DR15 - Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  Clete and Trish crossed another bridge at Des Allemands and ate deep-fried soft-shell crabs in a restaurant by a waterway where the banks were still thickly wooded and undeveloped and houseboats were moored under the overhang of the trees. When they got back on the highway, Clete saw the Explorer swing behind him. Clete took the exit to Luling and approached the huge steel bridge spanning the Mississippi. The Explorer dropped back four cars but stayed with him.

  At one point the blond man threw some trash out the window, perhaps a fast-food container, something that splattered and bounced across the pavement.

  “Know anybody who drives a dark green Explorer?” Clete said.

  “Nobody I can think of.” Trish leaned forward so she could see into the side mirror. “I don’t see one. Where is it?”

  “He’s about three cars back now. A blond guy with shades on, throwing garbage on the road.”

  “No, that doesn’t sound like anybody I know. He’s following us?”

  “He’s probably just a jerk. Sometimes I think we should make littering a capital offense, you know, have a few roadside executions. It would really solve a lot of environmental problems here.”

  He could feel her looking at the side of his face. When he glanced at her, she was smiling, her eyes lit with a tenderness that made his loins go weak.

  “What’d I say?” he asked.

  “Nothing. You’re just a sweet guy.” She touched his shoulder with her fingertips. Clete forgot about the man in the Explorer and wondered if he wasn’t being played.

  They drove down I-10 to New Orleans and parked in a multilevel garage in the French Quarter. A storm was blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and the air smelled like salt and warm concrete when the first drops of rain hit it. They walked to the casino, at the bottom of Canal, and Clete could hear the horn blowing on the paddle-wheel excursion boat out on the river. He paused at the steps leading into the casino, under a row of transplanted palms that lifted and straightened in the breeze.

  “Sure you want to go in here? Wouldn’t you like to take a boat ride instead?” he said.

  “Come on, I’m just going to play a couple of slots. Then I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  “You’ll see.” She winked at him.

  He told himself he was pulling the rip cord if she went near the craps table or if she started playing blackjack and a member of her crew was in place at the table or watching the game from the crowd. Clete had never been a gambler, but he had learned most of the casino hustles when he had run security for Sally Dio in Vegas and Reno. One of the best scams going involved card counting. Actually, it wasn’t even a scam. It was a matter of having more brains than the house. A good card counter could determine at which point a blackjack deck contained a preponderance of cards in the high numbers, usually 10 through king. The high numbers in the shoe raised the odds that the dealer, who was required to take a hit on 16 or less, would go bust. The player just had to stand pat and let the dealer beat himself.

  There was a hitch, however. The casino cameras and pit managers could tell when a card counter’s betting pattern had changed. So a crew made use of a player who always bet the same high amount of money but did not take a seat at the table and commence betting until he received a signal from a colleague in the crowd. The player would stay at the table as long as the odds remained in his favor, then linger briefly after the shuffle, losing a few bets if necessary. Finally he would glance at his watch, pick up his winnings, and stroll over to a craps or roulette table, where he would be absorbed into the crowd.

  Clete ordered a vodka collins at the bar and watched while Trish wandered between the rows of slot machines. Was she casing the joint? Did she and her crew plan to take it down? He couldn’t tell. But she was no garden-variety grifter. Nor was she a degenerate gambler. So what were they doing here.

  The recycled air was like cigarette smoke that had been trapped for days in a refrigerator full of spoiled cheese. Half the people on the floor had B.O. and reminded Clete of outpatients at the methadone clinic. The rest were peckerwoods in shiny suits and vinyl shoes, with haircuts that resembled plastic wigs that didn’t fit their heads. What a dump, he thought. The people who ran it would probably comp Hermann Göring.

  Then he saw the blond driver of the Explorer watching him from behind a column by the entrance. The blond man wore a silk neckerchief and a magenta-colored silk shirt that was molded against his lats and shoulders and tapered waist. His facial skin was bright and hard-looking, like polished ceramic, his eyes a mystery behind his shades. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his mouth and cupped the flame from a gold lighter to it.

  Clete thought about bracing him, then decided to let the hired help handle it. He introduced himself to a security man by the craps table, out of sight of the blond man, opening his P.I. badge holder in his palm. “I have an office on St. Ann in the Quarter and one in New Iberia,” he said. “I think a dude hanging by the entrance is bird-dogging me and my lady friend. Blond hair, shades, reddish-purple shirt, kerchief around the neck. He’s been following me since Morgan City. But I’ve got no idea who he is.”

  The security man listened attentively. He was trim and well dressed, his whitewalled hair freshly barbered. “You said your name was Purcel?”

  “Right.”

  “You used to be with NOPD?”

  “What about it?”

  “I heard your name mentioned at Second District headquarters, that’s all.”

  Clete waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. The security man stepped away from the craps table and glanced casually toward the front of the casino. “Wait here.”

  “Maybe the guy doesn’t know I made him. I’d appreciate being left out of it.”

  But the security man walked off without acknowledging Clete’s last statement, and Clete concluded the reference to his past history at the Second District wasn’t a positive indicator of his situation. The security man began talking to the blond man, the silhouette of a potted palm between them and Clete. But he quickly became a listener rather than a talker. He listened and then he listened some more. The blond man slipped what looked like a photo from his pocket and the two men examined it together, the blond man tapping on it for emphasis. Then the blond man gave the photo to the security man, obviously to keep.

  When the security man returned to the craps area, he had the photo cupped in his palm. It showed Trish Klein at a blackjack table, laughing, a drink in her hand, one of her crew on the stool next to her. She had five cards turned up on the green felt in front of her, the total sum of which was under 21.

  “Is this your girlfriend?” the security man asked.

  “That’s the lady I’m with.”

  “She’s in the Griffin Book.”

  “That looks like a photo of somebody who just hit a five-card Johnny. That gets you blackballed here?”

  “You and your friend are welcome to play the slots, Mr. Purcel. Just stay away from the tables. If you get near them, you’ll be escorted from the building.”

  “Really?” Clete said, stepping closer to him. “How about my initial question? Who’s this geek with the shades following me around?”

  “He does the same kind of work I do, at least in my off-duty capacity. You and Miss Klein enjoy yourselves. At the slot machines.”

  Clete’s face was burning. “We need to get something straight here.”

  “No, we don’t. Thank you for visiting the casino,” the security man said, and walked off.

  Suddenly Clete’s shirt felt too tight for his chest. Inside the steady din of coins rattling into metal trays and the excited yelling around the craps table, he could hear the hoarseness of his own breathing and a sound like wind roaring in his ears. It took him five minutes to find Trish, who was watching a blackjack game, one knuckle poised on her chin, a thoughtful expression on her face. Thirty feet away, two security men were talking to each other, glancing in her direction.

  “Tim
e to boogie,” Clete said.

  “What for?”

  “I want to show you the battleground at Chalmette.”

  She seemed to consider the idea.

  Please, God, Clete thought.

  “All right,” she said. “But don’t forget I have a surprise.”

  He put one arm over her shoulders, and the two of them began walking toward the entrance. Through the glass doors he could see the dark green of the palm fronds in the rain and the lighted store-fronts along Canal. We’re almost there, he thought.

  “I have to stop by the restroom,” she said.

  “Now?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, giving him a look. “I might be a minute or two.”

  “Sure,” he said, his eyes sweeping the casino. “I’ll wait at the bar. Take your time.”

  Just cool it, he told himself. You can’t always dee-dee out of Indian country when you want. Sometimes you just have to brass it out.

  He took a seat at the bar and ordered a soda and lime slice. It was a mistake. He heard a stool squeak on its swivel and felt a presence near his left arm, almost like an energy field that had the potential of a beehive.

  Clete took the soda and lime from the bartender’s hand, then turned and looked into the sunglasses of the blond man in the reddish-purple shirt.

  “Your gash go to the can?” the man asked.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said did the lady, your gash, stop by the john?”

  Clete took a sip from his glass, then put the lime slice in his mouth and chewed it. “What’s your name, buddy?”

  “Lefty Raguza,” the man said, and offered his hand. When Clete didn’t take it, he removed his shades and grinned. His eyes made Clete think of a cool green fire, an intense combination of color and light that didn’t indicate thought patterns or moods so much as incipient cruelty that had no specific target.

  Clete drank the rest of his soda and crunched ice between his molars. He looked into the bar mirror when he spoke. “Here are the ground rules for you, Lefty. You don’t bird-dog us, you keep your mouth off certain people, and if I see you passing around photos of my lady again, I’m going to rip your wiring out.”

  “She looks like a sweet piece of ass is all I was saying. That’s meant as a compliment. Prime cut is prime cut. So far, what I’m doing here isn’t personal. If I were you, I’d let things remain like that.”

  Clete gazed into the moral vacuity of Lefty Raguza’s eyes. Then he got off the stool, left a five-dollar bill on the bar, and waited for Trish by the door of the women’s restroom.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Sure, I’m solid,” he replied.

  “You’re red as a boiled crab.”

  “I could go for some of those right now. I know a joint over on Iberville. Then we’ll go out to Chalmette. I’m extremely copacetic today.”

  But Clete was neither solid nor copacetic. They walked into the Quarter, in the rain, staying under the colonnades, the music from the clubs drifting out on the sidewalk, but he couldn’t get the words of the man named Lefty Raguza out of his head. He stopped in front of a café that was brightly lit and cheerful inside and patted his pants pocket. “I think I left my keys at the bar. Have a coffee in the café and I’ll be right back,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to call the casino first?”

  “No, I’m sure I left them at the bar. It’s not a problem,” he said.

  He didn’t wait for her to reply. When he got back to the casino, his loafers were sopping with rainwater. He dried his face with a paper napkin from the bar and scanned the casino but didn’t see Lefty Raguza. “There was a guy sitting next to me, a friend of mine, a guy with a neckerchief and shades, you see where he went?” he said to the bartender.

  “To the men’s room,” the bartender replied.

  The crowd had grown, and Clete had to thread his way through the people at the machines and tables. His eyes were watering in the cigarette smoke, his ears ringing, his heart pounding in his chest. He passed a neatly folded and stacked fire hose inside a glass door that had been inset in the wall, then entered the restroom. Lefty Raguza was positioned in front of a urinal, his feet slightly spread, one hand propped against the wall, his face turned toward the far wall.

  “Put your flopper in your pants and turn around,” Clete said.

  Two other men had been washing their hands. They glanced simultaneously in Clete’s direction, then left the room without looking back. Lefty Raguza shook himself off and flexed his knees, tucking his phallus back inside his slacks. Then he turned, grinning from behind his shades, and kicked Clete between the thighs as casually as he would punt a football.

  Clete felt a wave of nausea and pain surge through his lower body that was like broken glass being forced up his penis and out his rectum. He fell backward through a stall door, crashing into a toilet bowl, his fingernails raking down the sides of the walls. He could feel the wet rim of the bowl against his back and piss on the seat of his slacks.

  Lefty Raguza was staring down at him, a small, triangular-shaped leather case in his hand. “You attacked me in the can and got your ass kicked. Don’t screw with Whitey, don’t screw with me. Show your gash what happened here. Tell her she can have the same. Ready for it, big man?”

  Ready for what? Clete thought. He tried to raise himself, but the pain inside his groin made his eyes brim with water.

  Lefty Raguza unsnapped the leather case in his hand and removed a metal tool that was like a machinist’s punch with a short crosspiece at the top designed to fit the palm and a hilt one inch from the point. “You’re getting off easy, Blimpo. So act like a man and take your medicine,” he said.

  Then he leaned down and jabbed the tool into Clete’s shoulder, thudding it hard with the heel of his hand, feeling for bone, twisting it sideways before removing it. He cleaned the point on a piece of toilet paper. “Now beat feet. I got to finish my piss,” he said.

  Clete stumbled toward the door, his hand pressed to the wound under his shoulder bone. The door swung open in his face. Two black men and a white man about to enter the room stepped aside, avoiding eye contact with him, then walked off as though the last five seconds in their lives had not happened.

  Clete worked his way along the wall in the concourse to the glass enclosure that housed the emergency fire hose. He fitted his palm inside the handle and ripped the door loose, expecting an alarm to go off. But none did.

  The hose was a masterpiece of engineering. It was full-throated at the valve, perhaps four inches across, probably directly connected into a main that could blow paint off a battleship. The nozzle was brass, with a lever to adjust the outflow, the hose itself made of a canvaslike material that unfolded neatly from the stack and slapped on the carpet. Clete pushed the lever on the main valve and watched the hose straighten and harden like an enormous, thick-bodied snake.

  Lefty Raguza was combing his hair in the mirror when Clete kicked open the restroom door and dragged the hose inside with him. “Here’s a postcard from New Iberia, motherfucker,” he said. Then he pulled back the lever on the nozzle.

  The jet of water blew the shades off Raguza’s face, then blew Raguza into the tile wall. Clete tugged the hose deeper into the room, keeping it trained on Raguza, knocking him down when he tried to get up, skittering him into the urinals, remolding his mouth and cheeks, flattening the flesh against bone and teeth so that his face looked like he was caught in a wind tunnel.

  Raguza almost got to his feet when Clete blew him into a stall, trapping him between the toilet and stall wall. Raguza was gasping for breath, his feet fighting for purchase, one arm sunk deep inside the bowl, his head thudding against the wall like a rubber ball tethered to a paddle.

  Clete shut down the nozzle and dropped the hose on the floor. The restroom was flooded, the doorway packed with onlookers, security guards in uniform trying to fight their way through.

  “This guy was starting a fire. He said something about hiding a bo
mb. Somebody better get the cops,” Clete said.

  Suddenly the crowd headed in all directions, the words “fire” and “bomb” rippling like flame across the casino floor. “Hey, you, come back here!” a security man yelled.

  But Clete was now ensconced in the middle of the throng pouring onto Canal. The mist was gray and swirling, as thick and damp as wet cotton, the palm fronds fraying overhead, and he could smell beignets cooking somewhere and the heavy green odor of the Gulf. His shoulder throbbed, his genitals were swollen, his shirt was streaked with blood and his slacks with urine and bathroom disinfectant, but somehow he knew it was going to be a grand day after all. He crossed into the Quarter, splashing through pools of rainwater, wondering if Trish would still be at the café, wondering, for just a moment, why she had not come looking for him.

  He felt his spirits begin to sink. Maybe Dave had been right; maybe he had been a special kind of fool this time out. He was not only over the hill and addicted to most of the major vices, he was still the violent, chaotic, immature man intelligent women might find exciting and even interesting for the short haul but whom they eventually got rid of, as they would an untrained house pet.

  Then he saw Trish coming down the street, without umbrella or raincoat, almost being hit by a car at the intersection, her lovely, heart-shaped face filled with concern and pity when she realized the condition he was in. “Oh, Clete, what did they do to you?” she said, her fingers touching his eyes, his hair, his mouth. “What did they do to you, honey?”

  “Just a little discussion with a guy. What was that surprise you were talking about?”

  She hooked her arm through his and began to pull him across the street toward the parking garage. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” she said, ignoring his question. “It was that guy following us, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have let you go back there. I hate myself for this.”

  A passing car blew a wall of water across both Clete and Trish. She used a handkerchief to wipe it out of his eyes, her face turned up to his like a flower opening into light. He wrapped both his arms around her and lifted her up on his chest and carried her in that fashion all the way to the car.