James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"No, I just feel kind of weird," he replied.

He reached out to take the lighter from her hand, but the gold surface seemed to turn soft and sink in the middle, like a lump of butter inside the warmth of a stove. His fingers went past her hand and knocked over a salt shaker, as though his motors had been snipped in half at the back of his brain. His mouth and throat became instantly dry; the overhead lighting caused his eyes to well with tears.

"What's happening?" he said.

She stared at him mutely, her expression caught between fear and guilt. "I have a little girl. I've got to get clean. Just don't lie to them. It makes them really mad," she said.

"Come here," he said, catching a piece of fabric with one hand.

But she pulled her canvas tote from him, looked back once, and rushed out the back door into the darkness.

Clete felt himself slip from the chair and crash on the linoleum, his drink glass shattering inches from his face.

Both the men who came through the front door carried lengths of chain and looked Hispanic. One wore a formfitting strap undershirt and had shaved armpits and the tapered lats and flat chest of a boxer. The other man was much bigger, his skin slick with black hair. The fingers of his right hand were inserted in the holes of a pair of brass knuckles.

A third man entered the house. He wore white slacks belted high up on his waist and a western shirt sewn with chains of purple and red flowers. "We tossed your room and found your P.I. buzzer. Sorry to do this to you, big man, but it's out of my control," Lou Coyne said.

"Yeah, you came here to get fucked, and that's what you got, spermo – fucked," the man in the formfitting undershirt said. Both he and the other Hispanic man laughed.

Lou Coyne squatted down eye-level with Clete. "You working for Robicheaux? You working for some political people? These guys here are serious. Don't underestimate their potential," he said.

Clete tried to rise to his feet, then collapsed again, pieces of broken glass knifing into his back.

"This ain't my way, big man. Please don't do this to either one of us," Coyne said.

But the words Clete heard were muffled, distorted, like someone shouting inside the downdraft of a helicopter. In his mind's eye he saw a hooch burning brightly on the edge of a flooded rice field. Boxes of AK-47 rounds were exploding inside the heat, and in the distance, against a storm-sealed sky, he could see a Zippo-track with a Confederate battle flag tied to the radio antenna grinding over a dike that flanged the rice field, automatic weapons fire dancing across the water's surface.

Clete got on his hands and knees and began crawling.

That's when a chain whipped out of the air and raked across his neck and the side of his face. Then the man with animal hair on his skin straddled him and drove the pair of brass knuckles deep into his back and a second time into his neck.

What had they given him? Clete guessed it was chloral hydrate. Or maybe acid. Or maybe both. The room had melted, the colors in the walls and floor dissolving and running together. One of the men was now wrapping a chain around his forehead, tightening the links into his scalp. Clete drove his elbow into the man's scrotum and heard him scream and the chain rattle to the floor.

Clete crashed into a laundry room off the kitchen, knocking over an ironing board and a plastic basket filled with dried clothes. On his knees, he slammed the door behind him and shot the bolt. A cast-iron pipe, an old drain of some kind, extended four feet high up on one wall. He gripped it at the top, wrenched it back and forth until it broke loose from a rusted connection, then ripped it out of the floor.

The pipe was heavy and thick in his palms. The floor seemed to be pitching under his feet, the roar of helicopter blades still thundering in his head. Or was that one of his attackers throwing his weight into the bolted door? The sounds in his head were so loud he couldn't tell where they originated, but the door was shaking hard, vibrating through the walls and floor. Then the bolt splintered loose from the jamb and the door flew open in Clete's face. Clete looked into the close-set pig-eyes of the man with brass knuckles, and drove the pipe into his mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth.

The man held his hands to the lower portion of his face, his brass knuckles shiny with the blood and saliva that drained through his fingers. Clete lifted the pipe like a baseball bat and swung it into the other Hispanic man's jaw, then across his back and rib cage. Both Hispanic men tried to shield their heads with their forearms and escape the blows raining down on them, but Clete followed them into the backyard, hitting them again and again, the pipe ringing in his palms.

"They're done! Jesus Christ! We're done!" Lou Coyne said. "You're gonna kill them guys! Hey, are you hearing me?"

Clete stumbled out of the backyard, dropping the pipe on the front sidewalk. The air smelled of smoke, perhaps from outdoor barbecue pits, and mist was blowing off an elevated highway in the distance. He staggered down the street toward a clapboard bar that glowed with the hazy iridescence of a pistol flare burning inside fog. Again, he thought he heard the downdraft of helicopter blades and the labored breath of people running, clutching at his arms, speaking words to him that made no sense.

Totally stoned, zoned, and shit-blown up the Mekong. I'm not going to make it, he thought.

Then, while a Miami P.D. helicopter with a searchlight roared by overhead, the loving hands of women who made him think of black angels guided him into the backseat of a car. Their lips were arterial-red, their perfume like that of an enclosed garden inside the car, their hands cool and gentle as they wiped his face and hair and the cuts in his scalp.

"What's the haps, ladies?" Clete said, and passed out.

Clete arrived back in New Iberia the following evening on the Sunset Limited, ensconced in a Pullman bedroom with his flight bag and golf clubs, although he had little memory of being put aboard the train.

"These were black hookers?" I asked as I drove him to his cottage at the motor court.

"Except the woman driving. She was white. A beanpole with a corn bread accent, but definitely in charge," he replied. "She got on the cell phone and gave hell to this guy Lou Whatever."

"The pimp asked you if you were hooked up politically?"

"Yeah, that brings up another subject. Remember I told you Raphael Chalons had this televangelical character fronting points for his casino interests and you blew me off?"

"Vaguely."

"The dial-a-prayer number Babette gave me belongs to a TV huckster named Colin Alridge. He's the same guy who's working for Chalons. Babette said she and Lou Whatever and some other whores visited the casino in Lake Charles and met him. He looks like a college kid out of the 1940s. I think Babette creamed her pants when she shook his hand."

"Why should people be beating you up with chains because of Raphael Chalons's connection to a lobbyist?"

"I don't know," he replied. He was quiet a long time, lost in thought, his back and neck marbled with bruises. "There's one other thing I didn't tell you."

I looked at him.

"The white woman, the beanpole with corn fritters in her mouth? Before she and the black girls poured me into the Pullman, I'm pretty sure she said, 'Tell Dave and Jimmie Robicheaux I said hello.' What do you think of that, noble mon?"

Was the white woman Ida Durbin? There was no way to know. When Clete told me of his experience in Miami, he was still half-swacked on the drugs that the prostitute named Babette had probably dropped in his glass before she poured the rum punch into it.

I also wondered if the story about Raphael Chalons's connection with an evangelical political huckster had any relevance. If a political operative wired into the White House was on his payroll, Chalons's breeding would probably restrain him from revealing that fact at a formal dinner, but he would not care if someone else did. He was jaded, corrupt, sexually profligate, politically pragmatic, but not a hypocrite, a gentleman in the same way the Prince of Darkness is.