"Did something happen today?"
"No, not at all. Just be a little careful."
"About what?"
"I can't put my hand on it. It's like the war. It's like seeing a guy out there in the elephant grass, then not seeing him," I said.
She squeezed my hand. "Don't scare me, Dave," she said.
After Molly picked up the elderly lady from next door and headed for the movie theater, I realized what it was that had bothered me all day. It wasn't the fact that a serial killer was in our midst or that I couldn't return to the year 1958 or the fact that Valentine Chalons had bested me at every turn. It was none of those things, even though they laid a certain degree of claim on me. The real problem was my last conversation with Koko Hebert. How had Koko put it? Something to the effect that when Val Chalons and his minions were finished with me, my name wouldn't be worth warm spit on the sidewalk. Then he had added, "You and your wife will be picking flypaper off your skin the rest of your lives."
That was it. The damage Val Chalons could do was endless. His kind planted lies in the popular mind, smeared people's names, destroyed lives, and floated above the fray while others did their dirty work for them. As their victim, you never got the opportunity to confront your accusers. You didn't get to walk out on a dirt street in nineteenth-century Arizona and empty a double-barrel twelve gauge into the Clanton gang. Instead, you and your family picked flypaper off your skin.
In the meantime, the predators would continue hunting on the game reserve. They'd transport crack, brown skag, and crystal meth down 1-49 and across I-10 and peddle it in the projects and on inner-city basketball courts and street corners, where teenage kids carried beepers and nine-Mikes and looked you straight in the eye when they explained why they had to do a drive-by on their own classmates.
The by-product was the whores. Sexual liberation and herpes and AIDS be damned, the demand was still there, as big as ever. But depressed times didn't produce the whores anymore. The dope did.
And guys like Lou Kale were there to help in any way they could.
Yes indeed, I thought, Lou Kale, now living regally in Lafayette, about to open an escort service.
Years ago, many street cops used to keep a second weapon they called a "drop" or a "throw-down." It was usually junk, foreign-made, pitted with rust, the grips cracked, sometimes without grips at all. The important element was the filed-off or acid-burned serial numbers. When the scene went south and a fleeing suspect turned out to be unarmed, the "throw-down" had a way of ending up under the body of a dead man.
Mine was an old.38 I took off a Murphy artist and part-time drug mule who used to work out of a bar two blocks from the Desire Welfare Project. The barrel and sight had been hacksawed off an inch from the cylinder. The grips were wrapped with electrician's tape. But the previous owner's carelessness and neglect had not affected his weapon's mechanical integrity. The cylinder still locked firmly in place when the hammer snapped down on the firing pin and didn't shave lead on the back end of the barrel.
I put on my raincoat and hat, dropped the revolver in my pocket, and drove to Lou Kale's motel in Lafayette.
It was still raining hard when I parked under a spreading oak and showed my badge to a young woman at the desk. "Lou Kale," I said.
She was probably a college kid. Her face was plain, earnest, eager to please, totally removed for any implication my presence might have. "He's in one-nineteen. Would you like me to ring his room?" she said.
"That's all right. Would you let me have a key, please?"
"I'm not sure I'm supposed to do that," she said.
"It's fine. This is part of a police investigation," I said.
"Well, I guess it's all right, then," she said, programming a card for me.
I walked down the corridor, past soft drink and candy machines, and entered an annex that paralleled the swimming pool. I didn't feel good about what I had just done. The girl at the desk was probably a good person and I had taken advantage of her trust and deceived her. In my mind's eye I saw myself somehow making it up to her, and I knew at that moment that the script for the next few minutes was already written in my head and the final act was one that I must not allow myself to see. I stuck the electronic key into the door of Room 119 and pulled it out quickly. When the tiny green light flashed at me, I twisted the door handle and stepped inside, my right hand squeezed around the taped grips of the.38.
Lou Kale was asleep on his side, bare-chested, a pair of pajama bottoms notched into his love handles. The room was dark, but the swimming pool lights were on outside and the surface of the water glowed with a misty green luminosity in the rain. When I closed the curtain on the sliding door, Lou Kale's eyes opened as though he had been shaken violently awake.
"You know what a dry drunk is, Lou?" I said.
"Dry what?"
"It's a guy like me. That means you're shit out of luck."
He lifted himself up on his arms. His abdominal muscles looked as hard as the rollers on a washtub, his chest and shoulders coated with soft strips of monkey fur. Even with the air-conditioning on, the room smelled like an animal's lair or un-buried offal. By the bed was a service table, and in the middle of it a steak knife and ragged pink T-bone rested on a white plate marbled with gravy and blood.
"I got no beef with you, Jack," he said.
"Remember when you woke me up in that motel in Galveston? You touched the muzzle of a nickel-plated automatic to the center of my forehead. You called me 'hoss' and told me I had a lot of luck. I was twenty years old."
"What are you doing with that gun, man?"
I had dumped all six shells from the cylinder into my palm. I inserted one of them into a random chamber and clicked the cylinder back into the revolver's frame. Then I put the hammer on half-cock, spun the chamber, and reset the hammer.
"I'm going to hand you this pistol, Lou. When I do, I want you to point it at me and squeeze the trigger. Maybe you'll punch my ticket. But if not, it will be my turn, and the odds for you will have shrunk appreciably. Are you processing this, Lou?"
"You need to fire your psychiatrist."
"Take it," I said.
"I don't want it."
"This is as good as it's going to get, partner. I advise you to take it."
But he kept his hands at his sides, his face jerking away each time the barrel came close to him. "Take it, you piece of shit," I said.
"No!" he said, teeth clenched.
That's when I lost it. I hooked him in the face with my left, mashed my knee into his chest, and forced the revolver into his hands. "Do it!" I said.
"No!"
"Do it, you motherfucker!"
The muzzle was pointed into my chest, inches from my sternum. I forced his thumb onto the trigger and pressed it back against the trigger guard. I heard the hammer snap on an empty chamber. His eyes were wide with disbelief as they stared up into mine.
"You're crazy," he said, his voice seizing in his throat, like a child who has been crying uncontrollably.
"My turn," I said, pulling the revolver from his hands.
"Just tell me what you want."
"Val Chalons is your son, isn't he?"
"That's what this is about? Are you nuts? You make me pull the trigger on a cop over -"
I clenched my left hand on his throat and jammed the.38 into his mouth with my right, forcing the cylinder over his teeth. He gagged, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. I pulled the trigger and heard the hammer snap again on an empty chamber.
"Oh Jesus," he said, trembling all over when I slid the barrel from his mouth.
"Is Val Chalons your -"
"Yeah, yeah, we found out when the old man needed a kidney donation. He had to get the kidney from the girl."
"Honoria?"
He nodded, blotting the spittle and blood on his mouth with the bedsheet.
"Val put the contract on me?" I said.
"Figure it out. How many people want you snuffed?"