But these were things he had to do, whether others liked them or not. He had survived at the orphanage and on the streets of Mexican border towns where children were rented by the hour. Today he had power that he wanted to take back in time and use on all those who had exploited his little body. But that was not the way it worked. Time did not take away the pain; nor did it allow him to use his skills on people out of the past who waited for him in his sleep.
Chester got up and realized there was a wet spot the size of a quarter in his underwear. Although no one was in sight, he felt his face burning as he walked back to the car and dropped the rifle into the trunk. He drove straight to a Dairy Queen in Franklin and cleaned himself in a restroom, then sat at a wooden table in the shade and began eating a paper plate full of ice cream sandwiches.
Three teenagers sat in an SUV ten feet away, the doors open, the panels throbbing with rap.
“Turn that down, please,” Chester said.
A kid lowered the volume. “What was that?”
“That music. It hurts my ears,” Chester said.
“It grows on you,” the kid said. He turned the volume up full-blast.
Chester walked to the door of the SUV. The three kids were looking at one another and grinning, as though they intuitively knew a lifelong object of ridicule had wandered into their midst and they were free to do anything they wished to him.
“Why do you want to act smart-alecky?” Chester shouted above the roar.
“You like Dilly Bars?” said the kid in the passenger seat. “Strap on your kneepads in the restroom. I’ll bring you one.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“My father owns half this town. Now get out of here, freak.”
Chester rested one hand on the door like a lump of dough. “You shouldn’t say that to me.”
“Oh, he’s all mad now,” the kid said, forming his mouth into a pout. “He messed himself. He’s starting to cry.”
“He’s a retard,” the driver said. “Leave him alone.”
“He’s cute,” said the kid in the passenger seat. “We like you, little buddy. Want to meet some girls?”
“You’re very mean,” Chester said.
“We’re finished here,” the driver said. He leaned toward the passenger window. “You hear me? Get your hand off the door.”
When Chester didn’t move, the driver smashed his hand.
“Owie,” Chester said.
The three kids laughed.
Chester got behind the wheel of his vehicle. He started the engine but could not hear its sound and had to rest his hand on the dashboard to make sure it was running. He had entered one of those soundproof moments in his life that belonged to neither the past nor the present. The catalyst and the consequence were always the same. Contempt, ridicule, public shame, followed by his eardrums swelling so tightly he couldn’t hear, and his optical nerves popping loose from the backs of his eyes, deconstructing the external world piece by piece.
For perhaps thirty seconds, the backs of his eyelids were a red veil on the other side of which stick figures performed gross acts and fought one another with staves and staffs like the caricatures in tarot cards. It was funny how life replicated the tarot rather than the other way around. Maybe that was how thought worked. You had the thought, then the thought became the thing. That was why bad thoughts were to be avoided.
The moment passed, and the world reassembled itself, and Chester drove into the street and down to the intersection. Ten minutes later, the three boys in the SUV pulled out and drove in the opposite direction. They stopped at a girl’s house, a filling station to gas up, a street corner in a black neighborhood to score some weed, a drive-through window for daiquiris, a gun-and-ammo store to buy .22 shells. They parked by a swampy woods used as an illegal dump and took turns pocking holes in a rusted-out car body that had no engine and no glass in the windows. When they were out of shells, they got back into the SUV and Bic-fired a bong.
Chester estimated the range at eight hundred yards. With his gloves on, he loaded nine armor-piercing rounds into the box magazine, then wet the tenth round with his mouth and inserted it with the others. He braced the bipod on the car hood and sighted through the scope. Inside the SUV, the silhouettes of the boys moved back and forth like cutouts on a moving clothesline. He felt a flame lick at his loins, a hardening again in his manhood, a desire that went so deep he knew he would never satisfy it. His ears whirred with sound, his heart pounded, and just as he squeezed the trigger, he felt a dam break inside him and an orgasmic sensation flood through his body, so strong and warm and encompassing that his legs went weak.
There was no movement inside the SUV, nor any sound. The round had punched a hole just below the rear window and probably gone through the seats and the radio. Chester kept the rifle aimed at the same level and delivered four more rounds, blowing pieces of the seats and upholstery and dashboard and windshield onto the hood.
His last shot was into the gas tank. He picked up his brass and dropped it into the pockets of his baggy trousers. Before he pulled onto the asphalt, he glanced through the rear window. One of the kids had spilled onto the ground. One was running through the woods. Chester didn’t know where the third had gone. He turned up the air-conditioning until the inside of the car was frigid and the sweat on his face turned to ice. He thumbed a CD of Brahms into the stereo and took a deep breath through his nose, as though inhaling air off a glacier on the first day of creation, long before a thick-legged quadruped with fins and gills and lungs waddled out of the surf and began its agenda.
Chapter 28
Helen came into my office on Tuesday morning. She had just gotten back from the sheriff’s department in St. Mary Parish. She told me of the shooting.
“None of the boys were hit?” I said.
“That’s what’s peculiar,” she said. “The shooter clustered five rounds below the rear window and put one in the gas tank. Why didn’t he riddle the whole vehicle if he was out to do maximum damage?”
“How far away was he?”
“Far enough that the boys never saw him. By the way, ‘boys’ isn’t a good term for these guys. They’re walking promotions for Planned Parenthood.”
“No brass?”
“Just tire tracks,” she said. “They may belong to a stolen car that was found in Des Allemands.”
“You think this is our guy?” I asked.
“He was obviously using a high-powered military rifle and probably firing armor-piercing rounds.”
“The kids don’t have any idea who was shooting at them or why?”
“They say a weirdo guy was yelling at them at the DQ.”
“About what?”
“Their radio was playing rap. That was a couple of hours before the shooting. I don’t think they were just playing rap, either.”
“They wised off?”
“Who knows? They’d drown in their own shit if they ever left St. Mary Parish,” she said.
“What kind of car was the guy at the DQ driving?”
“They just remembered it was green. Like the stolen one in Des Allemands.”
“Any latents?”
“The owner’s,” she said. “You think the shooter just wanted to scare the hell out of them?”
“He parked one in the tank.”
“Maybe he didn’t want them coming after him,” she said.
“Or he wanted to burn them alive,” I said.
“No, I think our boy lost control and went outside his parameters. Like somebody rolling the dice and shutting his eyes. Charlie Manson claims he never killed anyone. That’s because he got somebody else to do it.”
I said earlier that Clete Purcel was the best investigative detective I ever knew — but Helen Soileau was a close second.