James Burke - Pegasus Descending

Tony Lujan’s attitude toward law enforcement was one that no amount of experience has ever allowed me to deal with in an adequate way. Every police officer who reads this knows what I’m talking about, too. Certain groups of people in our society genuinely believe police agencies have only one purpose for existing, and that is to protect and serve the interests of a chosen few. Guess which income bracket they belong to.

I had gotten what I wanted and probably should have left at that point. But I didn’t. “See, we don’t get involved in civil suits, Tony. In fact, it’s the prosecutor’s office that determines which criminal charges we pursue in a given case. Personally, I don’t think you need to worry about a guy like Monarch Little fooling around with civil suits. The truth is, Monarch Little is one badass motherfucker who swallows his blood in a fight and comes at you right between the lights. He’s not above doing serious collateral damage, either.”

I heard a glass break in the kitchen.

I WAS HOOKING UP my boat trailer to my truck when Clete’s Caddy bounced into the driveway, his spinning rod propped up in the backseat, a Rapala flopping on the tip. “Ready to rock?” he said.

“Almost,” I said.

He got out and watched me load our rods, tackle boxes, and the cooler into the boat. He was wearing shined loafers, cream-colored golf slacks, and a Hawaiian shirt I hadn’t seen before.

“Dressed kind of sharp, aren’t you?” I said.

“Not really,” he replied, ripping the tab on a beer, looking off casually at the thick green arch of oak limbs over East Main. “Where’s Molly?”

“Right there,” I said, nodding toward the porte cochere, where Molly was coming out the side door with an armload of food. “What are you up to, Cletus?”

“Maybe I like to wear some decent threads once in a while. Will you give it a rest?”

Because my pickup truck was not big enough for the three of us, he followed us in the Caddy to Henderson Swamp. In the rearview mirror, I could see he was sneaking sips from a beer can on the floorboards. I thought about stopping and possibly preventing legal trouble on the road, but reason and caution and even common sense held little sway in the life of Clete Purcel. I was even more convinced of that fact when I saw him upend the can, crush it in his fist, and drop it over his shoulder into the backseat, where any cop who stopped him would be able to see it.

“What are you looking at?” Molly said.

“Clete.”

“What about him?”

“That’s like asking about the flight plan of an asteroid.”

She looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t try to explain further.

I backed the trailer down the concrete ramp at Henderson and we slid the boat into the water. It was a perfect afternoon for fishing. The day was hot, the wind down, the water dead-still in the coves. Out on the vast expanse of bays and channels and islands of willow and gum trees that comprised the swamp, I could see other fishermen anchored hard by the pilings of the interstate highway and the desiccated wood platforms of oil rigs that had long ago been torn down and hauled away. The air contained the bright, clean smell of rain in the south, which meant the barometer was dropping and the bass and bream would begin feeding as soon as one raindrop dented the surface of the water.

Molly and I sat in the boat’s stern and Clete sat up on the bass seat by the bow, flicking his Rapala in the lee of the willows that grew along the entrance to a wide bay. He had spread a paper towel over the seat cushion and I noticed that whenever he took a hit off a can of Budweiser or ate one of the po’boy sandwiches Molly had made, he leaned forward to avoid staining his clothes. At six o’clock he looked at his watch, removed his aviator shades and his porkpie hat, and combed his hair. His face was red from beer and sunburn, the area around his eyes still pale. He grinned happily. “Look at that sky,” he said.

Then a bass that must have weighed eight pounds rolled the surface by a nest of lily pads and took Clete’s Rapala with such force it blew water up into the willows. “Jesus Christ,” Clete said, dropping his beer can in his lap.

I got the net from under the seat and Molly swung the electric trolling motor about to keep Clete’s line at eleven o’clock from the bow so the bass would not tangle it with ours. Clete cranked the handle on his reel and jerked the tip of his rod up at the same time, bowing his rod into a severe arch.

“Ease up,” I said. “I’ll get the net under him.”

The bass broke the surface in a flash of gold and green and a roll of its white belly, then it stripped the monofilament off Clete’s drag and dove for the bottom, sawing the line against the boat.

“Pull your line around the bow and let him run,” I said.

Too late. The line snapped and the tip of Clete’s rod sprang back toward his face. “Wow,” he said, wiping at the beer on his slacks with a paper towel.

“Tie on a Mepps. We’ll try the next island up the channel,” I said.

“No, that’s it for me,” he replied.

“You want to quit?” I said, incredulously.

“It’s been a great day. I don’t always have to catch fish.”

“Right,” I said.

Molly looked at me. “I could go for a red snapper dinner up at the restaurant,” she said.

We had at least an hour of good fishing left and I wanted to stay out, but Molly had obviously chosen to act charitably toward Clete’s mercurial behavior and I didn’t have it in me to go against her wishes. “You bet,” I said.

Molly cranked the engine, and we headed across a long bay toward the landing. The surface of the water was the color of tarnished bronze against the sunset, and the new bloom on the cypress trees lifted like green feathers in the wind. Cars with their lights on streamed across the elevated causeway behind us, and ahead I could see the boat ramp and the levee and a lighted restaurant on pilings, with a walkway that extended out over the water.

We winched the boat back up the trailer, then I saw Clete’s face soften as he glanced up at the railing on the restaurant walkway. “I better head on out. Thanks for the afternoon,” he said.

A solitary woman stood on the walkway, her face turned into the sunset, her hair moving in the wind.

“Who’s your lady friend?” I asked, afraid of the answer I would get.

“I love you, Streak, but at some point in your life, can you give me some space?” he said.

Then I saw the woman’s profile against the sky.

“Just keep it in your pants,” I said.

He lifted his tackle box out of the boat and said good-bye to Molly but not to me. He walked toward the restaurant, his big hand gripped tightly on the disconnected sections of his rod, the back of his neck thick and glowing with heat.

“I can’t believe you said that,” Molly said.

“He’s used to it,” I replied.

A few minutes later, as Molly and I walked up to the restaurant for a meal, Clete and the woman drove past us on the rocks to the levee, the moon rising above his pink convertible. The woman’s face was young and radiant and lovely in the glow from the dashboard. She lifted a highball glass to her mouth, never looking in my direction. May the angels fly with you, Cletus, I said to myself.

“Who was that?” Molly said.

“A grifter by the name of Trish Klein. The kind of gal who knows how to break Clete’s heart.”

I HAD THOUGHT MONARCH might be stand-up, might let the FBI do its worse, even if that meant he had to go down on what recidivists used to call “the bitch,” short for “habitual offender,” which was the old-time term for the Clinton-era equivalent known as the three-strikes-and-you’re-out law.