Free Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke

Haul your butt over here, Streak. Over-and-out.”
    I drove down Main and across the drawbridge into the park. The sky was gray, the trees shrouded with mist, the surface of the bayou chained with rain rings. Clete was sitting on a table under a picnic shelter, his restored Cadillac parked back in the trees. But if he was trying to hide his Caddy from notice, he had taken on an impossible task. It was a beautiful automobile, with big fins, Frenched headlights, wire wheels and whitewalls, an immaculate cream-colored top, and a waxed finish that was the shade of a flamingo’s wing — all of it the gift of a pornographic actor and drug mule by the name of Gunner Ardoin, who credited Clete with turning his life around.
    I sat beside him under the shelter and unscrewed the cap on a thermos of coffee and hot milk I had brought from home.
    “You went after Billy Joe Pitts, didn’t you?” I said.
    “I found out he hangs around the casino in Lake Charles on the weekends. But that’s not all he does over there. He’s part owner of a motel that operates as a cat-house for high rollers.”
    Clete sipped his coffee, the steam rising into his face. He wore a rumpled suit with a white shirt and no tie, and a yellow straw cowboy hat that was bright with dew. The back of his neck was thick and red and pocked with scars below his hairline. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.
    “What happened?” I said.
    “He made me at the casino and got me busted. I spent Saturday night in the Calcasieu Parish Jail. I’d still be in there if Nig and Willie hadn’t called in some IOUs for me. I was in a cell with a meth freak who tried to talk to his wife in the women’s section by yelling into the toilet bowl.”
    Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater were two New Orleans bondsmen Clete worked for, but I didn’t want to hear about them or Clete’s night in the can. When Clete’s stories digressed, he was usually trying to hide a disaster of some kind inside an incessant stream of minutiae. “What did you do when you got out, Clete?”
    “Hung around town, bought some books at Barnes and Noble, went swimming out at the lake. You ever been to Shell Beach?”
    “Clete —”
    “Toward evening I made a house call out at Pitts’s motel. He was lifting weights in a cottage out back. He was also getting a blow job. The girl was black, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.” Clete tossed the remainder of his coffee into the grass and stared at the bayou.
    “Go on,” I said.
    “The girl went into the motel, probably to scrub her teeth with Liquid Drano. So I ducked into the cottage. I was just going to have a motivational talk with the guy. He was lying on a bench, pressing a bar with maybe a hundred and seventy-five pounds on it. I waited till the bar was down on his chest, then I came up behind him and grabbed it and held it there so he couldn’t lift it up again.”
    “I go, ‘You busted up my podjo, motherfucker. That means you take the payback or give up the guy who sent you. Want a second to think it over’?”
    “He goes, ‘Oh, it’s Louisiana Fats again. I thought you were getting your cheeks oiled at the jail.’ “
    “I go, ‘Bad time to be a wiseass, Billy Joe,’ and roll the bar toward his throat.”
    “I thought he’d give it up. He was popping with sweat, his face starting to get a little purple. Then he says, ‘Does Robicheaux make you squat down for your nose lube?’ “
    Clete blew out his breath. “What was I supposed to do? The clock was running. The guy almost took your head off with a two-by-four. He made a teenage girl cop his swizzle stick. He’s a dirty cop. He should have had his spokes ripped out a long time ago. So I did it.”
    “What?”
    “Maybe hurt him a little when I picked up the bar and dropped it on him.”
    Clete looked sideways at me, then back at the bayou again. I could hear the rain ticking on the trees and the camellias that grew along the water’s edge. I was afraid to ask