He was already shaking his head before I could finish.
'I was on a tanker got torpedoed. Right out yonder,' he said, and pointed toward the southern horizon. 'There ain't no way to describe hit for somebody ain't been there. Holding on to the life jacket of a man whose face is burnt off… Boilers blowing apart under the water… Men crawling around on the hull like ants just before she slips to the bottom… Somebody screaming out there inside an island of flaming oil. You don't never want to hear a sound like that, Mr. Robicheaux.'
'Sometimes you have to let things go, partner.'
'They got to make people afraid. That's the plan. Make 'em afraid of the coloreds, the dope addicts, the homeless, the homosexuals, hit don't matter. When they got enough people afraid, that's when they'll move.'
'Who?'
'The Book of Revelation says the Beast will come from the sea. In the Bible the sea means politics.'
'I think you're a decent man. But don't go down after that sub with this junk.'
'Just leave things alone… Don't be messin'… Let the law handle hit… You put me in mind of a woodpecker tapping away on a metal light pole.' He pursed his lips and began to whistle, then opened the door to the truck cab and reached behind the seat. 'Tell me what you make of this?'
'An iron rose.'
'Hit was probably tore off a tomb or a gate. But this morning hit was on my front porch. The stem was stuck through the heart on a valentine card.'
It was heavy in my palm, the iron black with age, the edges of the petals thin and serrated with rust.
'Have you given somebody reason to be upset with you?' I said.
'I been working down in the Desire Project for the last week.'
'You know how to pick them.'
'Jesus didn't spend a lot of time with bankers and the fellows at the Chamber of Commerce.'
I placed the iron rose back in his hand.
'Good luck to you, Reverend. Call me if I can help with anything,' I said.
I left him there, a good man out of sync with the world, the era, even the vocabulary of his countrymen. But I doubted if anyone would ever be able to accuse the Reverend Oswald Flat of mediocrity. His kind ended on crosses, forever the excoriated enemies of the obsequious. To him my words of caution bordered on insult and my most reasoned argument had the viability of a moth attempting to mold and shape a flame.
A narcotics sting sounds interesting. It's not. It usually involves what's called rolling over the most marginal players in the street trade—hypes, hookers, and part-time mules, and any of their demented friends and terrified family members who are unlucky enough to get nailed with them. As a rule, the mules, or couriers, are dumb and inept and spend lifetimes seeking out authority figures in the form of probation officers and social workers. In the normal world most of them couldn't make sandwiches without an instruction manual. They are almost always users themselves, dress as though they're color-blind, speak in slow motion, and wonder why cops can easily pick them out of a crowd at a shopping mall.
They scheme and labor on a daily basis at the bottom of the food chain. When they're busted in a sting, their choices are immediate and severe—they either roll over and give up somebody else, or they go straight to jail, sweat out withdrawal over a toilet bowl in a holding cell, then meditate upon their mistakes while hoeing soybeans for several years at Angola.
Shitsville in the street trade is when you're spiking six balloons a day and suddenly you're in custody and the Man can snap his fingers and turn you into a Judas Iscariot or a trembling bowl of Jell-O.
'You telling me you want to ride the beef, Albert?' the plainclothes says to the frightened black man, who sits on the edge of the motel bed, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his thin forearms lined with the infected tracks and gray scar tissue of his addiction.
'If I give you Bobby, he'll fuck me up, man,' Albert answers. 'Cat's got a blade. He did a guy in Houston with it.'
The plainclothes, a heavy, choleric man in a sweaty, long-sleeve white shirt, reaches out and taps Albert sharply on the cheek with his hand.
'Are you stupid, Albert?' he says. 'You're already fucked up. You're taking Bobby's fall. Bobby has kicked a two-by-four up your ass. Look at me, you stupid shit. Bobby told me your old lady whores for lepers. He laughs at both of you behind your back. He's got you copping his joint and you're too fucking dumb to know it.'
'He told you my old—'
'You want to go back to Angola? You want to get turned out again, made into a galboy, that's what you're telling me, Albert? You like those swinging dicks to turn you out? I heard they tore up your insides last time.'
'You gotta he'p me on this. I cain't go down again, man.'
'Get him out of my sight,' the plainclothes says to another cop.
'You gotta keep my name out of it, okay? The cat tole me to meet him in a pizza joint out in Metairie. He's gonna be there in an hour.'
'You got to make him take you to his stash, Albert. That's the only deal you get. Bobby goes down, you walk. Otherwise, your next high is going to be on nutmeg and coffee. Is it true that stuff can give you a hard-on like a chunk of radiator pipe?'
Albert trembles like a dog trying to pass broken glass; Albert vomits in his lap; Albert makes the plainclothes turn away in disgust.
What's it all worth?
You've got me.
The people at the top usually skate. They buy defense attorneys who used to be prosecutors for the U.S. Justice Department. A million-dollar bond is simply factored into the overhead.
Albert goes to jail, or into a diversion program, or into the graveyard. And nobody, except Albert, particularly cares which one, since Albert doesn't even qualify as a footnote.
In an adjoining room Lucinda and I questioned seven individuals—five of them black, two white—about the vigilante. But these were people who long ago had accepted the sleepy embrace of the succubus or incubus that had insinuated itself into their lives through a tied-off, swollen vein. Their concept of mortality did not extend past the next five minutes of their day. They shot up with one another's syringes, used the public health clinic as a temporary means to knock their venereal diseases into remission, looked upon AIDS as just another way of dying, and daily accepted the knowledge that a vengeful supplier could give them a hot shot that would transform their hearts into kettledrums.
Their beef was with the narcs. Their angst was centered on their own metabolism and the fact that they were about to rat out their friends. Why bargain with a couple of homicide investigators who could offer them nothing? They turned to stone.
Then one of those terrible moments happened, the kind that you dream about, that you hope will never occur in your career, that will always somehow be the misfortune of someone else. Later, you'll attribute it to bad judgment, callousness, inhumanity, bad luck, or simple stupidity, like a safety-minded fool righteously padlocking fire exits, but it remains forever as the moment that left you with the mark of Cain.
The plainclothes who had been interrogating Albert decided to tighten and tamp down the dials a little more and whipped Albert repeatedly across his nappy head with a fedora, yelling at him simultaneously, until another cop stopped it and walked him outside for a cigarette. When they came back in, the plainclothes's face was still flushed and his armpits were.gray with sweat. The thermostat switch was broken, and the room was hot and dry with the electric heat from the wall panels. The plainclothes ripped off his tie, kneaded the thick folds in the back of his neck, then hung his shoulder holster on the back of a wood chair.
Albert was shirtless, his lap soiled with vomit, his face wringing wet. His shoulders trembled, and his teeth clicked in his mouth. He begged to go to the toilet.
The plainclothes walked him into the bathroom, unlocked one cuff, then snipped it on a water pipe and closed the door.
Albert was strung out, delusional, popping loose seam and joint. His body was foul with its own fluids; his pitiful attempt at integrity had been robbed from him; his n
ew identity was that of snitch and street rat. With luck he'd be out of town before his friend Bobby made bail.
But Albert was jail-wise and had been underestimated.
He feverishly lathered his wrist with soap and pulled his thin hand through the cuff like it was bread dough. The plainclothes stared with disbelief as Albert came through the bathroom door and tore the .38 out of the shoulder holster that hung on the chair back, his hand shaking, his eyes blood-flecked and bulging with fear, sweat streaming down his chest.
The plainclothes's face looked like a large, round, white clock that had run out of time.
'Put it down, Albert!' Lucinda shouted, pointing her nickel-plated .357 Magnum straight out with both hands from the doorway.
The plainclothes's chest was heaving; he clutched at his left breast, and his breath rose from his throat like bubbles bursting from an underwater air hose. Lucinda's feet were spread, her midriff winking above her Clorox-faded Levi's. Albert's eyes were half-dollars, his clenched right hand trembling as though it were painted with electricity.
'You don't want to do this, Albert,' she said, fitted her thumb over the knurled spur of the hammer, and cocked it back. The notched grooves and the cylinder locked into place with a sound like a dry stick snapping. 'We can all walk out of this. You'll go downtown. Nobody'll hurt you. I give you my word. Lower the gun, Albert… Wait… Don't do it, don't let those thoughts get in your head… Albert!'
But it was too late. A facsimile of a man, with the soft bones of a child and muscles like jelly, with lint in his navel and a snake feeding at his heart, was imploding inside and looking for his executioner. He gripped the pistol with both hands, squeezed his eyes shut, turned toward Lucinda, and lowered his head between his extended arms as he tightened his finger inside the trigger housing.
She fired only once. The round caught him in the crown of the skull and knocked him back against the wall as though he had been struck by an automobile.
The air was bitter with the smell of gunpowder, dry heat, and a hint of nicotine and copulation in the bed clothing. My ears were ringing from the explosion, then I saw the plainclothes pointing at the red horsetails on the wallpaper while he giggled and wheezed uncontrollably, his left hand clawing at his collar as though it were a garrote about his neck.
Three hours later, after the paperwork, the questions, the suspension from active duty, the surrender of her weapon to Nate Baxter, I drove her home. Or almost home.
'Stop at the corner,' she said.
'What for?'
'I want a drink.'
'Bad day to feed the dragon,' I said.
'Drop me off and I can walk.'
'Lucinda, this is what happens. Tonight, you'll finally fall asleep. You'll have troubling dreams, but not exactly about the shooting. It's like your soul has a headache and can't allow itself to remember something. Then you'll wake up in the morning, and for a few moments it'll all be gone. Then, boom, it'll wash over you like the sun just died in the sky. But each day it gets better, and eventually you come to understand there's no way it could have worked out differently.'
Her eyes had the unnatural sheen of an exhausted person who just bit into some black speed.
'Are you coming in or not?' she said when I pulled to the curb in front of an old wood-front bar with a colonnade on Magazine.
'I guess not.'
'See you around, sport,' she said as she slammed the door and walked into the bar, the tip of a white handkerchief sticking out of the back pocket of her Levi's, her bare ankles chafing against the tops of her dusty tennis shoes.
Bad situation in which to leave a distraught lady, I thought, and followed her inside.
It was dark and cool inside and smelled of the green sawdust on the floor and a caldron of shrimp the black bartender was boiling on a gas stove behind the counter. I used a pay phone by the empty pool table to call home. It was the second time I had called that afternoon and gotten no answer. I left another message.
Lucinda drank a whiskey sour in two swallows. Her eyes widened, then she let out her breath slowly, almost erotically, and ordered another.
'Join me?' she asked.
'No thanks.'
She drank from the glass.
'How many times has it happened to you?' she said.
'Who cares?'
'I don't know if I can go back out there again.'
'When they deal the play and refuse the alternatives, you shut down their game.'
'How many times did you do it? Can't you answer a simple question?' she said.
'Five.'
'God.'
I felt a constriction, like a fish bone, in my throat.
'Who'd you rather have out there, people who do the best they can or a lot of cops cloned from somebody like Nate Baxter or that blimp in the motel room?'
She finished her drink and motioned to the bartender, who refilled her glass from a chrome shaker fogged with moisture. She flattened her hands on the bar top and stared at the tops of her fingers.
'I busted Albert four years ago,' she said. 'For stealing a can of Vienna sausage out of a Winn-Dixie. He lived in the Iberville Project with his grandmother. He cried when I put him in the holding cell. His P.O. sent him up the road.'
'A lot of people wrote that guy's script, but you weren't one of them, Lucinda. Sometimes we just end up being the punctuation mark,' I said, slid the whiskey glass away from the ends of her fingers, and turned her toward the door and the mauve-colored dusk that was gathering outside in the trees.
I drove her to her house and walked with her up on the gallery. The latticework was thick and dark with trumpet vine, and fireflies were lighting in the shadows. The lightbulb above our heads swarmed with bugs in the cool air. She paused with her keys in her hand.
'Do you want me to call later?' I said.
'I'll be all right.'
'Is Zoot here?'
'He plays basketball tonight.'
'It might be good if you ask somebody to come over.'
Her face looked up into mine. Her mouth was red; her breath was soft with the smell of bourbon.
'I'll call when I get back to New Iberia,' I said.
Her face looked wan, empty, her gaze already starting to focus inward on a memory that would hang in the unconscious like a sleeping bat.
'It's going to be all right,' I said, and placed one hand on her shoulder. I could feel the bone through the cloth of her blouse.
But nothing was going to be all right. She lowered her head and exhaled. Then I realized what she was looking at. On the tip of her tennis shoe was a red curlicue of dried blood.
'Why did it have to be a pathetic and frightened little man like Albert?' she said. She swayed slightly on her feet, and her eyes closed, and I saw the tears squeeze out from under the lashes.
I put my arms around her shoulders and patted her softly on the back. Her forehead was pressed against my chest; I could feel the thickness of her hair against my cheek, the thin and fragile quality of her body inside my arms, the brush of her stomach against my loins. On the neighbor's lawn the iron head of a broken garden sprinkler was rearing erratically with the hose's pressure and dripping water into the grass.
I took the door key from her fingers. It felt stiff and hard in my hand.
'I have to go back-home now, Lucinda,' I said. 'Where can we get hold of Zoot?'
Then I turned and saw the car parked at the curb, a two-door white Toyota. The car of Sister Marie Guilbeaux, whose small hands were as white as porcelain and resting patiently on the steering wheel. In the passenger seat sat Bootsie, her face disbelieving, stunned, hurt in a way that no one can mask, as though all the certainties in her life had proved to be as transitory as a photographic negative from one's youth dissolving on top of a hot coal.
* * *
chapter twenty-two
Bootsie looked straight ahead as we followed I-10 past the sand flats and dead cypress on the northern tip of Lake Pontchartrain. My mind was racing. None of the day's eve
nts seemed to have any coherence.
'I left Motley's and Lucinda's extensions on the answering machine, I left the address of the motel. I didn't imagine it,' I said.
'It wasn't there, Dave.'
'Was there a power failure?'
'How would I know if I wasn't home? It wouldn't have affected the recording, anyway.'
'There's something wrong here, Boots.'
'You're right. Sometimes you worry about other people more than you do your own family.'
'That's a rotten thing to say.'
'Goddamn it, he called while you were out of town looking after this Bergeron woman.'
'Buchalter?'
'Who else?'
'How could he? We just changed the number.'
'It was Buchalter. Do you think I could forget that voice? He even talked about what he did to me.'
I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were shiny in the green glow from the dashboard. A semi passed, and the inside of the pickup was loud with the roar of the exhaust.
'What else did he say?'
'That he'd always be with us. Wherever we were. His voice sounded like he had wet sand in his throat. It was obscene.'
'I think he's a hype. He calls when he's loaded.'
'Why does this woman have to drag you into her investigation?'
'It's my investigation, too, Bootsie. But you're right, I shouldn't have gone. We were firing in the well.'
'I just don't understand this commitment you have to others while a psychopath tries to destroy us.'
'Look, something's out of sync here. Don't you see it? How did the nun, what's her name, get involved in this?'
'She dropped by, that's all.'
'Then what happened?'
'Nothing. What do you mean?'
'Come on, think about it. What happened after she came by?'
'She used the phone. To call somebody at the hospital, I think.'
'When did Buchalter call?'
'A little later. I tried to get you at your office. That's when the sheriff told me there'd been a shooting. I couldn't just stay at home and wonder what happened to you and wait for Buchalter to call again. Marie and I took Alafair to Batist's, then drove to New Orleans. What else was I supposed to do?'