“Pardon?”
“Does he look like he might have a blowgun on him?”
“I’m confused, Mr. Purcel.”
“Send him in, please.”
The boy, who was not over twelve, came in and sat in a deep chair in the corner, his baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He gazed at the antique firearms mounted on the walls. “You cain’t afford any kind of guns except junk?” he said.
“Your first name is Buford, right?”
“You can stick with Kiss-My-Ass. Or you can call me Mr. Kiss-My-Ass.”
“You know I beat the shit out of your cousin Herman Stanga, don’t you?”
“Yeah, at the Gate Mout’. I know all about it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“My cousin wasn’t no good. ’Cause I do what I do don’t mean I liked Cousin Herman.”
“I’m pretty busy, Kiss-My-Ass.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Reading a t’rowaway magazine takes up a lot of time. There’s a lady
lives up the street from me on Cherokee. She’s Vietnamese. She’s a waitress at Bojangles. Know who I’m talking about?”
“No.”
“She’s a nice lady. She don’t need no trouble from the wrong kind of guy.”
“You got to be a little more specific.”
“I was on my corner, and this white guy in a Mustang come by and wanted to buy some roofies. I tole him I don’t handle that kind of stuff. So he axed me for some X. I tole him I don’t have no X, either. I tole him that maybe I had some breat’ mints ’cause that’s what he needed.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“’Cause I seen this same car and this same guy dropping off the Vietnamese lady at her house. She don’t need this guy slipping her roofies so he can do t’ings to her in his backseat.”
“You remember what I told you I’d do if I caught you slinging dope again?”
“No disrespect, but you can go fuck yourself, too. You gonna he’p me or not?”
“Don’t be surprised if you don’t reach your next birthday. What’s this cat’s name?”
“I don’t know, but I seen him before. He was at Cousin Herman’s house. Herman said he was in the pen over in Texas. Herman said he wrote a book about it.”
“Does the name Robert Weingart ring a bell?”
Buford shook his head.
“My fee is a hundred and fifty an hour. But we offer a pygmy discount,” Clete said. He waited. “That was a joke, Kiss-My-Ass.”
The boy gazed out the French doors at a tugboat passing on the bayou. “When the guy in the Mustang stopped by the corner, I wasn’t slinging. I was waiting on some friends to go to the pool. If you want to make fun of me, go do it. But tell me if you gonna he’p or not, ’cause that man is fixing to do bad t’ings to a lady that been nice to every kid in the neighborhood.”
“Why don’t you tell her this yourself?”
The bill of the boy’s cap was tilted downward, hiding his face. “’Cause maybe I sold roofies before. ’Cause maybe I ain’t proud about having to say that to somebody.”