“You don’t understand, do you?” he asked. “Look, you piss a guy off bad, you make him look like shit in front of people, you keep turning dials on him, you show him up a punk in front of his gash so they ain’t interested in his Dream-sicle anymore, he’s going to stay up nights thinking about you.”
His eyes were serene, almost kind, as though it had all been explained in a way that should be acceptable to even the most obtuse.
“You’re a little thick, aren’t you?” he said. “Look, you’re supposed to go in pieces, left lung, then cock in the mouth. But I say fuck that. At least not while the guy knows it. Nobody tells me how to do my work, man. Hey, this maybe isn’t much comfort to you, but it could be a lot worse. Believe me.”
He put his left palm flat on my chest, almost as if he were reassuring or comforting me or feeling for my heartbeat as a lover might, and reached behind him into the canvas sack with his right hand. The knife was a foreign imitation of the Marine Corps K-Bar, with a stainless steel blade, sawteeth on the top, a black aluminum handle with a bubble compass inserted in the butt. I remembered seeing them advertised for six dollars in the Times-Picayune Sunday magazine.
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. I 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 cornholers 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.