James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“How you know that?”

“Joe Dupree at Lafayette P.D. told me. A couple of guys impersonated repairmen from the gas company and got free run of the house for a half hour.”

“What for?”

“Who knows? Stop drinking if you’re going to drive.”

“They were actually inside Bruxal’s house?”

“Ask Trish Klein.”

“Dave, you have a talent for making people feel miserable. Every woman I meet turns my life into a nightmare. And all you can say is ‘Stop drinking if you’re going to drive’? Twenty minutes ago you were trying to kill a guy with your bare hands. Why don’t you show a little empathy for a change?”

We were back to normal. He spun gravel under the tires and roared onto the highway, fishtailing on the asphalt, bent over the wheel like a sorrowful behemoth.

I HAD LEFT A NOTE for Molly before I had picked up Clete and gone to Monarch Little’s house. When I got home the note was still on the kitchen table, with an additional message written in Molly’s hand at the bottom: “Got too tired and couldn’t wait up. Pecan pie and milk in the icebox. Love, Molly.”

I checked the message machine and the caller identification on the telephone. No one had called that evening. I stripped in the bathroom, stuffed my bloody shirt and trousers deep in the clothes hamper, and got in the shower. Molly was still asleep when I lay down beside her. Outside, the rain ticked in the trees and occasionally the flasher lights on emergency vehicles passed on the street. But none of them stopped in front of my house.

Lefty Raguza had obviously not dimed me with the Lafayette P.D. Would he come around again and try to square things on his own? I doubted it. His real problem would be with Whitey Bruxal. Men like Whitey want respectability almost as much as they desire power and obscene amounts of money. Raguza had just managed to drag Whitey’s name into a back-of-town barroom brawl resulting from Raguza’s cruelty to an animal. I had a feeling Whitey’s bedside visit to his employee would not be a sympathetic one.

But I had a problem of my own that would not go away, nor would it let me sleep. After four hours, I gave up any hope of escaping the gargoyle that lived within me. I sat on the side of the bed, my hands in my lap, my head filled with images that no power on earth could relieve me of. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:13 a.m. “What’s wrong, Dave?” I heard Molly say.

“I tried to kill a guy tonight,” I replied.

I felt her weight shift on the mattress, her legs and bottom slide loose from the sheets. She walked around the side of the bed and sat beside me. She picked up my hand and looked hard into my face. “Tried to kill which guy?” she said.

“The man who poisoned Tripod. I kicked his face in, then I shoved that tube of roach paste down his throat. I mean down his throat, too. I wanted him to strangle on it.”

She looked into space, her hand still covering mine. “How bad did you hurt him?”

“Enough so he’ll never poison one of our animals again.”

“Dave, when you say you wanted to kill this man, you’re describing an emotion, not an intention. There’s a big difference. Had you really wanted to kill him, he’d be dead.”

I thought about what she had just said. The implications were not necessarily flattering. “I never shot anyone who didn’t try to kill me first,” I said, now defending a history of violence that went all the way back to Vietnam.

“This man is evil and I wish you hadn’t gone after him on your own. But stop judging yourself so harshly. You were protecting a creature who can’t protect himself. You don’t think God can understand that?”

I’m not a theologian, but I believe absolution can be granted to us in many forms. Perhaps it can come in the ends of a woman’s fingers on your skin. Some people call it the redemptive power of love. Anyway, why argue with it when it comes your way?

THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday and Helen was home when I called her. I told her about my behavior of the previous night, every detail of it, including the fact Clete had backed my play with a twelve-gauge pump. When I finished my account, I could hear a whirring sound in the receiver and feel a steel band tightening across my sternum.

“You still there?” I said.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Nobody called in a nine-one-one?”

“That’s your main concern here?”

“Raguza dealt the play. Considering what he did to Tripod, I think he got off light.”

“There’s no point talking to you. You hear nothing I say.”

“I called to tell you I’ll take the heat. If it costs me my job, that’s the way it is. I don’t want you compromised.”

“I’m having a hard time with this show of magnanimity.”

“I did what I felt I had to. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you or the department,” I said. “I know Raguza, Helen. He’s the kind of guy you put out of action before he burns your house down.”

It was quiet a moment, then I heard a sound like dry bread being crunched and I realized she was eating toast. I thought our conversation was over, that my moment in the confessional box had come and gone. As was often the case in my dealings with the complexity of Helen Soileau, I was wrong.

“One day they’re going to kill you, Pops. When that happens, a big part of me is going to die with you,” she said.

I went outside and worked in the yard, flinging shovel-loads of compost into the flower beds, my eyes burning with sweat. Then I jogged two miles in the park, but Helen’s words stayed with me like an arrow in the chest. Just as I returned home, out of breath, aching for a shower, Betsy Mossbacher pulled a steel-gray Toyota into my drive.

“Hello,” I said.

She didn’t reply. She got out of her car and looked me flat in the face. Her jeans were belted high on her hips, her cowboy boots powdered with dust.

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“You are.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me.”

“You went over to Lafayette and beat the crap out of Lefty Raguza.”

“What about it?” I said.

My cavalier attitude seemed to light a fire in her chest. Her eyes stayed fixed on my face, as though she was deciding how much information she should convey to a fool. “You listen,” she said. “We have knowledge about the inner workings of Whitey Bruxal’s circle that you don’t. You understand the connotations of what I’m saying?”

“You’ve got him tapped?”

She didn’t acknowledge my question. “Bruxal thinks Trish Klein and her merry pranksters are planning to take down one of his operations. He also thinks your fat friend Clete Purcel is involved. So what do you guys do? You remodel Raguza’s head and stuff a tube of Super Glue down his throat.”

“It was roach paste,” I said.

She blinked, I suspected from a level of anger that she could barely contain. “You think this is funny?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

“Good. Because we now have the sense Whitey believes you and Purcel may both be working with Trish Klein. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if you are.”

“Wrong. Look, you know anything about Whitey’s house getting creeped?”

“No,” she said, surprised.

“I think Trish Klein’s friends did it. They convinced Whitey’s wife they were from the gas company.”

I could see the consternation in her face. It was obvious the Lafayette P.D. was not sharing information with her, perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was a Fed, or perhaps both.

“What were they after?” she asked.

“You got me. But whatever it is, Purcel is not part of it.”

“That’s not the impression we have. Your friend’s anatomy seems turned around. I think his penis and main bowel are located where his brains should be,” she said.