“Yes,” he said.
“With no work obligations.”
“Probably a rainy morning, too,” he said. “It’s a fine time of year.”
In the darkness of the gallery, she took her key from her purse. She looked up into his face. “You’re a gentleman. You’re kind and strong, and you respect women. Those things are not lost on a woman.”
“I didn’t quite get that.”
“If you need to go, I understand. I just want you to know you’re always welcome here and that I appreciate your gentlemanly ways.”
When he spoke, he felt as though he had swallowed a pebble. “I’d love to come in.”
Inside, she closed the blinds and turned on a light in a back hallway. “This way.”
In the bedroom, the wood floor creaked under his weight as he approached her. She turned on a lamp. The wallpaper was covered with roses. The quilt on the bed was lavender, the pillows pink. He felt as though he were inside a dollhouse, but in a good way. “Miss Carolyn, I’ve led a checkered life.”
“Who hasn’t?” she replied.
He left her house early in the morning, before the neighbors were up, to avoid making Carolyn a subject of gossip. There was not a person on the street. The morning paper lay on people’s galleries or walkways. The trees ticked with moisture. At the end of the block, he looked in the outside mirror and saw an SUV swing out of an alley and follow him.
He coasted to the curb, cut the engine, and pretended to look for something in the glove box. The SUV passed him. The windows were charcoaled and rolled up except for a crack at the top, probably for a smoker. Clete wrote down the tag number on a small white pad he kept in the well of the console. At the next intersection, the SUV turned and disappeared down a side street.
Clete drove downtown and ate in a café, stationing himself at a table with a view of the street. Before his food arrived, he saw the SUV park at an angle in front of a hardware store that had gone out of business. After a few minutes, the driver opened the door far enough to drop a cigarette on the asphalt. The driver was wearing a checked sport coat and a gray knit cap with a bill.
Clete ate his breakfast, paid the check, and went outside, his gaze fixed on a black kid skateboarding down the sidewalk. Then he crossed the street and tapped on the window of the SUV.
Maximo Soza lowered the window. JuJu Ladrine was in the passenger seat, his face stretched with tension. Maximo scratched a spot under his eye. “I don’t see no envelope.”
“Envelope?” Clete said.
“It’s Saturday. You got to pay the vig,” Maximo said.
“I think I hit you too hard in the head with the rubber machine.”
“The vig is the vig, man. It’s due on Saturday. If you got to sell your body parts online, you pay the vig.”
“You put a Taser on me, Max. But I’m letting that slide. You got to do the same. That means you and JuJu pack up your shit and go back to New Orleans.”
Maximo turned his head with the stiffness of a ventriloquist’s dummy and let his eyes settle on Clete’s. “Tony will hang you on a hook by your asshole. Or maybe somebody else will have to pay the price for what you ain’t taken care of.”
“You want to clarify that?”
“Nobody can be all places at once,” Maximo said. He started the engine. “Step back. I don’t want to run over your foot.”
Clete felt a sensation like stitches popping loose inside his head. He opened the driver’s door and tore Maximo out of the seat, lifting him high in the air, then crashing him on the hood. Maximo rolled off on the asphalt. “Son of a beech, what the fuck, man?”
Clete threw him against the fender and told him to take the position. When Maximo tried to turn around, Clete kicked the man’s feet apart and drove his face against the hood, then smashed it down a second time for good measure.
“I ain’t carrying, man!” Maximo said.
“What do you call this?” Clete said, holding up a switchblade knife.
“See what I use it for later. I’ll be back, man.”
Clete turned him upside down and shook him like a rag doll, spilling coins, keys, a rabbit’s foot, a pair of dice, a box of condoms, a cell phone, credit cards, and a wallet in the gutter.
“You leave that man alone!” someone called from across the street.
Clete dropped Maximo on the asphalt, then picked him up and threw him back into the driver’s seat. He looked up and down the street. No cops yet. He put Maximo’s belongings into his cap and tossed it to JuJu. Maximo’s eyes were crossed, blood running in two scarlet strings from his nostrils. He was trying to speak. Clete smashed his face into the horn button.
“You got a brain, JuJu,” he said. “Tell Tony what happened. Also tell him if he sends you guys after me again, he’s going off the board, oxygen bottle and colostomy bag included. That goes for you, too, JuJu.”
“It don’t work that way, Clete,” JuJu said. “Why you making it hard on everybody?”
“Me?”
“It’s you went to the shylocks. Not us.”
“Get out of here,” Clete said.
He slammed the driver’s door and walked to the Caddy, burning with shame, eyes straight ahead, trying to ignore the stares of people around him and the knowledge that he had involved a gentle lady in a world she could not have imagined in her worst nightmares.
Clete came by my house that night. It was raining hard, and he ran from the Caddy through the puddles in the yard to the gallery. I could smell weed on him through the screen. “What happened?” I asked.
“Who said anything happened?” he replied, brushing past me into the living room, his face oily and dilated. He blew his nose into a handkerchief.
“You just get in from Juárez?” I said.
“Cut it out, Dave. I feel bad enough.” He told me about Maximo and JuJu.
“Maximo was threatening Miss Carolyn?” I said.
“That’s the gist.”
“Does she know?”
“She was going to visit her mother in Lake Charles today. I left a couple of messages. What am I going to do? I feel awful.”
“Jennings PD might throw a scare into them.”
“The same guys who couldn’t come up with one suspect in eight homicides?”
“Weed and booze aren’t going to help.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Don’t use that language in my house, Cletus.”
“I’m sorry.”
I went into the kitchen and came back with a pair of Dr Peppers. “I think Tony wants to make movies. I think that’s what started all this.”
“So what?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“You’re going to talk reason to that pile of whale shit?”
“He bought a sword that he thought would get him in the good graces of Levon Broussard, and instead he lost the sword and had the door slammed in his face. So being the infantile narcissist he is, he’s throwing his scat all over the room.”
Clete stared at me. “You think it’s that simple?”
“How much time does he have left? Have you been in a closed room with him? He’s got the smell of death on him, and he knows it. It’s like wallpaper and dead flowers. He wants to see his name in lights before he goes out.”
“A guy like that doesn’t have a soul.”
“That’s why he wants his name in lights.”
He studied my face. “Where’s Alafair?”
“At the grocery.”
“She’s doing okay? Every time I look at her, I see her as a little girl. That’s funny, isn’t it?”
I didn’t reply.
“What if I treat y’all to dinner at Café Des Amis tonight?” he said.
“I was just about to suggest that.”
He grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it.
Chapter 17