Read The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do for Free Online

then followed her to the door.
    “I really have nothing more to say,” Cleo told them.
    “Sorry for your tragedy, there,” Blanchette said as he passed her and stepped out onto the lawn.
    Blue and red lights twirled in the night, and white uniforms were moving a sheet-covered litter from out of the house across the street. Many voices filled the air, some terse, some entertained, and some angry. A crowd had gathered, but it was largely silent, listening to the officials on the scene.
    “Get some rest,” Shade said.
    “You just do your job.”
    “You don’t even have to tell us that, lady,” Blanchette snapped.
    “Hey,” Cleo said. She held her hand out, palm up. “The cash, please.”
    Shade stroked his hair, and shook his head very slowly.
    “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “But it’s evidence now.”
    Cleo stiffened and withdrew her hand.
    “You are so right,” she said.
    The two detectives studied one another for a moment, then Blanchette shrugged. Shade turned around and handed the wallet to Cleo.
    “I don’t have to do this,” he said. “But I am.”
    Cleo accepted the wallet, then backed inside the doorway.
    “You got some guilt,” she said. “That’s all it is.”
    Then she firmly swung the door closed.

3
    S HADE AND Blanchette drove through the streets of Pan Fry, past small wooden homes that wobbled from the century or more of hard living that they’d seen, past three-story group housing where half the apartments had windows rotting out and the other half had neatly painted window boxes full of red and yellow flowers. Occasionally there was a minor leap upscale, and there would be a prim, crisply clean, color-coordinated house, with a carport and a chain-link fence.
    “How,” Shade said. “I’ve got to ask you this. Just what is the edge in rudeness? What advantage do you think it gives you?”
    After an amused and amiable grunt, Blanchette said, “I could give a good reason. I know one. I mean, I could say it’s because that stirs people up, makes them blurt things that make my job easier. I could tell you that one.”
    “But you won’t.”
    “Not to you, here in the dark and all alone. I mean, the truth is, people bug the shit out of me half the time. Their bullshit bores me. I don’t mind a little bullshit but, you know, you ought to astonish me with it, not nod me off.” Blanchette looked at Shade and winked. “You know that. The ones that really get me are the ones who say, ‘Society made me do it,’ ” Blanchette mimicked. “ ‘I didn’t have a bicycle when I was eight, Your Honor, so naturally I can’t be blamed for hammerin’ nails through the nun’s head and rapin’ the priest when I was twenty.’ Shit, man, I grew up on dirt, and now I work for more of it.”
    “So nobody else can complain?”
    “They can complain all they want, but I don’t care.”
    “You have no sympathy for yourself,” Shade said.
    “I guess I’d need more college to see the smartness in that silliness, partner.”
    The street lights became brighter when they’d passed out of Pan Fry. Saint Bruno, with a population of two hundred thousand, was a city of many neighborhoods, Frogtown and Pan Fry being the largest and most fabled, and great numbing stretches of anonymous, bland, and nearly affluent subdivisions.
    At Clay Street Blanchette turned east with rubber-squealing confidence and stomped the gas pedal since traffic was light. Pio’s Italian Garden was still open, the red neon pizza in the window flashing an all-night invitation. Blanchette found his memories of repasts taken there to be varied but sufficient, and he suddenly wheeled into the parking lot.
    He looked at Shade and said, “A man’s got to eat. Hungry?”
    “For chrissake no, man.”
    Blanchette climbed from the car, then leaned in the door.
    “Tragedy saps your energy, Rene. Does mine anyhow. Think I’ll grab a meatball grinder.”
    “You’re a real man, How.”
    Blanchette nodded in