I looked into the rearview mirror and saw die face of the ex-soldier staring at me through die back window. I swerved to the side of die road and got out. He climbed out of the camper shell, bare-chested, a crucifix and a G.I. can opener hung around his neck.
"What are you doing in there?" I asked.
"The motor on your refrigerator kept me awake. I got in your camper to sleep," he said.
"Bad night for it, Doc," I said.
"I'll walk back. No big deal," he replied.
He reached inside die shell and retrieved a pillow and his shirt. His face was beaded with raindrops.
"Hop in front. Let's take a ride upcountry," I said.
He thought about it a moment, his mouth screwed into a button, his eyes clear of both dope and madness, his expression almost childlike. "I don't mind," he said.
We drove up Bayou Teche, through Loreauville and waving fields of sugarcane that flickered with lightning. We turned off the state road and passed scattered farmhouses and clumps of trees inside cattle acreage and a bait shop and a filling station that were dark inside. Then I saw the nightclub where Baby Huey bartended, the neon beer signs glowing in the rain, the empty parking lot lit by floodlamps.
I left the ex-soldier in the truck and went inside. The front and back doors of the club were open to air it out. Baby Huey was at the end of the bar, on the phone, his back to me. His hair was wet, his pink shirt spotted with raindrops. When he hung up and saw me standing behind him, he looked back at the phone, as though reviewing the conversation he'd just had.
"You want to tell me something?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he replied.
"You wouldn't have been talking to Joe Zeroski, would you?" I said.
"You never can tell." He picked up a clean white cloth and began wiping the bar, although there was no water or drink residue on it.
"Lose the routine, Huey. I'm looking for Joe Zeroski's niece and a friend of mine named Clete Purcel. I think you are, too. You lie to me, you're going to be sharing accommodations with Tee Bobby Hulin."
He bit his lip and bunched the bar cloth in his huge hand.
"Use your head, partner. We're on the same side," I said.
"Mr. Joe called earlier. He thought his niece and her boyfriend had probably rented a camp somewhere. He axed me if I knowed who rented camps herebouts. I called a friend of mine runs the bait shop back up the road. He said a guy wit' a Cadillac convertible like the one Mr. Joe described was in there this afternoon. My friend said this guy and the woman wit' him was staying in a camp just the other side of the levee. So I drove on down there."
"So?" I said.
"You ain't gonna want to hear this."
"I don't mean to offend you, Huey, but you're starting to seriously piss me off," I said.
"The guy who lives next door to the cabin where your friend was at? He's been inside twice. He ain't the kind of guy got a real good relationship with the law or dials 911 a lot, know what I mean? He said a big white guy in swim trunks and a Marine Corps cap was cleaning fish on the porch in back when a guy dressed like a cowboy drove into the yard. He said the guy in swim trunks was talking loud and shaking his fish knife at the cowboy, but my friend couldn't see it too good 'cause the house was in the way."
"What happened?" I asked.
Baby Huey raised his eyebrows. "A few minutes later the woman drove away wit' the cowboy. The woman was driving, and the big guy in swim trunks wasn't nowhere around."
"What do you mean he wasn't anywhere around?"
Baby Huey's eyes went away from me, then came back again.
"My friend thought he might have been in the trunk of the car. A red pickup was parked down the road from the camp. It followed the Cadillac over the levee. My friend thought it look just like the pickup Legion drive," he said.
"Your friend didn't bother to tell anyone this until you asked him?" I said.
"That's the way it go sometimes," Baby Huey replied.
I pushed a napkin and my ballpoint pen across the bar to Huey.
"Write down your friend's name so I can thank him personally," I said.
I used the pay phone in the corner and called Helen Soileau at her house. She dropped the receiver when she answered, then scraped it up again. I described all the events that had occurred since I had seen her late that afternoon.
"Marvin was wearing red and green cowboy boots? Same color as the cowboy in the bar where Frankie Dogs got hit?" she said.
"That's right," I replied.
"Why did Legion pick today to go after Clete?"
"He thinks Clete is with Barbara. Barbara stood up to him in the western store. He wants to get them both at one time," I said.
"I'm still asleep. I can't think clearly. What do you want me to do?"
"Nothing right now. Look, when I went to see Perry LaSalle at Sookie Motrie's duck hunting camp down by Pecan Island, I saw an abandoned church that reminded me of the lyrics in a song Marvin Oates is always quoting from. The church has a sign on it that says Twelve Disciples Assembly. Is that just a coincidence?"
"Marvin used to stay with a preacher there when his mother was on a bender. I think the preacher was the only person who ever treated him decent."
"I'm going to head down there," I said.
"You sound a little strung out. Let it go till sunlight. There's a good chance Baby Huey's source is full of shit."
"No, the details are too specific," I said.
There was a pause on the line.
"You're not having the wrong kind of thoughts, are you?" she asked.
"No, everything's copacetic here," I said.
"Streak?"
"I'm telling you the truth. I'm fine," I said.
But when I hung up, my hands were tingling with fatigue, my mouth dry, my hair damp with sweat, as though my old courtship with the malarial mosquito had taken new life in my blood. I turned around and almost collided with Baby Huey, who was mopping down a table five feet behind me.
"What do you think you just heard?" I said.
"I was listening to the jukebox. That's Tee Bobby's new song. Boy got a million-dollar voice. Ain't been nobody like him since Guitar Slim," he said.
I was burning up inside my raincoat, and I took it off before I got back into the truck and put my sap, handcuffs, and extra magazine on the seat, beside my holstered.45. Then I turned the truck around and headed south, toward Pecan Island, down in Vermilion Parish.
"I don't have time to take you back home," I said to the ex-soldier.
"It's all right. I've been taking a nap," he said. He had put his shirt back on but had left it unbuttoned, and the crucifix on his chest shone in the dashboard light.
"What's your real name, Doc?" I said.
"Sal Angelo."
"You sure about that?" I said.
"Pretty sure," he said.
"You're okay, Sal," I said.
He grinned sleepily, then rested his head on his pillow and closed his eyes. I drove into Abbeville, past the old redbrick cathedral and the graveyard that was full of Confederate dead, then continued on south, into the wetlands and wind blowing across sawgrass and clumps of gum trees and swamp maples. My face felt hot to the touch, my jaws like emery paper. I thought I could hear the drone of mosquitoes, but none settled on my skin and I couldn't see any on the windshield or dashboard, where they usually clustered when they got inside the truck. When I swallowed, my spit tasted like battery acid.
My holstered.45 vibrated on the seat beside me. I touched it with my right hand, felt the coolness of the steel, the checkered hardness of the grips against my skin. It was the finest handgun I had ever owned, purchased for twenty-five dollars among a row of cribs in Saigon's Bring Cash Alley. I popped the strap loose with my thumb and slipped the heaviness of the frame into my hand and held it like an old friend against my thigh, although I could not explain the reason why I did so.
It wasn't far to the deserted church now. The rain had slackened and a crack of veiled moonlight shone among the clouds, like a dirty green vapor that had been sucked out of the Gulf during the storm. I rubbed the back of my wrist into my eye sockets and saw red rings recede into my brain, then I experienced a disturbing sense of clarity I had not felt all day, as though all my thought patterns for weeks, my prayers, my personal resolutions and soliloquies at AA meetings, were being made null and void because they were no longer useful to me.
Sigmund Freud was once quoted as saying, "Ah, thank you for showing me all of mankind's lofty ideals. Now let me introduce you to the basement."
I could feel myself descending into that subterranean place in the mind where the gargoyles frolic. The case against Marvin Oates for the murder of Linda Zeroski was tenuous and speculative, without even circumstantial evidence to support it, I told myself. Even if Marvin had harmed Clete and Zerelda and was in possession of the nine-millimeter that had killed Frankie Dogs, the right defense attorney could put him and his scarred back and his hush-puppy accent on the stand and have a jury of daytime soap-opera fans touching tears from their cheeks.
That's what I told myself about the future of Marvin Oates. But my real thoughts were on Legion Guidry and the women he had molested and raped and the methodical beating he had given me. In my mind's eye I once again saw his face lean down into my vision, his hand gripping my hair, his lips fastening on mine, his tongue probing my mouth. Then I swear I could taste the tobacco in his saliva and the tiny strings of decayed meat impacted in his teeth.
I felt my stomach constrict. I rolled down the window and cleared my throat and spit into the darkness. When I rolled up the window and wiped my mouth, I realized the ex-soldier who called himself Sal Angelo was awake, watching me.
"That guy who hurt you is down here, ain't he?" he said.
"Which guy?" I asked.
"We both know which guy, Loot."
"Can't ever tell," I said.
"Remember what I told you about making yourself the executioner? It's like your soul travels out of your body, then it can't find its way back. That's when you forget who you are."
"I may have to drop you off, Sal, and pick you up on my way out," I said.
"Hate to hear you say that, Loot."
"Why?" I asked.
"Our story is already written. You can't change it," he said.
I hit a deep rut and a curtain of gray water splashed across the windshield. I looked across the seat and saw him raise his head off his chest and open his eyes, as though awakening from a deep sleep.
"What did you just say?" I asked.
"I didn't say nothing. I was knocked out. Where are we, anyway?" he replied.