DR07 - Dixie City Jam

  'It's all right,' I said. 'We'll get you to a hospital. I'll have somebody stay with you. You hear me? Buchalter's gone. Everything's going to be okay.'

  She turned her face up to me. Her left eyeball jittered, as though a nerve in it were impaired. 'Where's Clete?' she said.

  'I don't know. But we'll find him.'

  'The man who beat me, he told me about the things he was going to do to Clete. He has pictures of what he's done to people.'

  She leaned forward with her face in her hands, sobbing. There were white places the size of nickels with raw cuts inside them all over her scalp.

  'I'll be right back,' I said.

  The man in cuffs on the floor was trembling.

  'I took her to the bathroom, I give her food when I wasn't supposed to,' he said.

  'Where's your phone?'

  'On the desk,' he said, exhaling the words like a man who knows the fury and intensity of the world is about to move past him.

  I called 911 and asked for an ambulance and a sheriffs car.

  'Here's how it shakes out, partner,' I said to the man on the floor. 'You're probably going down as an accessory to assault and battery, kidnapping, and anything else the locals can dream up. But no matter how you cut it, it's a serious bounce. You want to tell me where he is, I'll see what I can do for you later.'

  'He knows how to get to people. Anywhere. Lock-down, isolation, Witness Protection Program. There's white guys even paid the Black Guerrillas to protect them. It didn't work.'

  'Last chance.'

  'Him and Marie, this morning, they got excited about something in a newspaper. Then they took off.'

  'Where's the newspaper?'

  'I burned it in the trash barrel. With her hair I swept up. I was trying to keep the place clean, and I go down on a kidnapping beef. You tell me that's fair, man.'

  I heard sirens in the distance, outside the window, a black man was looking up the street.

  'I don't want to be rough on you, but I'd reconsider my attitude about cooperating,' I said to the man in handcuffs. 'When we nail Buchalter, he's going to find out we talked to you first. Who do you think he's going to blame his problems on?'

  His face turned ashen.

  I rode in the ambulance with Martina to the hospital, then used the phone at the Harrison County Sheriff's Department to call home and Clete's office. I recorded a long message on his machine, assured him Martina was going to be all right, and left him the number of the hospital.

  But I would soon discover that I wasn't thinking clearly. I called Ben Motley.

  'It's Saturday afternoon. Believe it or not, Robicheaux, I'd like forty-eight hours without thinking about pus bags.'

  'Buchalter doesn't take weekends off,' I said.

  'You got the woman back. You traced Buchalter to his nest. Count your blessings. Ease up.'

  'Now's the time to staple him to the wall, Ben. Call Fart, Barf, and Itch in New Orleans for me.'

  'What else?'

  'Nothing.' Then I happened to glance at a deputy across the room who was eating a sandwich with his feet on the desk and reading the sports page in the newspaper.

  'Wait a minute. Do you have this morning's Times-Picayune?'

  'What do you want?'

  'Look in the personals for me.'

  'That's what they do when they're bored over in Vice.'

  'Come on, Ben.'

  He put down the phone, then I heard newspaper pages rattling.

  'Do you see anything in there that looks peculiar?' I said.

  'That's like asking if there's any washroom graffiti that shouldn't be on a Hallmark card,' he said. 'Hold on… Here's one that's all numbers. No message, just numbers.'

  'Read them.' I could hear my own breath in the phone. I wrote the numbers down as he read them off. 'Those are the coordinates for that Nazi sub, Ben. You check with The Times-Picayune, you'll find Clete ran that ad.'

  'I don't get it.'

  'Buchalter kidnapped Martina and forced Clete to find out where I'd seen the sub. I gave him the coordinates. But it took a couple of days for the ad to come out. Look, we need to get a boat or a chopper out there.'

  'Call your own department.'

  'We don't have anything available.'

  'You think I can snap my fingers on Saturday afternoon and come up with a boat or a helicopter? We don't have jurisdiction out on the salt, anyway.'

  'You don't understand. I left a message on Clete's machine. I told him Martina's all right. As soon as he retrieves the message, you know where he's headed.'

  'So let him light up the fun house. It's what Purcel does best.'

  'He might lose, too. I need a boat.'

  'You won't get it from me this weekend.'

  'Motley—'

  'It's Motley now? Why don't you call Nate Baxter? See what kind of help you get.'

  I started back home, It was getting dark now, and the palm trees along the highway were beating in the wind, the rain spinning in my headlights. It would take me at least four and a half hours to reach New Iberia, then another seven, maybe more, with the bad weather, to get my boat down Bayou Teche and into the gulf south of Grand Isle.

  I pulled into a filling station by the Pearl River and called Lucinda Bergeron's house. The gum trees around the phone booth were green and brightly lit by the filling station's signs, and the leaves were ripping like paper in the wind.

  'Zoot?'

  'Hey, Mr. Dave, what's happenin'?'

  'Where's your mom?'

  'She ain't here. Something wrong?'

  'I've got to get ahold of her. I need a boat.'

  'She went to the grocery. What kind of boat you looking for?'

  'A fast one,' I said.

  'You ax the right man.'

  'Oh?'

  'I tole you at your house. But you wasn't listening real good, remember? I worked on all kinds of boats.'

  'Who owns this boat, Zoot?'

  'A man who don't mind lending it, I promise. When you coming?'

  An hour and a half later I parked the truck at a boatyard way out in Jefferson Parish. It had quit raining; and the sky was dark, and water was dripping off the tin shed where Zoot waited in a cabin cruiser with the interior lights on. I took my Japanese field glasses from the glove compartment, then unlocked the iron box welded to the bed of my pickup and removed my old army field jacket and the AR-15 and my Remington twelve-gauge with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump that I had wrapped in a canvas duffel bag. I dropped a box of .223 rounds and a box of double-ought buckshot into the bag and pulled the drawstring. When I walked out onto the dock under the shed I saw that Zoot wasn't alone.

  'Hello, Lucinda,' I said, stepping down into the boat.

  She was dressed in jeans, a purple sweater, and a nylon NOPD windbreaker. Zoot fixed his attention on the clearing sky, tapping his palms on the wheel, whistling quietly.

  'What would you like to hear from me first?' she said.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'You call my house and ask a seventeen-year-old to provide a boat for you?' she said.

  'Believe what you want, Lucinda. I'm not up to an argument tonight.'

  'You were willing to bring a minor and civilian into a potentially dangerous situation? With no consultation with anyone else?'

  'I couldn't get a boat from Motley. I don't have time to go back to New Iberia. You think it's right Purcel may be out there by himself?'

  'I can't quite tell you how angry I am,' she said.

  'Then why'd you let him come?'

  She didn't answer. I lowered my voice. 'Maybe nobody's out there. Maybe I should have waited for you to come home. Maybe I should have gone back to New Iberia,' I said. 'I did what I thought was best.'

  I waited. Her arms were folded across her chest, her hands cupped on her elbows. I looked at Zoot, and he turned over the engines and backed us out of the slip. The wind was cool and damp and smelled of salt and dead gars that had been hit by boat propellers. Lights flickered across the c
louds in the south.

  We headed down Bayou St. Denis. It was a beautiful boat, custom-built with teakwood and mahogany panels in the cabin, brightwork that had the soft glow of butter, wide beds down below, sonar, a pump toilet, a small galley, and twin two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude outboard engines that could hit fifty knots. When we entered Barataria Bay, Zoot tried to open her up.

  'The chop's too heavy. You're going to beat us to death, partner,' I said.

  The glass was beaded with the spray off the bow. The moon had broken from behind the clouds, and our wake glistened behind us like a long brown and silver trough. Zoot wore a black knitted cap rolled up on top of his head and chewed on a matchstick. When he eased back on the throttle, I saw the two ignition wires wrapped together and swinging loose at the bottom of the instrument panel.

  'What kind of engineering do we have here, Zoot?' I said, raising my finger toward the wires.

  'The man out of town right now. He forgot to leave the key where it's always at,' he said.

  'I see.'

  'That's a fact. He lets me take it all the time. I'll introduce y'all sometime.'

  'That's very kind of you.'

  I looked down below at Lucinda, who was sitting on a cushioned storage locker with her legs crossed, staring straight ahead. Her nickel-plated .357 revolver glinted in her belt holster. I realized that I had read her wrong.

  I walked down the steps and sat on a bunk across from her. I could feel the steady vibration of the bow coursing through the chop.

  'You're over the black dude in the motel?' I said.

  Her mouth parted slightly.

  'It's like anything else. It passes,' I said.

  The skin wrinked at the corner of her left eye.

  'The first time a guy dealt the play on me, I thought I'd wake up with his face in front of me every day of my life,' I said. 'Then one day it was gone. Poof. Three years later I put another guy down.'

  'Why are you doing this?' she said.

  'Because this boat's a little warm.'

  'It's a little…'

  'Right. Warm. Not hot exactly. Terms like borrowed and lend-lease come to mind,' I said, and leaned forward on my hands. 'You've got your own agenda tonight, Lucinda.'

  'He tortured my son.'

  'You know when a good cop does it by the numbers? The day he thinks he shouldn't do it by the numbers.'

  'I get this from the friend and advocate of Clete Purcel? Wonderful.'

  'Don't let Buchalter remake you in his image.'

  She looked into my face for a long time.

  'Your advice is always good, Dave,' she said. 'But it's meant for others. It has no application for yourself, does it?'

  We stared silently at each other as the hull of the boat veered toward the cut at Grand Terre.

  It was a strange, cold dawn. With first light the sky looked streaked with india ink, then the wind dropped suddenly and the sun came up red and molten on the gulf's watery rim. The tide was coming in, rose-dimmed, heavy with the fecund smell of schooled-up trout, flecked with foam toward the shore, the air loud with the cry of gulls that glided and dipped over our wake. I watched the gray-green landmass of Louisiana fall away behind us,

  Zoot stood erect in front of the wheel, his hooded workout jersey zipped up to his chin, his long hands resting lightly on the spokes. He had cranked open the glass, and the skin of his face looked taut and bright with cold.

  'How you doing, Skipper?' I said.

  'Not bad. She asleep?'

  'Yes.'

  'You know what she said about you the other day?'

  'I wouldn't want to guess.'

  'She say, "He's probably crazy but I wouldn't mind if I'd met him before he was married."'

  'You'd better not be giving out your mama's secrets,' I said.

  'Why you think she tell it to me?' he said.

  Through my field glasses I could see the black, angular silhouettes of two abandoned drilling platforms against the sun and a freighter with rusty scuppers and a Panamanian flag to the far west. Zoot cut back on the throttle, and we rocked forward on our own wake.

  'Look at the sonar, Mr. Dave,' he said. 'We're in about forty feet now. But see where the line drops? That's a trench. I been over it before. It runs maybe two miles, unless it drifts over with sand sometimes.'

  'You're pretty good at this.'

  'I ain't even gonna say nothing. You and her just alike. Got one idea about everything, so every day you always surprised about something.'

  'I think you're probably right.'

  'Probably?' He shook his head.

  But I wasn't listening now. Just off the port bow, beyond one of the drilling platforms, I saw the low, flat outline of a salvage vessel, one that was outfitted with side booms, dredges, and a silt vacuum that curved over the gunwale like the body of an enormous snake. I sharpened the image through the field glasses and saw that the ship was anchored bow and stern and was tilted slightly to starboard, as though it were straining against a great weight.

  Then I saw something move on the drilling platform closest to us. I stepped outside the cabin and refocused the field glasses. The tide was washing through the pilings at the base of the platform, and upside-down in the swell, knocking against the steel girders, was the red and white hull of a capsized boat. I moved the glasses up a ladder to the rig itself and held them on a powerful, sunburned, bare-chested man whose Marine Corps utilities hung just below his navel.

  'What is it?' Lucinda said behind me. The side of her face was printed with lines from her sleep.

  I handed the glasses to her.

  'Take a look at that first rig,' I said.

  She balanced herself against the sway of the deck and peered through the glasses.

  'It's Clete Purcel,' she said. 'He looks half frozen.'

  'With a sunk boat,' I said. 'Clete's no sailor, either. Which means he probably went out with somebody who didn't make it to that ladder.'

  'Who?'

  'I don't like to think about it.'

  'Who?'

  'The elderly preacher comes to mind.' I went back inside the cabin. 'Zoot, take us on into the rig. But try to keep it between us and that salvage ship so whoever's onboard doesn't get a good look at us.'

  'It's Buchalter and them Nazis?' he said. I saw his long, ebony hands tighten involuntarily on the wheel.

  'Maybe it's just an ordinary salvage group trying to raise some drilling equipment.'

  'There's some oil field junk down out here, but not yonder, Mr. Dave.'

  'Okay, podna.'

  'I know what you got in that canvas bag. If the time come, is one of them for me?'

  'You have any experience with firearms?'

  'A lot.'

  'With what kind?'

  'The kind you shoot things wit'… Me and my cousin, we gone under the Huey Long Bridge and shot bottles all over the place.'

  'Look, Zoot, we want the people on that salvage boat to think we're a fishing party. Can you set the outriggers and put some trolling rods in the sockets while I take the wheel?'

  'Sure,' he said, but his eyes were still on the canvas bag.

  'Just keep your hood tied on your head, too, in case they put binoculars on us.'

  'You ain't gonna let me have one of them guns?'

  'If that's Buchalter out there, we'll call the Coast Guard.'

  'Then why you bring all them guns?'

  I'd never guess you were Lucinda's son, I thought to myself.

  I kept the bow pointed in a straight line at the rig and the salvage ship. The sun had broken through a bank of lavender and black clouds, and you could see flying fish and the stringlike tentacles and swollen pink air sacs of Portuguese man-o'-wars in the swell. The day should have warmed, but the wind had risen again and the tidal current looked green and cold flowing under the oil platform, rolling the capsized boat against the pilings and the steel ladder.

  To the south there was a frothy white line along the horizon where the waves were starting to cap.
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  Zoot worked his way forward onto the bow, and I cut the gas and let the cabin cruiser drift into the ladder that extended out of the water, upward to the platform where Clete Purcel was leaning over the rail, staring down at us, the sandy curls of hair on his shoulders and chest blowing dryly in the wind.

  He came down the ladder fast, his face pointed downward, his love handles flexing, his huge buttocks working as he clanged onto each rung. When he dropped onto the bow, he kept his face pointed in the opposite direction from the salvage ship and made his way aft along the side of the cabin.

  His teeth were chattering when he came through the hatchway.

  'Streak, I love you,' he said. 'I knew my old podjo wouldn't let me down. I ain't kidding you, I was turning to an ice cube up there. I tried to wrap myself up in a piece of canvas, but it blew away.'

  'What happened?'

  'It's Buchalter. We found him about three this morning,' he said, pulling a blanket around his shoulders.

  'We came up on him from the south. I thought we had him. There's a metal stairs on his port side. We were going to drift up to it, then take them from behind while all that machinery was roaring. Except we hit a log and punched a hole in the hull.'

  He sat on top of a locker filled with life vests and scuba gear and worked the stopper from a bottle of Cutty Sark he had taken from the liquor cabinet. The scar through his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose looked like a stitched strip of pink rubber.

  'Who's we, Clete?'

  'Brother Oswald.' His voice changed when he said the words. His eyes looked away from me, then at Lucinda and Zoot. Then he looked at the deck. He lifted the bottle to his mouth.

  'Why didn't you wait?' I said.

  'For what? The guy to blow the country?'

  'You could have waited,' I said.

  'Get real, Streak. You nail this guy under a black flag or he'll live to piss on your grave.'

  'What's a black flag?' Zoot said.

  Clete started to raise the Scotch again, then the color drained out of his face and he went through the hatchway and threw up over the stern. He came back inside, wiping his mouth with a towel.