's house. I'm taking care of her parakeet while she's out of town. You want to come?"
They drove in her compact down 1-95 and took an exit into a neighborhood of cinder-block apartment buildings and one-story wood-frame homes that looked like they had been built during the Depression years. Babette entered a dark street and turned into the driveway of a paintless house. The front porch was lit and the screens on it were stained with rust, the yard filled with waving shadows from clusters of untrimmed banana trees.
"Your cousin lives in Little Havana?" Clete said.
"She's not Hispanic, if that's what you mean," Babette replied.
"No, that's not what I meant," he said.
"Before we go in, I need to tell you something. The cell number I gave you, it wasn't mine. It belongs to a dial-in prayer service."
"Really?"
"See, Lou took a bunch of us to Lake Charles, to the hotel and casino on the lake there. We met this famous evangelical leader. It was like a spiritual experience for me. I think for the first time in a long while I can stop living the way I do. But I don't have enough money to quit yet and plus I got a little drug problem."
"That's why they have Twelve-Step programs," Clete said.
She had cut the engine and now she opened the door partway, lighting the interior of the compact. "I just wanted you to know how it is with me and why I gave you the prayer number," she said. "I'm just trying to be honest."
Clete did not try to follow her reasoning. He waited for her to ask him for money. But she didn't. "I need to use the bathroom. Then I'll clean the birdcage and we can go," she said.
The inside of the house was clean and squared away, the furniture bright, the rooms air-conditioned by two window units. Through a bedroom door he could see a water bed and a lava lamp on the nightstand. Babette went into the bathroom, then Clete heard the toilet flush and the faucet running before she came back out.
"Why do you have that funny look on your face?" she said.
"Sorry."
"You think this is a fuck pad?"
"Hey -" he said.
"If that's what you think, say so."
"Not me," he said, and tried to smile.
"I've got a pitcher of rum punch in the fridge. You want some?" she said.
"I'm good," Clete said.
"I can't find my aspirin. My head is coming off. Somebody is always hiding my aspirin," she said, opening and slamming cabinets all over the kitchen.
"I thought this was your cousin's place."
"It is. I just visit here sometimes."
Clete decided he would have a drink after all. Babette broke apart a tray of ice, dropped cubes in two tall glasses that had been standing straight up in the dry rack, and filled them with rum punch from the pitcher. She took a long drink and the color bloomed in her face. "Oh, that's a lot better," she said.
"You got a pretty heavy jones?" Clete said.
"I got into smoking China white because I didn't want to infect. But I ended up using needles anyway. I've got it down to two balloons a day. They say if you can get it down to one, it's mostly manageable."
Clete drank from the punch, crunching ice between his molars, and tried to look attentive. He put a cigarette in his mouth and asked to borrow her cigarette lighter.
"I didn't think you smoked," she said.
"Just once in a while." He opened and closed his mouth to clear a popping sound from his ears. "You never heard of a hooker name of Ida Durbin?"
"I already told you. You think I'm lying?"
"No, I just feel kind of weird," he replied.
He reached out to take the lighter from her hand, but the gold surface seemed to turn soft and sink in the middle, like a lump of butter inside the warmth of a stove. His fingers went past her hand and knocked over a salt shaker, as though his motors had been snipped in half at the back of his brain. His mouth and throat became instantly dry; the overhead lighting caused his eyes to well with tears.
"What's happening?" he said.
She stared at him mutely, her expression caught between fear and guilt. "I have a little girl. I've got to get clean. Just don't lie to them. It makes them really mad," she said.
"Come here," he said, catching a piece of fabric with one hand.
But she pulled her canvas tote from him, looked back once, and rushed out the back door into the darkness.
Clete felt himself slip from the chair and crash on the linoleum, his drink glass shattering inches from his face.
Both the men who came through the front door carried lengths of chain and looked Hispanic. One wore a formfitting strap undershirt and had shaved armpits and the tapered lats and flat chest of a boxer. The other man was much bigger, his skin slick with black hair. The fingers of his right hand were inserted in the holes of a pair of brass knuckles.
A third man entered the house. He wore white slacks belted high up on his waist and a western shirt sewn with chains of purple and red flowers. "We tossed your room and found your P.I. buzzer. Sorry to do this to you, big man, but it's out of my control," Lou Coyne said.
"Yeah, you came here to get fucked, and that's what you got, spermo – fucked," the man in the formfitting undershirt said. Both he and the other Hispanic man laughed.
Lou Coyne squatted down eye-level with Clete. "You working for Robicheaux? You working for some political people? These guys here are serious. Don't underestimate their potential," he said.
Clete tried to rise to his feet, then collapsed again, pieces of broken glass knifing into his back.
"This ain't my way, big man. Please don't do this to either one of us," Coyne said.
But the words Clete heard were muffled, distorted, like someone shouting inside the downdraft of a helicopter. In his mind's eye he saw a hooch burning brightly on the edge of a flooded rice field. Boxes of AK-47 rounds were exploding inside the heat, and in the distance, against a storm-sealed sky, he could see a Zippo-track with a Confederate battle flag tied to the radio antenna grinding over a dike that flanged the rice field, automatic weapons fire dancing across the water's surface.
Clete got on his hands and knees and began crawling.
That's when a chain whipped out of the air and raked across his neck and the side of his face. Then the man with animal hair on his skin straddled him and drove the pair of brass knuckles deep into his back and a second time into his neck.
What had they given him? Clete guessed it was chloral hydrate. Or maybe acid. Or maybe both. The room had melted, the colors in the walls and floor dissolving and running together. One of the men was now wrapping a chain around his forehead, tightening the links into his scalp. Clete drove his elbow into the man's scrotum and heard him scream and the chain rattle to the floor.
Clete crashed into a laundry room off the kitchen, knocking over an ironing board and a plastic basket filled with dried clothes. On his knees, he slammed the door behind him and shot the bolt. A cast-iron pipe, an old drain of some kind, extended four feet high up on one wall. He gripped it at the top, wrenched it back and forth until it broke loose from a rusted connection, then ripped it out of the floor.
The pipe was heavy and thick in his palms. The floor seemed to be pitching under his feet, the roar of helicopter blades still thundering in his head. Or was that one of his attackers throwing his weight into the bolted door? The sounds in his head were so loud he couldn't tell where they originated, but the door was shaking hard, vibrating through the walls and floor. Then the bolt splintered loose from the jamb and the door flew open in Clete's face. Clete looked into the close-set pig-eyes of the man with brass knuckles, and drove the pipe into his mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth.