James Burke - Swan Peak

He walked over to the college boy and his girl. The air in the shade was cool and smelled of clover. The two young people looked up at Clete uncertainly. He squatted down on his haunches, eye level with them, and opened his badge holder on his knee.

“My name is Clete Purcel. I’m a private investigator from New Orleans,” he said. “See that guy parked in the green shitbox over there?”

They nodded but kept their eyes on his face and did not look directly at the parking lot.

“That dude has been following me, and I want to turn it around on him,” Clete said. “The problem is, he’s made my maroon Caddy over there. In the next couple of minutes, I’m going to flush him out of the parking lot. I’ve got about thirty-seven bucks in my wallet. It’s yours if you’ll follow him in your car and let me sit in the backseat.”

“He’ll know who we are,” the boy said.

“No, he can’t see your car from where he is. He’s not interested in y’all. He’ll be looking for me and my Caddy.”

“What’s he done besides follow you?” the girl asked.

“He’s a child molester,” Clete replied.

“What do you plan to do to him?” the boy asked.

Take a chance , Clete thought. “Maybe nothing. Maybe break all his wheels,” he said. “Anytime you want me out of the car, I’ll get out.”

The boy and girl looked at each other and shrugged.

Clete walked across the grass to Lyle Hobbs’s vehicle and propped one arm on the roof above the driver’s window. Hobbs had a box of Wheat Thins open on his lap and was feeding them one at a time into his mouth, chewing them on his back teeth. His recessed right eye, the one looped with stitch marks, glittered wetly, as though it had been irritated by the wind. Clete suppressed a yawn, his gaze wandering up the slope of the mountain behind the university. Then he watched a U.S. Forest Service plane, one filled with fire retardant, flying low across the sky, its engines laboring with its massive load. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.

Lyle Hobbs turned on his radio and tuned the station to a baseball game in progress. “You gonna let it get personal, Mr. Purcel?”

A nest of small blue veins was pulsing in Clete’s temple. “When I was with NOPD, I’d do just that, Lyle. Get personal, I mean. Know why that was? Because my pay was the same whether I was eating doughnuts or mopping up the sidewalk with a degenerate. Now I’m a PI. When it becomes personal, I get in trouble and lose my source of income.”

“I noticed that about you when you were working for Sally Dee. A real pro. I was impressed. You always seemed to fit right in,” Hobbs replied, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Does it ever get personal for you, Lyle? Ever know a guy with a short-eyes jacket who wasn’t afraid – I mean, deep down inside, scared shitless? It’s what makes them cruel, isn’t it? That’s why they always choose their victims carefully. You ever get a real bone-on and go apeshit on somebody, Lyle?”

“You’re a real philosopher, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said, suddenly looking up at Clete, just like the lead-weighted eyelids of a doll clicking open. He dropped his empty Wheat Thins box out the window. It bounced off the pavement, powdering Clete’s shoes with crumbs.

Clete went into the alcove of the classroom building across from the library and waited. He unscrewed the cap on his flask and took a hit of Scotch and milk, then another one. After five minutes, he heard Lyle Hobbs start his car. He waited until he could see Hobbs’s car heading toward the road that separated the campus from the mountain behind it. Then he walked quickly down the steps to the young couple sitting under the trees. “Let’s rock,” he said.

The three of them followed Hobbs across town to a park in the middle of the residential district. All of the adjoining streets were lined with maple trees, the park spangled with sunshine, children playing on a baseball diamond and in a wading pool with a fountain geysering out of the center. In the midst of it all, Lyle Hobbs stood under a tree, watching a group of young teenage girls practicing somersaults in the grass.

Clete took all the bills out of his wallet and handed them to the driver. “Thanks for the lift. You guys take care of yourself,” he said.

“That guy’s really a molester?” the boy said.

“From the jump,” Clete said.

“Keep the money,” the boy said. He was burr-headed and wore a T-shirt and a ball cap pulled down on his brow. “You might actually bust that guy up?”

“I exaggerate sometimes.”

“You have booze on your breath,” the girl said, trying to smile. “We don’t want to see you get in trouble. You seem like a nice man.” She patted Clete on the wrist.

After the college kids drove away, Clete walked into the park. Then his eyes focused on a picnic bench on the far side of the recreation building. Jamie Sue was sitting next to her brother-in-law, Ridley Wellstone. She was also sitting next to a stroller, watching a diapered little boy play in the grass. She set the boy on her lap and combed his hair with her fingernails.

Clete tried to assimilate what he was looking at. The Scotch he had drunk wasn’t helping his thought processes. The light seemed to splinter into needles inside the trees; he opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Then he realized both Wellstone and Jamie Sue were staring at him as though he were an aberration rather than the other way around.

“What are you doing here?” Wellstone said. His aluminum crutches were propped beside him.

“Following the asshole you put on my tail,” Clete said. He looked at Jamie Sue and the little boy. “You have a kid?”

“Yes, I do. Why do you ask?”

“Why do I ask?”

“You don’t look well,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”

“That’s not a good idea,” Ridley Wellstone said.

The popping sound in Clete’s ears seemed to be gaining in intensity, like the thropping of helicopter blades. How dumb can one guy be ? he asked himself.

“We made restitution for your fishing gear. Now get out of here,” Wellstone said.

People at the other picnic tables were staring, and Clete’s face felt tight and small in the wind. Again he thought he heard mechanical sounds from a distant war and smelled an odor like moldy clothes on his body and diesel fuel and mosquito repellent and mud that stank of stagnant water. For just a second he thought he felt the squish of trench foot inside his boot and saw the flicker of conical straw hats moving through elephant grass.

He walked away from Jamie Sue’s picnic table, slightly off balance, his mouth dry, his forehead breaking a sweat. He passed Lyle Hobbs, who was still watching the teenage girls turning somersaults in the shade. Clete went into the restroom and washed his face for a long time. He dried his skin with a paper towel and looked in the metal reflector that served as a mirror. His face made him think of a pumpkin beaded with drops of water. Outside, he heard the music from an ice-cream truck. He thought of children playing in Audubon Park when he was a child in New Orleans. For a moment his heart was a kettle drum.

Lyle Hobbs walked into the restroom and relieved himself in a urinal. He was wearing shades, breathing through his mouth as he urinated, shaking himself off with one hand. He zipped his fly, then wet his comb under the lavatory faucet and began combing his hair. He never glanced at Clete.

“I catch you tailing me again, it’s going to play out a whole lot different,” Clete said.

Hobbs flicked the water off his comb and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mr. Wellstone came to town for his therapy. Nobody is tailing you, nobody is interested in you, Mr. Purcel. I cain’t abide a self-righteous man, particularly one that didn’t have a problem of conscience with putting his dick in another man’s wife. You’d better count your blessings you’re dealing with me and not Quince. Quince is mightily attached to the Wellstone family. Believe me when I say Quince is not a man you want mad at you.”