I was tired, used up after the long day, wired with too many voices, too many people on the hustle, too many who bought and sold others or ruined themselves for money that you could make with a Fuller-brush route. There was grit in my clothes; my mouth tasted bad; I could smell my own odor. The inside of the depot reeked of cigar butts and the diesel exhaust that blew through the doors to the boarding foyer.
I took the receiver off a pay phone by the men's room and let it hang by its cord.
A minute later the ticket salesman stared down at my badge that I had slid across the counter.
"You want me to do what?" he said.
"Announce that there's a call at the pay phone for Mr. Bob Brown."
"We usually don't do that."
"Consider it an emergency."
"Yes, sir."
"Wait at least one minute before you do it. Okay, podna?"
"Yes, sir."
I bought a soft drink from a vending machine and looked casually out the glass doors while a bus marked "Miami" was being loaded underneath with luggage. The ticket salesman picked up his microphone, and Bob Brown's name echoed and resonated off the depot walls.
Downtown Bobby Brown's face became quizzical, impish, in front of the girls, then momentarily apologetic as he explained that he'd be right back, that somebody at his shelter probably needed advice about a situation.
I dropped my soda can into a trash bin and followed him to the pay phone. Downtown Bobby was streetwise, and he turned around and looked into my face. But my eyes never registered his glance, and I passed him and stopped in front of the USA Today machine.
He picked up the telephone receiver, leaning on one arm against the wall, and said, "This is Bobby. What's happenin'?"
"The end of your career," I said, and clenched the back of his neck, driving his face into the restroom door. Then I pushed him through the door and flung him inside the room. Blood drained from his nose over his lip; his eyes were wide, yellow-white—like a peeled egg—with shock.
A man at the urinal stood dumbfounded with his fly opened. I held up my badge in front of him.
"This room's in use," I said.
He zipped his trousers and went quickly out the door. I shot the bolt into the jamb.
"What you want? Why you comin' down on me for? You cain't run a shake on somebody, run somebody's face into a do' just because you—"
I pulled my .45 out of the back of my belt and aimed it into the center of his face.
He lifted his hands in front of him, as though he were holding back an invisible presence, and shook his head from side to side, his eyes averted, his mouth twisted like a broken plum.
"Don't do that, man," he said. "I ain't no threat to you. Look, I ain't got a gun. You want to bust me, do it. Come on, I swear it, they ain't no need for that piece, I ain't no trouble."
He was breathing heavily now. Sweat glistened like oil on his temples. He blotted drops of blood off his nose with the backs of his fingers.
I walked closer to him, staring into his eyes, and cocked the hammer. He backed away from me into a stall, his breath rife with a smell like sardines.
"I want the name of the guy you're delivering the girls to," I said.
"Nobody. I ain't bringing nobody to nobody."
I fitted the opening in the barrel to the point of his chin.
"Oh, God," he said, and fell backward onto the commode. The seat was up, and his butt plummeted deep into the bowl.
"You know the guy I'm talking about. He's just like you. He hunts on the game reserve," I said.
His chest was bent forward toward his knees. He looked like a round clothespin that had been screwed into a hole.
"Don't do this to me, man," he said. "I just had an operation. Take me in. I'll he'p y'all out any way I can. I got a good record wit' y'all."
"You've been up the road for child molesting, Bobby. Even cons don't like a short-eyes. Did you have to stay in lockdown with the snitches?"
"It was a statutory. I went down for nonconsent. Check it out, man. No shit, don't point that at me no more. I still got stitches inside my groin. They're gonna tear loose."
"Who's the guy, Bobby?"
He shut his eyes and put his hand over his mouth.
"Just give me his name, and it all ends right here," I said.
He opened his eyes and looked up at me.
"I messed my pants," he said.
"This guy hurts people. Give me his name, Bobby."
"There's a white guy sells dirty pictures or something. He carries a gun. Nobody fucks wit' him. Is that the guy you're talking about?"
"You tell me."
"That's all I know. Look, I don't have nothin' to do wit' dangerous people. I don't hurt nobody. Why you doin' this to me, man?"
I stepped back from him and eased down the hammer on the .45. He put the heels of his hands on the rim of the commode and pushed himself slowly to his feet. Toilet water dripped off the seat of his khakis. I wadded up a handful of paper towels, soaked them under a faucet, and handed them to him.
"Wipe your face," I said.
He kept sniffing, as though he had a cold.
"I cain't go back out there."
"That's right."
"I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man."
"You're never coming back here, Bobby. You're going to treat this bus depot like it's the center of a nuclear test zone."
"I got a crib . . . a place . . . two blocks from here, man. What you—"
"Do you know who—is?" I used the name of a notorious right-wing racist beat cop from the Irish Channel.
His hand stopped mopping at his nose with the towels.
"I got no beef wit' that peckerwood," he said.
"He broke a pimp's trachea with his baton once. That's right, Bobby. The guy strangled to death in his own spit."
"What you talkin' 'bout, man? I ain't said nothing 'bout —I know what you're doin', man, you're—"
"If I catch you in the depot again, if I hear you're scamming runaways and young girls again, I'm going to tell —you've been working his neighborhood, maybe hanging around school grounds in the Channel."
"Who the fuck are you, man? Why you makin' me miserable? I ain't done nothing to you."
I unlocked the bolt on the door.
"Did you ever read the passage in the Bible about what happens to people who corrupt children?" I said.
He looked at me with a stupefied expression on his face.
"Start thinking about millstones or get into another line of work," I said.
I had seventeen dollars in my billfold. I gave twelve to the two runaway girls and the address of an AA street priest who ran a shelter and wouldn't report them.
Chapter 9
Outside, the air tasted like pennies and felt like it had been superheated in an electric oven. Even the wind blew off the pavement like heat rising from a wood stove. I started my truck, unbuttoned my shirt to my waist, and headed toward I-10 and home.
When I passed Lake Pontchartrain, the moon was up and small waves were breaking against the rim of gray sandy beach by the highway. I wanted to stop the truck, strip to my skivvies, wade out to the drop-off, then dive down through the descending layers of temperature until I struck a cold, dark current at the bottom that would wash the last five hours out of my pores.
But Lake Pontchartrain, like the city of New Orleans, was deceptive. Under its slate-green, capping waves, its moon-glazed surfaces, its twenty-four-mile causeway glowing with electric light, waste of every kind lay trapped in the dark sediment, and the level of toxicity was so high that it was now against the law to swim in the lake.
I kept the truck wide open, the plastic ball on the floor stick shaking under my palm, all the way to the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge. Then I rolled down the elevated causeway through the Atchafalaya marsh and the warm night air that smelled of sour mud and hyacinths blooming back in the trees. Out over the pewter-colored bays, the dead cypress trunks were silhouett
ed against burning gas flares and the vast black-green expanse of sawgrass and flooded willow islands. Huge thunderclouds tumbled one upon another like curds of black smoke from an old fire, and networks of lightning were bursting silently all over the southern sky. I thought I could smell raindrops on the wind, as cool and clean and bright as the taste of white alcohol on the tip of the tongue.
Outside our bedroom window the pecan trees were motionless and gray, soaked with humidity, in the false dawn. Then the early red sun broke above the treeline in the marsh like a Lucifer match being scratched against the sky.
Bootsie slept on her side in her nightgown, the sheet molded against her thigh, her face cool, her auburn hair ruffled on the pillow by the window fan. In the early morning her skin always had a glow to it, like the pale pink light inside a rose. I moved her body against mine and kissed her mouth lightly. Without opening her eyes she smiled sleepily, slipped her arms around my back, widened her thighs, and pressed her stomach against me.
Out on the bayou, I thought I heard a bass leap from the water in a wet arc and then reenter the surface, slapping his tail, as he slid deep into the roots of the floating hyacinths.
Bootsie put her legs in mine, her breath warm against my cheek, one hand in the small of my back, her soft rump rolling against the bed; then I felt that heart-twisting moment begin to grow inside me, past any point of control, like a log dam in a canyon resisting a flooded streambed, then cracking and bursting loose in a rush of white water and uprooted boulders.
I lay beside her and held one of her hands and kissed the thin film of perspiration on her shoulders.
She felt my face with her fingers and touched the white patch in my hair as though she were exploring a physical curiosity in me for the first time.
"Ole Streak," she said, and smiled.
"Cops get worse names."
She was quiet a moment, then she said my name with a question mark beside it the way she always did when she was about to broach a difficult subject.
"Yes?" I said.
"Elrod Sykes called while you were in New Orleans. He wanted to apologize for coming to our house drunk."
"Okay."
"He wants to go to an AA meeting with you."
"All right, I'll talk to him about it."
She looked at the revolving shadows the window fan made on the wall.
"He's rented a big boat," she said. "He wants to go fishing out on the salt."
"When?"
"Day after tomorrow."
"What'd you tell him?"
"That I'd have to check with you."
"You don't think we should go?"
"He troubles me, Dave."
"Maybe the guy is psychic. That doesn't mean he's bad news."
"I have a strange feeling about him. Like he's going to do something to us."
"He's a practicing alcoholic, Boots. He's a sick man. How's he going to harm us?"
"I don't know. It's just the way I feel. I can't explain it."
"Do you think he's trying to manipulate me?"
"How do you mean?"
I raised up on one elbow and looked into her face. I tried to smile.
"I have an obligation to help other alcoholics," I said.
"Maybe it looks like Elrod's trying to pull some strings on me, that maybe instead of helping him I'll end up back on the dirty-boogie again."
"Let him find his own help, Dave."
"I think he's harmless."
"I should have listened to you. I shouldn't have invited them into the house."
"It's not good to do this, Boots. You're worrying about a problem that doesn't exist."
"He's too interested in you. There's a reason for it. I know it."
"I'll invite him to go to a meeting. We'll forget about the fishing trip."
"Promise me that, Dave."
"I do."
"You mean it, no going back on it?"
"You've got my word."
She cupped my fingers in her hand and put her head under my chin. In the shadowy light I could see her heart tripping against her breast.
I PARKED IN THE LOT BEHIND THE OFFICE AND WALKED TOWARD the back door. Two uniformed deputies had just taken a black man in handcuffs into the building, and four others were drinking coffee out of foam cups and smoking cigarettes in the shade against the wall. I heard one of them use my name, then a couple of them laugh when I walked by.
I stopped and walked back to them.
"How y'all doing today?" I said.
"What's going on, Dave?" Rufus Arceneaux said. He had been a tech sergeant in the Marine Corps and he still wore his sun-bleached hair in a military crewcut. He took off his shades and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"I'd better get back on it," one deputy said, flipped away his cigarette, and walked toward his cruiser.
"What's the joke about, Rufus?" I said.
"It's nothing I said, Dave. I was just quoting the boss man," Rufus said. His green eyes were full of humor as he looked at the other deputies.
"What did the sheriff have to say?"
"Hey, Dave, fair is fair. Don't lay this off on me," he said.
"Do you want to take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and tell me what you're talking about?"
"Hey, come on, man," he said, chuckling.
"What the fuck, it's no big deal. Tell him," the deputy next to him said.
"The sheriff said if the governor of Lou'sana invited the whole department to dinner, Dave would be the one guy who'd manage to spit in the punch bowl."
Then the three of them were silent, suppressing their grins, their eyes roving around the parking lot.
"Drop by my office sometime today, Rufus," I said. "Anytime before five o'clock. You think you can work it in?"
"It's just a joke, Dave. I'm not the guy who said it, either."
"That's right. So it's nothing personal. I'd just like to go through your jacket with you."
"What for?"
"You've been here eight or nine years, haven't you?"
"That's right."
"Why is it that I always have the feeling you'd like to be an NCO again, that maybe you have some ambitions you're not quite telling us about?"
His lips became a tight, stitched line, and I saw a slit of yellow light in his eye.
"Think about it and I'll talk to you later, Rufus," I said, and went inside the building, into the air-conditioned odor of cigar butts and tobacco spittle, and closed the door behind me.
Ten minutes later the sheriff walked into my office and sat down in front of my desk with his arms propped stiffly on his thighs. In his red-faced concentration he reminded me of a football coach sitting on the edge of a bench.
"Where do you think we should begin?" he said.
"You got me."
"From what I hear about that scene in the restaurant, you tried to tear that fellow apart."
"Those guys think they're in the provinces and they can do what they want. Sometimes you have to turn them around."
"It looks like you got your message across. Balboni had to take the guy to the hospital. You broke his tooth off inside his gums."
"It was a bad morning. I let things get out of control. It won't happen again."
He didn't answer. I could hear him breathing through his nose.
"You want some coffee?" I said.
"No."
I got up and filled my cup from my coffee maker in the corner.
"I've had two phone calls already about your trip to New Orleans last night," he said.
"What about it?"
He took a folded-back notebook out of his shirt pocket and looked at the first page.
"Did you ever hear of a black guy named Robert Brown?" he asked.
"Yep, that's Downtown Bobby Brown."
"He's trying to file charges against you. He says you smashed his face into a men's-room door at the bus depot."
"I see."
"What the hell are you doing, Dave?"
"He's a pimp and a convicte
d child molester. When I found him, he was scamming two girls who couldn't have been over sixteen years old. I wonder if he passed on that information when he filed his complaint."
"I don't give a damn what this guy did. I'm worried about a member of my department who might have confused himself with Wyatt Earp."
"This guy's charges aren't going anywhere and you know it."
"I wish I had your confidence. It looks like you got some people's attention over in Jefferson Parish, too."
"I don't understand."
"The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department seems to think we may have a loose cannon crashing around on our deck."
"What's their problem?"
"You didn't check in with them, you didn't coordinate with anybody, you simply went up and down the Airline Highway on your own, questioning hookers and bartenders about a pimp with no name."
"So?"
He rubbed the cleft in his round chin, then dropped the flat of his hand on his thigh.
"They say you screwed up a surveillance, that you blew a sting operation of some kind," he said.
"How?"
"I don't know."
"It sounds like bullshit to me, sheriff. It sounds like cops on a pad who don't want outsiders walking around on their turf."
"Maybe that's true, Dave, but I'm worried about you. I think you're overextending yourself and you're not hearing me when I talk to you about it."
"Did Twinky Lemoyne call?"
"No. Why should he?"
"I went over to Lafayette and questioned him yesterday afternoon."
He removed his rimless glasses, wiped them with a Kleenex, and put them back on. His eyes came back to meet mine.
"This was after I talked to you about involving people in the investigation who seem to have no central bearing in it?" he asked.
"I'm convinced that somehow Baby Feet was mixed up with Cherry LeBlanc, sheriff. Twinky Lemoyne has business ties to Feet. The way I read it, that makes him fair game."
"I'm really sorry to hear this, Dave."
"An investigation clears as well as implicates people. His black employees seem to think well of him. He didn't call in a complaint about my talking to him, either. Maybe he's an all-right guy."
"You disregarded my instructions, Dave."