James Burke - Swan Peak

“I saw you watching those young girls, you piece of shit.”

Hobbs leaned toward the metal reflector, tilting up his nose, sucking in his lips. He plucked a hair from one nostril and dropped it in the basin. “Stay out of trouble,” he said.

Hobbs walked out into the sunlight, his hair wet on his collar. Clete followed him, remaining in the shade, his heart still hammering. Hobbs was watching the teenage girls, who were now sitting on the grass under the maple trees, their knees pulled up in front of them. He bought a Popsicle from the ice-cream truck, opened his car door, and stood behind it, eating the Popsicle while he watched a girl not over fourteen climbing up on the jungle gym, her shirt sliding up on her hips.

Clete could see the outline of Hobbs’s phallus against his trousers.

Walk away , Clete told himself. You can’t change what’s happening here .

Screw that , another voice said.

“You need to take your johnson somewhere else, Lyle,” he said.

Hobbs turned, the Popsicle half in his mouth. He bit into it, clearly savoring the melt in the back of his jaws, his eyes lighting with a thought. “Sally Dee said you blew your career and marriage with booze and weed and ten-dollar street cooze. He said he felt sorry for you, Mr. Purcel. He said your wife was a muff diver, and that’s why you were a gash hound and your colleagues at NOPD gave you a bad rap. That’s why he gave you a job at his casino.”

Hobbs’s eyes remained fixed on the girl playing on the jungle gym, but Clete saw the indentation, the tug of a suppressed grin, at the corner of his mouth.

“I have a feeling there’s paper on you somewhere,” Clete said.

Hobbs dropped the empty Popsicle stick over the top of the car door into the gutter. He tilted his head inquisitively.

“Defective guys like you have outstanding warrants – a skipped bond, failed court appearances, a PV of a kind that only idiots commit,” Clete said. “But what that means is I’m going to take you in and split the skip fee with whoever is looking for you. Lean against the vehicle and assume the position.”

“Go blow yourself, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said.

“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, Lyle.”

Clete clenched one hand on the back of Hobbs’s neck and slammed him against the side of the Honda. When Hobbs began to struggle, Clete swung him in a circle, flopping like a fish, and crashed him against the roof and against the hood. Hobbs’s shades shattered on the asphalt, and blood leaked from his nose. Then he tried to run. He got as far as the grille of the Honda before Clete grabbed him again and threw him against the far side of the hood, kicking his ankles apart, shoving his face down on the hot metal.

The back of Hobbs’s neck felt oily and warm in Clete’s hand. The stench of deodorant layered over dry sweat rose from Hobbs’s armpits. His head reared from the metal, his buttocks striking Clete in the loins.

Clete whirled him around and drove his fist into Hobbs’s face. The force of the blow lifted Hobbs into the air and dropped him between his shoulder blades on the point of the hood ornament. It should have stopped there, but the red lights flashing and the bells ringing at a train guard deep inside Clete’s head were of no value now. He realized what the popping sound in his ears had been. The stitches that held Clete Purcel together were coming loose one by one, and in the next thirty seconds he did things that were like pieces of liquid color breaking apart behind his eyes, dissolving and re-forming without sound or meaning. He thought he heard people screaming and a car horn blowing and the music from the megaphone on top of the ice-cream truck clotting with static. But none of these things deterred him. He felt his fists smashing into sinew and bone, the flat of his shoe coming down on the side of someone’s head and face. He saw an old man pleading with him to stop, to grant mercy to the figure on the asphalt.

Then he was standing alone, as though under a glass bell, Hobbs at his feet, the children on the playground terrified by what they had just seen, the wind swelling the trees against a blue summer sky.

Think , he told himself.

He dropped to one knee, a handkerchief in his hand, and pulled a stiletto from a scabbard that was Velcro-strapped to his right ankle. He rubbed the surfaces of the handle clean, clicked open the blade, and wiped it clean, too. Then he pressed the handle into Hobbs’s palm and folded his fingers on it.

In the background, he could hear sirens pealing down the street.

ONE HOUR LATER,Clete was sitting on a bench by himself in a holding cell that contained no plumbing and smelled of disinfectant and stone. Down the corridor, someone was yelling without stop in a voice that reflected neither coherence nor meaning, as though the person were yelling simply to deliver an auditory message to himself about his state of affairs. When Clete closed his eyes, he kept seeing the faces of the children in the park, their disbelief at the level of savagery taking place before their eyes. Clete wondered if it was he who was the ogre and not Lyle Hobbs.

The undersheriff who had cuffed Clete stood at the cell door, one hand behind his back. He was a pleasant-looking man, a bit overweight, more administrator than policeman, his face windburned, pale around the eyes where his sunglasses had been. “Hobbs is at St. Pat’s. Did you use his head for a paddleball?”

“Sorry to hear that,” Clete said.

“You told him you made him for a bail skip?”

“Yeah.”

“And he came at you with a switchblade?”

“I guess that sums it up.”

“Where was he carrying the switchblade?”

Clete glanced again at the undersheriff. The undersheriff’s left hand was still concealed behind his hip. “It’s my fault. I got sloppy on the shakedown,” Clete said.

The undersheriff held up a Ziploc bag with a black polybraid scabbard inside. “My deputy found this under Hobbs’s car. It’s the kind of rig some plainclothes cops or PIs use.”

“Wonder what Lyle would be doing with that,” Clete said.

“You’re lucky, Mr. Purcel. Hobbs has a couple of bench warrants on him. It’s minor-league stuff, but as a bond agent, you probably have a degree of legality on your side. Anyway, there’s a lady waiting for you by the front entrance.”

“I’m sprung?”

“For now,” the deputy said. “Be careful what you pray for.”

Clete gave him a look.

A few minutes later, Clete emerged from the courthouse and saw an Asian-American woman on the sidewalk, a black purse hanging from a leather strap on her shoulder, her expression almost clinical, her wire-framed glasses perched neatly on her nose. “I’m Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans, Mr. Purcel,” she said. “I’ll drive you to your car.”

“You’re with Fart, Barf, and Itch?” he said.

“I think you’re an intelligent man, regardless of what most people say about you. You can cooperate with us, or you can choose not to. You can also deal with the assault charge on your own. Do you want me to take you to your car?”

Clete saw a four-door silver Dodge Stratus with a government plate on it parked by the curb. Alicia Rosecrans waited for him to reply, then started toward her car. “I appreciate the offer,” Clete said to her back. “I’ve always appreciated what you guys do.”

But on his way to the university, he began to have second thoughts about accepting favors from Alicia Rosecrans. She made him think of a lab technician taking apart an insect with tweezers. She told him to open a manila folder on the seat. In it were a stack of photos, a copy of his discharge from the United States Marine Corps, and his medical records from the Veterans Administration.