The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

“Clementine is so beautiful,” Homer said. “You can see the love in her eyes. It’s not right to leave her just standing by the road.”

  “See, John Ford directed that film, Homer. He was always experimenting with light and shadow. The story is about good and evil. Even though all the Clantons are killed, Wyatt knows more of them are waiting out there in the wastelands. He’s the guy who has to keep the rest of us safe.”

  “So maybe he’ll come back and see Clementine again?”

  “You never can tell.”

  * * *

  LATER, AS CLETE lay in the dark with the rain clattering on the roof, his own words brought him to conclusions about himself that he didn’t want to face. He had two kinds of dreams, one in color, one in black and white. Sometimes in his sleep, he returned to the French Quarter of the old days, when Sam Butera and Louis Prima were blowing out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, the balconies dripping with flowers along streets that seemed about to collapse in on themselves, the street bands playing for coins and the sidewalk artists setting up their easels in Jackson Square, the black kids dancing with taps as big as horseshoes clamped on their feet, the smell of beignets and café au lait in the Café du Monde, the palms and banana fronds ticking inside the gated courtyards, the arched entranceways dank and cool-smelling, the stone stained with lichen and ponded with water that resembled spilled burgundy in the shadows.

  The dreams in black and white went back to an Asian country where, out there in the sweltering dark, beyond the concertina wire and the claymores and the flicker of an offshore battery, Bedcheck Charlie launched grenades randomly with a captured blooker, blowing mud, foliage, and even a sit-down shitter into the air, the detritus raining down on Clete’s poncho and steel pot. Occasionally, Bedcheck Charlie got lucky, and after the explosion, a grunt down the line would scream words at the stars that Clete did not want to attach to an image.

  Sleep came to Clete only by way of surrender to a fantasy. Before he went overseas, he saw a black-and-white news film in an art theater in San Fran that showed Vietminh sappers crawling through barbed wire strung by French Legionnaires. The Vietminh wore sandals cut out of rubber tires and sweat-soaked black pajamas that looked like black oil on their skeletal frames. Their only possessions and weapons were a rice ball, a piece of fish tied in a sling on their waist, and a bamboo cylinder packed with explosives tied on their back. Without flinching, they crawled across anti-personnel mines that blew them into dog food; yet they kept coming, undaunted. Clete wondered how desperate a person would have to be in order to become so brave.

  At about 0400, he would surrender to his fatigue, the eggs of a malarial mosquito humming in his blood, the sour stench of his body, the jungle ulcers on his skin, the squishiness of trench foot inside his boots, the insects that got into his socks and up his legs, the cut on his nose where his steel pot had scissored down on his face. In surrendering, he put the faces of the sappers on Bedcheck Charlie and, for a brief time, did not think of him as an enemy. Clete gave himself over to a mental opiate, and Bedcheck disappeared into a box.

  Clete never spoke to others of the private universe in which he lived; nor did he share his belief that the world was mad, that most politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.

  Sunrise brought heat and humidity that felt like fire ants crawling inside his utilities. The dawn also meant rice paddies filled with human feces and trails with poisonous snakes looped around tree branches and booby-trapped 105 duds and Vietnamese knockoffs of our M14 mines and Bouncing Betties that would steal your limbs and eyes or simply take you off at the waist and leave half of you to whisper your last words. In his dreams he saw all of this in black and white, never in color, and he believed the phenomenon had something to do with the distinction between good and evil. The irony was that he had never learned where the difference lay.

  He woke with a start at 3:06 A.M., unsure where he was. He saw lightning outside and the silvery-green slashing of an oak limb across the window. But it was not the storm that woke him. Just before waking, he had seen an image in his mind, an incandescent wormlike creature whose heat was so bright and intense that it evaporated the rain and the darkness surrounding it.

  He took his snub-nose from under his pillow and put on his slippers and unbolted and unchained the door and stepped out on the stoop in his pajamas, ignoring the rain. “Who’s out there?”

  An electric light burned in a boathouse across the bayou. His Caddy was parked in the cul-de-sac, the hood and cloth top sprinkled with leaves and pine needles, the hand-waxed paint job beaded with water. In the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a figure moving through the trees, away from the motor court. Clete walked out on the gravel, rain running into his face, his pajamas sticking to his skin, the snub-nose hanging from his hand. “I saw you, pal. Come out or you might catch one in the brisket.”

  No response.

  “Hey, shit for brains, I know who you are,” he said.

  No answer or any movement in the trees.

  “You’re the guy they call Smiley,” he said. “My daughter is Gretchen Horowitz. A fuck like you is lucky to do hundred-dollar hits in Little Havana.”

  None of it worked, and Clete felt foolish talking to the rain. He walked through the trees to the water’s edge, his slippers sinking in the loam. The bayou was the color of café au lait, wrinkling in the wind like shriveled skin. His hand was squeezed tight on the grips of the .38. Maybe he had imagined it all. There was no wormlike creature anywhere except in his mind, which for years had been a repository of weed and alcohol.

  He walked back to the cul-de-sac and his Caddy, then saw the slim-jim stuck solidly and abandoned between the driver’s window and the door. Clete reached under the back fender and removed the magnetized metal box that held his spare key, and unlocked the passenger door and removed a small flashlight from the glove box. He went to the driver’s side and shined the light on a few footprints that seemed inconsequential, then opened the car door with the key and searched the floor.

  Nothing.

  He pulled the slim-jim from the window and began searching the ground. Again nothing. Or almost nothing. Just as he clicked off the light, he saw a glimmer in the grass. He clicked the light on again and stooped down and touched a small glass tube with the flashlight’s case. It was a mercury tilt switch, probably homemade.

  He went back into the cottage and pulled off his pajamas and dried off with a towel and put on clean clothes and wrote a note for Homer. Then he tore up the note and sat in a stuffed chair and stared out the window until daylight, when the rain thinned into rings on the bayou and fog bumping in thick clouds amid the tree trunks. When he thought of the glass tube’s implications, his shingles flared like a nest of heated wires between his shoulder blades, and the remnants of his undigested supper spilled into his mouth.

  HE PULLED IN to my driveway at seven A.M., when I was feeding Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon on top of Tripod’s hutch. I fixed a pot of coffee and took it and two tin cups out to the redwood table in the backyard and filled our cups, waiting for him to explain why he had come to my door.

  Clete’s face was a complex study, particularly during times of crisis or decision. The more intense the emotion, the more silent and withdrawn he became. The pattern never changed. He breathed evenly through his nose, his green eyes fixed on a hologram no one else saw. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes flattened and turned the color of papier-mâché, his forehead turning as cool as marble, the blood settling in his cheeks because it had nowhere else to go.

  “Had an early visitor this morning,” he said. “In the middle of the storm.” He hooked a finger through the handle on the cup. The coffee was black and scalding hot, a wisp rising from it like a trail of cigarette smoke. He drank from the cup a sip at a time, then swilled half of it, swallowing with no discomfort.

  “What happened?” I sa
id.

  “Somebody tried to put a bomb in my car.”

  “You saw somebody around your car with a bomb?”

  “I went outside before he could finish jimmying the window. He ran off.”

  “How do you know he had a bomb?”

  “I found a tilt switch in the grass next to the driver’s door.” He saw the confusion in my face. “It’s a glass tube that’s got mercury in it. It’s attached to the brake pedal or the accelerator. When the driver presses down on the pedal, the tube tilts and creates the electrical connection that detonates the charge.”

  “You saw the guy?”

  “He took off. If I hadn’t woken up, he probably would have killed me and Homer. We go down to McDonald’s in the morning for biscuits and eggs.”

  “Do you have the tube?”

  He nodded. “I think it’s this guy Smiley. I told him that.”

  “We’ll get everything to the lab.”

  “Waste of time. The guy’s a pro. One of two guys sent him.”

  I knew where we were going. “You don’t know it was Smiley. Don’t start making connections.”

  “He’s out-of-town talent. He’s working for Fat Tony or Jimmy Nightingale. They both have the same motivation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tony thinks he’s hit the big time in Hollywood. Nightingale is about to become an international figure. They’re leaving their baggage in the depot.”

  But I knew Clete’s thought processes had not reached their destination.

  “It’s Nightingale,” he said. “His shit-prints are on all of this.”

  “Okay, he’s the Antichrist of St. Mary Parish,” I said. “You made your point. But the evidence that he’s hired a killer isn’t there. Tony Nemo hires killers. Rich guys like Jimmy hire lawyers.”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Nightingale,” I said.

  “Right.” Clete refilled his cup and wrapped his hand around it and lifted it to his lips, then set it down without drinking. “I didn’t come here to tell you about my suspicions. You’re my friend, and I got to be up front with you about something.”

  I felt the moisture in my mouth dry up, even the taste of the coffee disappear.

  “The guy who sent the bomber after me didn’t care if he killed Homer or not,” Clete said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Tony Nine Ball or that punk in St. Mary Parish, the guy behind this is going off the board.”

  “I didn’t hear that. You didn’t say it. That thought never crossed your mind.”

  “I’m going to cap him, Streak.”

  I took the tin cup from his hand and threw the coffee on the ground. “We’re done.”

  “What would you do if it was Alafair?” he said. “Think about it. What would you do?”

  * * *

  LATE THAT NIGHT, a pizza scooter pulled in to the driveway of a rented nineteenth-century home outside Jeanerette, and a short man in a stiff hat with a big bill got out with a pie box and looked around as though unsure of the address. The house was set back from the street and dark with shadow except for a light in the bathroom. A tall figure walked out of the driveway and confronted the delivery man. There was a brief exchange, then the tall figure disappeared and the delivery man climbed the steps to the gallery and twisted the bell.

  The man who answered was wearing a brocaded royal blue silk robe. His body was shaped like a pile of inner tubes. “What’s this?”

  “Your pizza.”

  “I didn’t order a pizza.”

  The deliveryman looked at the bill in his hand. “Anthony Nemo?”

  “The name is Tony. I didn’t order a pizza. Where’s Robert?”

  “Who?”

  “My chauffeur.”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “You leave your flying saucer on the lawn?”

  “He was tired. He went to sleep. Like you.” The deliveryman raised a stun gun and touched it to the center of Tony Nine Ball’s face. Tony hit the floor like a cargo net loaded with salami.

  * * *

  WHEN TONY AWOKE, all the curtains were closed, the air-conditioning blasting out arctic levels of cold air. A toy man with lips as red as a clown’s was sitting on a chair two feet from him, staring at him with a silly smile. Tony’s arms were pulled behind him.

  “Hi, sleepyhead,” the man said. “My name is Chester. Do you want some pizza?”

  “I can’t move.”

  “You have ligatures on. So you won’t hurt yourself.”

  “You almost knocked my head off. I can’t breathe. I got emphysema.”

  Chester went into the bedroom and came back with a pillow. He put it under Tony’s head. “Better?”

  Tony’s eyes were small and black and buried deep in his face. “You sound like Elmer Fudd.”

  “Don’t be impolite. I can make you go back to sleep.”

  “You’re the wack job everybody is talking about.”

  Chester removed a rolled comic book from his back pocket and tapped it on Tony’s nose. “Bad, bad, bad.”

  “You’re nuts. You belong in a gerbil cage. Tell me what you want.”

  “Don’t make me mad.”

  “My dick in your mouth, jerk-off. I got guys out there gonna take you apart no matter what happens in here.”

  “No nasty talk. Not one word.” Chester tightened the comic in his grip and hammered the butt end on Tony’s nose. Tony’s face went out of shape, his eyes watering. A sound like a punctured tire wheezed from his throat. “I got to have my tank.”

  “Bad boys don’t get what they want. I did some research on you. You have been very bad.”

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “Did Kevin Penny work for you?”

  “So what?”

  “He was cruel to his little boy. You knew about it. You didn’t stop it.”

  “I didn’t know nothing about his personal life. You’re here from Boys Town?”

  Chester’s head was throbbing like wooden blocks falling down a staircase. “I wasn’t in Boys Town. I was in a place where bad things were done to me.”

  “From what I hear, you already fucked up two hits. One with the cop in New Iberia, one with Clete Purcel. Kevin Penny’s kid is living with Purcel. You were supposed to blow up the kid, too? You looking for child abusers? Go look in the mirror, gerbil boy.”

  Chester’s mouth had shrunk to a stitch, his nostrils no more than tiny holes, white around the rims. He unrolled his comic book and stared at the cover. Wonder Woman was leaping across a canyon undaunted, her gold and red bodice pushing up her breasts, her blue star-spangled shorts skintight, the message in her face unmistakable. I will, Chester said inside his head.

  “You’ll do what?” Tony said.

  “What Wonder Woman tells me to. If I don’t, I’ll have bad thoughts and do bad things.”

  “Bad thoughts? You’re an assassin who talks to a comic book. You’re a meltdown. I can get you help for that.”

  Chester rolled the comic into a tight cylinder again and jammed it as hard as a stick into Tony’s eye. “You will not talk back anymore.”

  Tony’s face quivered with shock. His wounded eye was watering and rimmed with a red ring.

  “I never did anything to you. Somebody is using you. I’m a businessman, a movie producer. Check me out. You want to be in a movie? I’ll put you in a movie.”

  “You need to be punished.”

  “What do you call this?”

  “Nothing,” Chester said.

  He went outside and returned with a black leather bag, the kind physicians once carried. He removed a pair of needle-nose pliers and a plastic container. Tony’s face seemed to shrink and become miniaturized. “Don’t.”

  Chester unscrewed the cap and fitted the pliers on Tony’s nose and squeezed. “Open wide.”

  Then he poured the container of Drano down Tony’s throat, making sure not to get any on his clothes or hands.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING Helen called half a dozen plainclothes into her
office. She was looking out the window at the Teche as we filed in. When she turned around, it was obvious that she planned to be brief and deliver a message that cops understand but don’t talk about.

  “The coroner says Nemo went out about as hard as it gets. His chauffeur is still in a coma. A passerby said he saw a man in a boxlike hat get out of the delivery wagon and talk to someone in the driveway. The ‘someone’ was probably the chauffeur: He got his eggs scrambled with a stun gun. The pizza wagon was stolen. Maybe it’s our man Smiley. Maybe not. The homicide is under the jurisdiction of St. Mary Parish.”

  “That’s it?” someone said.

  “It’s my belief that the same guy tried to put a bomb in Clete Purcel’s car,” she replied. “Or maybe we’ve got a tag team at work. Whoever it is, we need to cool them out. Everybody hearing me on this? We don’t get hurt. Civilians don’t get hurt. Bad guys go out of business. Everybody copy?”

  There was a collective “Yes, ma’am!”

  “You stay, Dave,” she said.

  She waited until everyone else had gone. There was a solitary red rose in a slender glass vase on her desk. “This is eating my lunch.”

  “Don’t let it,” I said.

  “We’ve got a guy killing people all over Acadiana, and we don’t know his name. We don’t have prints or weapons; all we have is two casings from the Cajun Dome that were wiped clean. Nobody is that good.”

  “Nothing more from the feds?”

  “They’ve heard of a guy working out of Miami named Smiley. They don’t know any more than we do.”

  “Maybe we’re all looking in the wrong place,” I said. “Maybe he’s from overseas. The Mob used to bring hitters in from Sicily. They’d stay with a local family, wash the dishes, do the hit, and go back home.”

  She tried to straighten the rose in the vase, then picked up a petal that had fallen on the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Her eyes seemed out of focus.

  “That’s a pretty flower,” I said.

  “A fellow gave it to me for my birthday. A fellow I might start seeing.”

  I had no idea why she was behaving the way she was. “You okay, Helen?”