Rain Gods by James Lee Burke Page B

shouldn’t it? Nick Dolan had never deliberately hurt anybody.
     
    But when he looked out his window and saw a man with a shaved, waxed head stepping out of a government car, he knew the cosmic plot to make his life miserable was still in full-throttle, turbo-prop overdrive and the Fates were about to special-deliver another fuck-you message to Nick no matter where he went.
     
    The government man must have been at least six-four, his shoulders like concrete inside his white shirt, his forehead knurled, his eyes luminous pools behind octagon-shaped rimless glasses, eyes that Nick could only associate with space aliens.
     
    The government man was already holding up his ID when Nick opened the door. “Isaac Clawson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You Nick Dolan?” he said.
     
    “No, I just look like him and happen to live at this address,” Nick answered.
     
    “I need a few minutes of your time.”
     
    “For what?”
     
    The sun was hot and bright on the St. Augustine grass, the air glistening with humidity. Isaac Clawson touched at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist. In his other hand he clutched a flat, zippered portfolio, the fingers of his huge hand spread on it like banana peels. “You want to do something for your country, sir? Or would you like me to ratchet up the procedure a couple of notches, maybe introduce you to our grand-jury subpoena process?”
     
    “What, I didn’t pay into workman’s comp for the guy who cuts my lawn?”
     
    Clawson’s eyes stayed riveted on Nick’s. The man’s physicality seemed to exude heat and repressed violence, a whiff of testosterone, an astringent tinge of deodorant. The formality and tie and white shirt and big octagon-shaped glasses seemed to Nick a poor disguise for a man who was probably at heart a bone breaker.
     
    “My kids are playing Ping-Pong in the game room. My wife is making lunch. We talk in my office, right?” Nick said.
     
    There was a beat. “That’s fine,” Clawson said.
     
    They walked through a foyer into an attached cottage that served as Nick’s office. Down on the river, Nick could see a chain of floaters on inflated inner tubes headed toward a rapids. Nick sat in a deep leather swivel chair behind his desk, gazing abstractedly at the sets of mail-order books he had bought in order to fill the wall shelves. Clawson sat down in front of him, his elongated torso as straight as a broomstick. Nick could feel the tension in his chest rising into his throat.
     
    “You know Arthur Rooney?” Clawson asked.
     
    “Everybody in New Orleans knew Artie Rooney. He used to run a detective agency. People in the graveyard knew Artie Rooney. That’s ’cause he put them there.”
     
    “Does Rooney use Thai whores?”
     
    “How would I know?”
     
    “Because you’re in the same business.”
     
    “I own a nightclub. I’m a partner in some escort services. If the government doesn’t like that, change the law.”
     
    “I got a short wick with people like you, Mr. Dolan,” Clawson said, unzipping the portfolio. “Take a look at these. They really don’t do justice to the subject, though. You can’t put the smell of decomposition in a photograph.”
     
    “I don’t want to look at them.”
     
    “Yeah, you do,” Clawson said, rising from his chair, placing eight eight-by-ten black-and-white blowups in two rows across Nick’s desktop. “The shooter or shooters used forty-five-caliber ammunition. This girl here looks like she’s about fifteen. Check out the girl who caught one in the mouth. How old are your daughters?”
     
    “This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
     
    “Maybe. Or maybe it does. But you’re a pimp, Mr. Dolan, just like Arthur Rooney. You sell disease, and you promote drug addiction and pornography. You’re a parasite that should be scrubbed off the planet with steel wool.”
     
    “You can’t talk to me like that.”
     
    “The hell I can’t.”
     
    Nick wiped the photos off his desk onto the floor. “Get out. Take your pictures with