James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

But Clete pushed the door back on its springs and stepped into the room like an elephant entering a phone booth. His unblinking eyes went from me to the blackjack; then his huge fist crashed against the side of Baxter's head. Baxter's face went out of round, his automatic flew from his shoulder holster, and he tripped sideways over the toilet bowl and fell on top of the trash can in a litter of crumpled paper towels.

Clete grimaced and shook his hand in the air, then rubbed his knuckles.

"Are you all right?" he said.

"I don't know."

"What happened?"

"He threatened to blow my cover."

Clete looked down at Baxter in the corner. Baxter's eyes were half-closed, his mouth hung open, and one hand twitched on his stomach.

"You hit him first?" Clete said.

"Yep."

Clete chewed his lip.

"He'll use it, then. That's not good, not good," he said, and began making clicking sounds with his tongue. He reached down and patted Baxter on the cheek. "Wake-up time, Nate."

Baxter widened his eyes, then started to sit up among the wet towels and fell back down again. Clete lifted him by the back of his herringbone jacket and folded him over the rim of the toilet bowl.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Freshen up, Nate. That's it, my man. Splash a little on your face and it's a brand-new day," Clete said.

He flushed the toilet and pushed Baxter's head farther down into the bowl.

"That's enough, Clete," I said.

Someone tried to open the door.

"This toilet is occupied right now," Clete said. He lifted Baxter off the bowl and propped him against the wall, then squatted down and blotted his face with paper towels. "Hey, you're looking all right, Nate. How many fingers am I holding up? Three. Look, three fingers. That's it, take a deep breath. You're going to be fine. Look, I'm putting your piece back in your holster. Here's your sap. Come on, look up at me, now."

Clete patted Baxter's cheek again. The back of Clete's thick neck was red from the effort of squatting down. His stomach and love handles hung over his belt.

"Here's the way I see this deal," he said. "We write the whole thing off. It was just a bad day at Black Rock, not even worth talking about later. You had a beef, Dave had a beef, it's over now. Right?"

Baxter blinked his eyes and flexed his jaw as though he had a toothache. Water dripped out of his beard.

"Or you could go back to the First District and get into a lot of paperwork," Clete said. "Or you might want to cause Dave some grief with Tony C. But I don't think you're that kind of guy. Because if you were, it'd create some nasty problems for everybody. See, here's the serious part in all this. There's a hooker who comes into the bar. I usually don't let them in because they're bad for business. But I've known this broad since I was in Vice myself, and she's basically a nice girl and she respects my place and doesn't come on to the Johns while she's in here. Anyway, she tells a funny story. She says you're getting freebies in the Quarter, and you made her ex-room-o cop your joint. I don't know, maybe she made it up. But you know how those broads are, they carry a grudge a long time. I don't think it'd take a lot to get one of them to drop the dime on you, Nate."

Clete crimped his lips together and looked Baxter steadily in the eyes. Baxter's face looked as though he were experiencing the first stages of recognition after an earthquake. Clete closed the lid on the toilet and sat Baxter on top of it. His head hung forward. Clete touched him gently on the shoulder with two fingers.

"It ends here, Nate," he said quietly. "We're understood on that, aren't we?"

Baxter moved his lips but no sound came out.

"You don't have to say anything, as long as we have an understanding," Clete said. "Get yourself a couple of free doubles at the bar, if you want. I'm going to walk Dave outside now. It's a nice day. We're all going back outside into a nice day."

Clete looked over the top of Baxter's head at me and made a motion toward the door with his thumb. I walked back out through the bar onto the sidewalk under the colonnade. Clete followed me. The French Market and the tables in the du Monde were crowded with tourists now, and the street was heavy with afternoon traffic. Clete adjusted his tie, lit a cigarette with the lighter cupped in his big hands, and looked up the street as though he had nothing in his mind except a pleasant expectation of the next event in his life.

I rubbed my collarbone and the puckered scar over the.38 wound and straightened my back.

"How's it feel?"

"Like it's packed in dry ice."

He felt along my shoulder with his thumb and forefinger. He saw me flinch.

"That's where he got you?"

"Yes."

"There's no break. When your collarbone's broken, there's a knot like a baseball."

"Who's the hooker?"

"You got me. The ones I knew five years ago are probably hags now. Actually, they were hags then."

"You're pretty slick, Clete."

"What can I say?" He grinned at me. "But one word of advice, noble mon. Think about going back to Bayou Teche and let New Orleans go down the drain by itself. For some reason, Dave, having you in town makes me think of a man walking into a clock shop with a baseball bat."

She had always loved roses and four-o'clocks. The flower beds in her lawn and the shaded areas around the coulee at her home on Spanish Lake had been bursting with them. Now she grew purple and gold four-o'clocks along the wall of her patio on Camp Street. They had already dropped their winter seeds like big black pepper grains on the worn bricks, but her yellow and hybrid blue roses still bloomed as big as fists. The western sky was streaked with magenta through the oak trees, and leaves floated across the tunnels of underwater light in the swimming pool. The air was heavy with the smoky taste of the meat fire in the hibachi, cool and bittersweet with the smell of fall, like the odor of burning sugarcane stubble, of pecans when they mold inside their husks under the tree.

She turned the steaks on the grill with a fork, her eyes watering in the smoke, and smiled at me. She wore leather sandals, faded designer jeans, and a black shirt with red flowers sewn into it. Her honey-colored hair was full of lights, and where it was trimmed on her neck it looked thick and stiff and soft and lovely to the touch, all at the same time.

She saw me press my hand to my shoulder again.

"Is there something wrong, Dave?" she said.

"No, I just have a little flare-up when the weather is about to change. I think it's going to rain. You know how it is this time of year. The leaves turn, then we have a real hard rain and we sort of click into winter."

"It's too early for that," she said. "Besides, winter is never that bad here, anyway."

"No, it's not. Boots, can I use your phone to call New Iberia? I need to check in on Alafair."

"Sure, hon."

Alafair's voice made me want to leave New Orleans that night. Or maybe it made me want to escape even more the brooding premonition that seemed to hang between me and Bootsie like a secret both of us knew, but neither of us would broach.

She didn't have to tell me about the Baylor medical center in Houston: I had seen it in her eyes. It's a detached look, as if the person has stepped briefly around a corner and seen to the end of a long, gray street on which there are no other people. I'd flown in a dustoff loaded with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochrome M's to indicate morphine injections, and the two who died before we reached battalion aid had had that look in their eyes, as though the hot wind through the doors, the steely blat-blat of the propeller blades, the racing green landscape below, were now all part of somebody else's filmstrip.

"It's bad, isn't it, Boots?" I said. I sat in the scrolled-iron patio chair by the pool and looked at the tops of my hands when I said it.