Read Online Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James Lee Burke
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pills and booze. He had also managed to kill a federally protected witness and had even done security in Vegas and Reno for a sadistic gangster by the name of Sally Dio, whose plane crashed into a mountain in western Montana. After Sally and several of his gumballs were combed out of the trees with garden rakes, investigators discovered Sally’s engines were clogged with sand that someone had poured into the fuel tanks. Clete Purcel blew Big Fork, Montana, like the town was burning down.
He was hated and feared by both the Mob and many of his old colleagues at NOPD. His detractors tried to dismiss him as a drunk and an addict and a whoremonger, but in truth Clete Purcel was one of the most intelligent and decent men I ever knew, complex in ways that few could guess at.
He had been raised in the old Irish Channel and talked like it—an accent more akin to Southie or Flatbush than the Deep South. His hands were as big as hams, the knuckles half-mooned with scars. With regularity his massive shoulders and broad back ripped the seams of his tropical shirts. He had a small Irish mouth, the corners downturned, and sandy hair and green eyes that crinkled when he smiled. A black witness to one of his escapades described him as “an albino ape crawling across my rooftop in skivvies,” and Clete wasn’t offended.
He talked openly about his visceral appetites, his addictions, his romances with junkies and strippers, his alcoholic blackouts that turned into scorched-earth episodes that caused people to climb out of barroom windows. But inside his violence and his reckless disregard for his own welfare was another man, one who carried images and thought processes in his head that he seldom shared: a father who used to make a little boy kneel for hours at a time on grains of rice; a wife who dumped him because she couldn’t sleep with a man who believed the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape; the grinding sound of steel tracks through a Third World village, an arch of liquid flame, the smell of straw and animals burning, and the screams of tiny men in black pajamas trapped inside a spider hole.
These were the memories his booze and pills couldn’t even make a dent in.
“What happened to Frogman?” I said.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” he said. “I got cleaned out at blackjack, so I was watching this great-looking broad shooting craps. You should have seen her ass when she bent over. Remember that song by Jimmy Clanton, ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’? I was getting a boner just watching from the bar.”
The kitchen window was open and I could see the curtains blowing inside the screen and hear Molly loading the dishwasher. “Clete, would you just—”
“Then I noticed this gal was probably part of a crew, maybe even running the crew. I think two of them had been counting cards at my blackjack table earlier. The gal crapped out twice, then the dice came back to her again. Soon as she picked them up from the stick man, a guy collides into the drink waitress and splashes cups of beer all over the place. That’s when she switched the dice. It was smooth, too. The boxman didn’t have a clue. She made seven passes in a row. Then she switched them back out, to one of the guys who’d been counting cards at my table.”
“What’s the point?” I said, my impatience growing.
We were sitting on the back steps. He squinted with one eye at the bayou, as though organizing his thoughts. “A half hour later she was back at the same table and switched them out again. Except this time she got greedy. She was doubling up her bets, until she had about eight or nine grand on the felt. Everyone around the table was starting to go apeshit and stacking chips on the pass line. The boxman called up a couple of security guys and I figured she was dead meat. That’s when Frogman showed up.”
“He was in her crew?”
“Dig this. The boxman and security guys were just about to bust the broad, then Frogman came
He was hated and feared by both the Mob and many of his old colleagues at NOPD. His detractors tried to dismiss him as a drunk and an addict and a whoremonger, but in truth Clete Purcel was one of the most intelligent and decent men I ever knew, complex in ways that few could guess at.
He had been raised in the old Irish Channel and talked like it—an accent more akin to Southie or Flatbush than the Deep South. His hands were as big as hams, the knuckles half-mooned with scars. With regularity his massive shoulders and broad back ripped the seams of his tropical shirts. He had a small Irish mouth, the corners downturned, and sandy hair and green eyes that crinkled when he smiled. A black witness to one of his escapades described him as “an albino ape crawling across my rooftop in skivvies,” and Clete wasn’t offended.
He talked openly about his visceral appetites, his addictions, his romances with junkies and strippers, his alcoholic blackouts that turned into scorched-earth episodes that caused people to climb out of barroom windows. But inside his violence and his reckless disregard for his own welfare was another man, one who carried images and thought processes in his head that he seldom shared: a father who used to make a little boy kneel for hours at a time on grains of rice; a wife who dumped him because she couldn’t sleep with a man who believed the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape; the grinding sound of steel tracks through a Third World village, an arch of liquid flame, the smell of straw and animals burning, and the screams of tiny men in black pajamas trapped inside a spider hole.
These were the memories his booze and pills couldn’t even make a dent in.
“What happened to Frogman?” I said.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” he said. “I got cleaned out at blackjack, so I was watching this great-looking broad shooting craps. You should have seen her ass when she bent over. Remember that song by Jimmy Clanton, ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’? I was getting a boner just watching from the bar.”
The kitchen window was open and I could see the curtains blowing inside the screen and hear Molly loading the dishwasher. “Clete, would you just—”
“Then I noticed this gal was probably part of a crew, maybe even running the crew. I think two of them had been counting cards at my blackjack table earlier. The gal crapped out twice, then the dice came back to her again. Soon as she picked them up from the stick man, a guy collides into the drink waitress and splashes cups of beer all over the place. That’s when she switched the dice. It was smooth, too. The boxman didn’t have a clue. She made seven passes in a row. Then she switched them back out, to one of the guys who’d been counting cards at my table.”
“What’s the point?” I said, my impatience growing.
We were sitting on the back steps. He squinted with one eye at the bayou, as though organizing his thoughts. “A half hour later she was back at the same table and switched them out again. Except this time she got greedy. She was doubling up her bets, until she had about eight or nine grand on the felt. Everyone around the table was starting to go apeshit and stacking chips on the pass line. The boxman called up a couple of security guys and I figured she was dead meat. That’s when Frogman showed up.”
“He was in her crew?”
“Dig this. The boxman and security guys were just about to bust the broad, then Frogman came
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