But it was too late. He rose up from behind the bait tanks and gently pressed the barrel of a pistol behind my ear.
“No, no, don’t turn around, my friend. That’d get both of us in trouble,” he said.
The light threw both of our shadows on the floor. I could see his extended arm, the pistol rounded by his fist, and an object, a sack perhaps, that seemed to dangle from his other hand.
“The till’s empty. I’ve got maybe ten dollars in my wallet,” I said.
“Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Give me a little credit.” The accent was New Orleans, the voice one I had heard before.
“What do you want, partner?”
“To give you something. You just shouldn’t have come to work so early. . . . No, no, don’t turn around—”
He shifted his position so that his face was well behind my range of vision. But when he did I saw his distorted silvery reflection on the aluminum side of a horizontal lunchmeat and cold-drink cooler. Or rather I saw the reflected metal caps and fillings in his mouth.
Then he stooped, set something on the floor, and nudged me toward the counter.
“Lean on it, Mr. Robicheaux. You probably don’t pack when you come down to your bait shop, but a guy can’t take things for granted,” he said, and moved his free hand down my hips and pockets and over my ankles.
“Look, a black man who works for me is going to be here soon. I don’t want him to walk in on this. How about telling me what’s on your mind and getting out of here?”
“Your ovaries don’t get heated up too easy, do they?” He clicked off the light. “What time’s the colored man get here?”
“Anytime now.”
“That sure would change your luck in a bad way, believe me.” Then he said, “Listen, the man I work for has fixations. Right now you’re one of them. Why? Because you keep bugging the shit out of him. It’s time you lay off, man. This is an important guy. There’s people up in Chicago don’t want him puking blood all over New Orleans because of nervous anxiety. . . . No, no, eyes forward—”
He rubbed the pistol barrel along my jawbone.
“Is that it?” I said.
“No, that’s not it, man. Look, nobody’s got a beef with you, Mr. Robicheaux. Nobody had a beef with that cop who walked into Sonnier’s house, either. That dumb fuck Fluck went out of control. We don’t whack cops, you know that, man. So we’re making it right.
“But it doesn’t have to end here. You’re a bright guy and you can have a lot of good things. Nothing illegal, no strings, just good business. Like maybe a nightclub down in Grand Isle. It’s yours for the asking. All you got to do is call the right Italian restaurant on Esplanade. You know the place I’m talking about.”
Through the slashed screen I could see the false dawn lighting the gray tops of the cypress trees in the marsh. I heard a fish flop loudly in the lily pads.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Good . . . good. Now—”
I felt him shift his weight, felt the dangling object in his hand brush against my pants leg.
“What?” I said.
“I got to figure what to do with you. You keep walking in on me at the wrong time. Nothing personal but you’ve really fucked up my plans twice now.”
“Like you say, so far it’s not personal. . . . Don’t do the wrong thing, partner.”
I could hear him breathing in the dark. The back of my neck and head felt naked, as though the skin had been peeled away from all the nerve endings.
“What’s inside that door, the one with the lock on it?” he said.
“It’s just a storage room.”
“Well, that’s where you’re going.”
From behind, he put his left hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the door. I felt the sacked object bump back and forth below my shoulder blade.
“Unlock it,” he said.
I found the key on my ring and snapped open the long U-shaped shaft on the lock. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with the back of my wrist.
“Come on, get inside, man,” he said.
“I want to give you something to think about when you leave me.”
“You’re gonna give me something to think about? I think you’ve got it turned around.” He started to push me inside.
“No, I don’t. I didn’t see your face, so I can’t identify you. That means you’re home free on this one. But I know who you are, Jack. Don’t go near my house. God help you if you get anywhere near my house.”
“You don’t know who your friends are. Hey, the man in New Orleans sent you a present. You’ll like it. He’s not a bad guy. He’s got his own problems. How’d you like to have boils all over the lining of your stomach? Why don’t you have a little compassion?”
With his knuckles he shoved me into the storage room, then snapped the lock shut. I heard him go out the front door, then moments later a car engine start out on the road.
I braced my back against a stack of beer cases and kicked as hard as I could against the door; but it was sheathed in tin, and the lock and hasp were solid. Then in the dark I tripped over an old twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude engine. I balanced it over my head by the shaft and the housing and hurled it against the slat wall next to the door. Two slats burst from the studs, and I splintered the others loose until I could squeeze through a hole back into the shop. I could hear the diminishing sound of Gates’s car on the dirt road that led to the drawbridge over the bayou. I pulled the chain on the light bulb over the counter and started punching the office number on the phone. Both my hands were shaking.
“Sheriff’s Department—”
“This is Dave. . . . Jack Gates just tore out of my bait shop. . . . He’s armed and dangerous. . . . Call the bridge tender and tell him to lift the bridge. . . . I’ll meet you guys at the—”
Then I stopped.
“What is it, Dave?”
I looked at the weighted clear plastic bag hanging from a nail on a post in the center of my shop.
“I’ll meet you guys at the bayou,” I said.
“What’s wrong, Dave? Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m all right. Get hold of the bridge tender and seal the whole area off. Don’t let this guy get out of town.”
I put the receiver back in the cradle and stared numbly at the severed head inside the plastic bag. The eyes were rolled, the tongue lolled out of the mouth, the nose was mashed against the folds of plastic, and the blond hair was matted with congealed blood; but even in death the face looked like it belonged to a toy man. And to preclude the possibility that I could ever mistake Jewel Fluck for someone else, one of his fingers had been inserted in the thick, purple residue at the bottom of the bag.
I ran to the house, through the front door and into the bedroom, and grabbed the .45 out of the dresser drawer. Bootsie sat up in bed and clicked on the table lamp.
“What is it?” she said.
“Jack Gates was in the shop. I’m going after him. Don’t go in the shop, Boots. Call Batist and tell him not to come to work right now.”
“What is it? What did he—”
“We might have to dust for prints. Let’s just keep people out of there for a while.”
I saw her eyes trying to read my expression.
“Everything’s all right,” I said. “Just don’t go out of the house, Boots, till we get this guy in custody.”
Then I was out the front door and in the truck, banging over the chuckholes in the dirt road that led to the drawbridge over the bayou, the .45 bouncing on the seat beside me, the early red sun edging the marsh with fire.
I could hear sirens in the distance now. I rounded a corner in second, where the bayou made a wide bend, and through the oak trees which lined the road I could see the drawbridge extended high in the air, a quarter of a mile away.
Jack, I think you’re about to be hung out to dry, I thought, and this time Joey the Neck is going down with you. Welcome to Iberia Parish, podjo.
Vanity, vanity, vanity. Jack Gates w
as an old-time Mafia soldier and thriving button man in a state whose system of capital punishment involved as much charity as you would expect in the deep-frying of pork rinds. Jack was not one you would simply drive into a bottleneck and cork inside the glass and put on display like a light bug.
I heard his car before I saw it: the transmission wound up full-bore, the engine roaring through a defective muffler like a garbage truck, gravel exploding like grapeshot under the fenders. Then the Trans Am skidded around the corner in a cloud of yellow dust, low on the springs, streaked and ugly with dried mud, ripping a green gash out of a canebrake.
I looked full into his face through his windshield—into his regret that he didn’t take me out when he had the chance, his rage at the cosmic conspiracy that had made him the long-suffering soldier of an ulcer-ridden paranoid like Joey Gee.
I pulled the truck diagonally across the road, leaped from the seat, and aimed the .45 across the hood, straight at Jack Gates’s face. He stomped on the brakes, and the Trans Am bucked sideways in a chuckhole and fishtailed against the trunk of an oak tree, pinwheeling a hubcap down the center of the road. He stared at me momentarily through the open passenger’s window, a blue revolver balanced in one hand on top of the steering wheel, his metal-capped teeth glinting in the sun’s hot early light, the engine throttling open and subsiding and then throttling open again under the hood.
“Give it up, Jack,” I said. “Gouza’s a psychotic sack of shit. Let him take his own fall for a change.”
The rooster tail of dust from behind the car drifted across his window, and in the second it took for me to lose eye contact with him, he aimed the revolver quickly out the window and popped off two rounds. The first one was low and kicked up dirt three feet in front of the truck, but the second one whanged off the hood and showered leaves out of the tree behind me.
Then he dropped the transmission into reverse and floored the Trans Am back down the road, the tires burning into the dirt, spinning with circles of black smoke. He veered from side to side, clipping bark out of the tree trunks, bursting a taillight, ripping loose his bumper. But evidently he had an eye for detail and had remembered passing a collapsed wire gate and a faint trace of a side road that led through a sugarcane field, because he slammed on his brakes, slid in a half circle, then roared over the downed gate—cedar posts, barbed wire, and all.
I ran up the incline by the far side of the road, through a stand of pine trees, splashed across a coulee, and came out on the edge of the field just as the Trans Am spun around the corner, rippled back a fender on a parked tractor, and mowed through the short cane toward a flat-topped levee that led back to the main parish road.
He hadn’t expected to see me on foot in the field. He started to cut the steering wheel toward me, to drive me back into the trees or the coulee, then he changed his mind, spinning the wheel in the opposite direction with one hand and firing blindly out the window with the other. In the instant that the Trans Am flashed by me, his face looked white and round and small through the window, like a spectator’s in a theater, as though he had suddenly become aware that he was witnessing his own dénouement.
I went to one knee in the wet grass and began firing. I tried to keep the sights below the level of his window jamb to allow for the elevation caused by the recoil, but in reality it was unnecessary. The eight hollow-point rounds, which flattened to the size of quarters with impact, destroyed his automobile. They pocked silvery holes in the doors, spiderwebbed the windows, blew divots of upholstery into the air, exploded a tire off the rim, gashed a geyser of steam out of the radiator, and whipped a single streak of blood across the front windshield.
His foot must have locked down on the accelerator, because the Trans Am was almost airborne when it roared along the lip of an irrigation ditch and sliced through the fence surrounding a Gulf States Power Company substation. The front end crashed right into the transformers, and the tiers of transmission wires and ceramic insulators crumpled in a crackling net on the car’s roof.
But he was still alive. He let the revolver drop outside the window, then started to push open the door with the palms of his hands like a man trying to extricate himself from the rubble of a collapsed building.
“Don’t get out, Jack! Don’t touch the ground!”
He sat back down on the seat, his face bloodless and exhausted, then the sole of one shoe came to rest on the damp earth.
The voltage contorted his face as if he were having an epileptic seizure. His body stiffened, shook, and jerked; spittle flew from his mouth; electricity seemed to leap and dance off his capped teeth. Then his car horn and radio began blaring simultaneously, and a scorched odor, like hair and feces burning in an incinerator, rose from his clothes and head in dirty strings of smoke.
I turned and walked back to the road. The grass was wet against my trouser legs and swarming with insects, the sun hot and yellow above the treeline in the marsh. The drawbridge was down now, and ambulances, firetrucks, and sheriff’s cars were careening toward me, emergency lights blazing, under the long canopy of oaks. My saliva tasted like copper pennies; my right ear was a block of wood. The .45, the receiver locked open on the empty clip, felt like a silly appendage hanging from my hand.
Paramedics, cops, and firemen were rushing past me now. I kept walking down the road, by the bayou’s edge, toward my house. Bream were feeding close into the lily pads, denting the water in circles like raindrops. The cypress roots along the far bank were gnarled and wet among the shadows and ferns, and I could see the delicate prints of egrets in the damp sand. I pulled the clip from the automatic, stuck it in my back pocket, and let the receiver slam back on the empty chamber. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my right ear, but it felt like it was full of warm water that would not drain.
The sheriff came up behind me and gently put his hand inside my arm.
“When they deal the hand, we shut down their game,” he said. “If it comes out any different, we did something wrong. You know where I learned that?”
“It sounds familiar.”
“It should.”
“We could have used Gates to get Joey Gee.”
“Yeah, so we’ll catch up with Fluck and use him. Six of one, half dozen of the other.”
I nodded silently.
“Right?” he said.
“Sure.”
“It’s just a matter of time.”
“Yeah, that’s all it is,” I agreed, and looked away into the distance, where I could almost feel the sun’s heat cooking the tin roof on the bait shop.
CHAPTER 15
I LOCKED UP THE bait shop and let no one in it for the rest of the day. I thought about the events of that morning for a long time. Things had worked out for Joey Gouza in better ways than he could have ever planned. I had been responsible for springing him on the phony assault-and-battery charges filed by Drew Sonnier; Weldon’s long-sought-after film evidence had turned out to be worthless; Eddy Raintree, a superstitious dimwit as well as pervert, who would have probably ratted out Joey Gee for an extra roll of toilet paper in his cell, had had his face blown into a bloody mist by Jewel Fluck while he was locked in my handcuffs; then Gates had gotten to Fluck, and I in turn had killed Gates, the only surviving person who could implicate Joey in the Garrett murder.
I wondered if Joey Gee got up in the morning and said a prayer of thanks that I had wandered into his life.
In the meantime one of his hired sociopaths had terrified my daughter, then he had ordered his chief button man to deliver a human head and severed finger to our family business.
I suspected that today had proved special for Joey, a day in which he took an extra pleasure in chopping up lines with his whores, sipping iced rum drinks with them by the pool, or maybe inviting them out to the clubhouse at the track for lobster-steak dinners and rolls of six-dollar pari-mutuel tickets. I suspected at this moment that Joey Gee did not have a care in the world.
After I wrote up my report at the office, I went back home
and sat in the shade on the dock by myself, staring at the sun’s hot yellow reflection on the bayou, the dragonflies that seemed to hang motionless over the cattails and lily pads. Even in the shade I was sweating heavily inside my clothes. Then I unlocked the bait shop and used the phone inside to call Clete Purcel. The heat was stifling, and the plastic bag that hung from the post in the center of the room had clouded with moisture.
When I had finished talking with Clete, the damp outline of my hand looked like it had been painted on the phone receiver.
I worked in the yard the rest of the afternoon, and when it rained at four o’clock, I sat on the gallery by myself and watched the water drip out of the pecan trees and tick in the dead leaves and ping on top of Tripod’s cage. Then at sunset I went back into the bait shop with a hat box, and five minutes later I was on my way to New Orleans.
“YOU LOOK TIRED,” Bootsie said at the breakfast table the next morning.
“Oh, I’m just a little slow this morning,” I said.
“What time did you come in last night?”
“I really didn’t notice.”
“How’s Clete?”
“About the same.”
“Dave, what are you two doing?”
I kept my eyes on Alafair, who was packing her lunch kit for a church group picnic.
“Be sure to put a piece of cake in there, Alf,” I said.
She turned around and grinned.
“I already did,” she said.
“Do you want to talk about it later?” Bootsie said.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
Ten minutes later Alafair raced out the screen door to catch the church bus. Bootsie watched her leave, then came back into the kitchen.
“I just saw Batist carrying some lumber into the shop. What’s he doing?” she asked.
“A few repairs.”
“Did that man Gates do something in our shop? Is that why you wouldn’t let anybody in it yesterday?”