“What’d you just say?” Sidney asked.
“Nothing. I ain’t said nothing.”
“You called me a motherfucker?”
“No, suh, I ain’t said that.”
“I think you did.” Sidney’s eyes dropped to Bertrand’s belt. “What have you got there?”
“Nothing,” Bertrand said, backing away.
“Yeah?” Sidney said. He slapped Bertrand across the face, hard, coming around with his shoulder when he did it. “I asked you a question. What’s down there?”
“Suh, I ain’t did nothing. I’ll go away. You ain’t never gonna see me again. I promise.”
Sidney reached down and jerked the .38 from Bertrand’s belt, the steel sight tearing Bertrand’s skin. “You little shit,” he said. “You came in here packing, with my wife in the store?”
“No, suh. I was just lost.”
“Don’t lie,” Sidney said. He slapped Bertrand full in the face again, knocking spittle from his mouth.
“I thought it was an easy score, man,” Bertrand said, his nose full of needles, his eyes brimming with water.
“I got the reputation as an easy score? I got the reputation as anybody’s punch? That’s what you’re telling me in my own shop?”
Bertrand opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Sidney flipped open the cylinder of the .38 and dumped the shells in his palm. “Where you from?” he asked.
“Shreveport,” Bertrand said.
Sidney dropped the .38 in his coat pocket and fitted his hand inside Bertrand’s shorts and pulled them and his trousers out from his stomach. He poured the six rounds down into Bertrand’s genitalia, then walked him to the door. “This is what it is, kid. You made a mistake. Come around again and I’ll tear up your whole ticket.”
Sidney pushed him into the alley and kicked him so hard between his buttocks that Bertrand felt like glass had been shoved up his rectum. He limped to the end of the alley, convinced that blood was running down his thighs. When he got out to the street, when he did not think any more humiliation or misery could come into his life, he saw a wrecker hoisting the front end of his Toyota into the air.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, the phone rang on my kitchen counter. “Either you or Purcel are behind this, Dave,” a voice said.
“Sidney?” I said.
“You surprised I’m alive?”
“You lost me.”
“I’m holding a thirty-eight one-inch in my hand. Guess where it came from? It was stolen from my own house. I just took it off a black kid with breath like somebody broke wind. The black kid came in my shop with my own gun and was going to cap me with it. You think that’s just coincidence?”
“Where’s the black kid now?”
“I don’t know. I kicked his ass down the alley before I realized he was one of the guys who tore my house apart. But if I get my hands on him, I’m going to pull all his parts off and bring them to you.”
“Bad statement to make to a cop, Sidney.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m glad you’re all right.”
He paused, evaluating my response. “You’re saying you didn’t sic that kid on me?”
“No, and neither did Clete Purcel.”
“Don’t give me that crap. Purcel has got a long-standing beef with me. There was a rumble at the bottom of Magazine when we were kids. He thinks I was behind the guy who bashed him across the eye with a pipe. He’s a dumb mick. You know how you can tell a dumb mick? They think and act and look like Purcel.”