The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux 1)

"We'll see."

"That touch about the IRS was beautiful."

"You want to tell me something, Clete?"

"Am I supposed to go to confession or something?"

"I don't like to see a guy like Segura trying to jerk my partner around."

"It was three years ago. My wife and I had broke up, and I'd been on the shelf for six weeks."

"You let the girl walk?"

"She never got busted. She was a snitch. I liked her."

"That's why you put your fist through that guy's stomach?"

"All right, so I don't feel good about it. But I swear to you, Dave, I never got any free action because of my badge, and I never went on the pad." He looked across at me with his poached, scarred face.

"So I believe you."

"So buy me a beignet and a coffee at the Café du Monde."

An afternoon thundershower was building out over Lake Pontchartrain. The sky on the distant horizon had turned green, and waves were scudding all across the lake now. The few sailboats still out were drenched with spray and foam as they pounded into the wind and headed for their docks. It started to rain in large, flat drops when we turned onto the Expressway, then suddenly it poured down on Clete's car in a roar of tackhammers.

The city was soaked and dripping when I went to pick up the social worker, whose name was Annie Ballard, by Audubon Park. The streetlamps lighted the misty trees along the esplanade on St. Charles; the burnished streetcar tracks and the old green streetcar glistened dully in the wet light, and the smoky neon signs, the bright, rain-streaked windows of the restaurants and the drugstore on the corner were like part of a nocturnal painting out of the 1940s. This part of New Orleans never seemed to change, and somehow its confirmation of yesterday on a rainy summer night always dissipated my own fears about time and mortality. And it was this reverie that made me careless, let me ignore the car that parked behind me, and let me walk up her sidewalk with the vain presumption that only people like Julio Segura had things happen to them out of sequence.

* * *

THREE

She lived in an old brick rowhouse that was connected to several others by a common porch and a shrub-filled front yard. I heard footsteps behind me, turned and glanced at three men who were joking about something and carrying a wine bottle wrapped in a paper sack, but I paid no att

ention to them after they turned toward a lighted house where a party was going on.

She smiled when she opened the door. She wore a blue dress with transparent shoulders, and her blond curls stuck out from under a wide straw hat. She was very pretty with the light behind her, and I didn't care whether we made it to the track or not. Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder, saw her expression break apart, heard the feet on the porch behind me, this time fast and running. Just as I turned, one of the three men shoved me hard into Annie Ballard's living room and aimed a Browning automatic pistol straight into my face.

"Don't try to pull it, biscuit-eater, unless you want your brains running out your nose," he said, and reached inside my sports coat and pulled my .38 from my waist holster.

He was tall and angular, his hair mowed into his scalp like a peeled onion, his stomach as flat as a shingle under the big metal buckle on his blue jeans. The accent was Deep South, genuine peckerwood, and on his right arm was a tattoo of a grinning skull in a green beret with crossed bayonets under the jaw and the inscription kill them all… let god sort them out.

The second man was short and olive-skinned, with elongated Semitic eyes and a hawk nose. He went quickly from room to room, like a ferret. But it was the third man who was obviously in charge. His hands rested comfortably in his raincoat pockets; his face looked impassively around the room as though he were standing at a bus stop. He was in his early fifties, with a paunch, a round Irish chin, a small mouth with down-turned corners, and cheeks that were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. The vaguely dissolute edges of his face, with his tangled eyebrows and untrimmed gray hair, gave you the impression of a jaded Kiwanian.

"There's nobody else," the olive-skinned man said. He spoke with a Middle Eastern accent.

"Do you already know I'm a police officer?" I said quietly.

"We know a lot about you, Lieutenant. You've really spread your name around recently," the man in the raincoat said.

"I thought Segura was smarter than this," I said.

"I don't know. I've never met the man. But you're not smart at all." He took a revolver casually out of his raincoat pocket and nodded to the man with the tattoo, who went into the bathroom, dropped my .38 into the toilet bowl, and started the water in the bathtub. Annie's eyes were wide under her hat, and she was breathing rapidly through her mouth.

"I have friends coming over," she said.

"That's why you got your hat on," the man with the tattoo said, smiling from the bathroom door. His hair was cut so close to his scalp that the light made his head glow with an aura. He held a large roll of adhesive tape in his hand.

"I'm going to walk out my door," she said. Her face was flushed and spotted as though she had a fever, and her voice was filled with strain. "I have friends next door and out in the yard and over on the next block and they can hear everything through these walls and you're not going to do anything to us—"