The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux 1)

"You're a good brother," he said. "But you worry too much about me. Remember, it was always me that got us out of trouble."

"That's because you always got us into it."

"I'm not the one that almost got drowned in a bathtub last night. You threw a bucket of shit into a cage full of hyenas, bro."

"How'd you hear about last night?"

"Forget about how I hear things or what I'm doing with Didi Gee. You worry about your own butt for a change, or those greasers are going to hang it out to dry."

"What do you think this elephant stuff is?"

"How the hell should I know?"

"You ever hear of a guy named Fitzpatrick?"

"No. What about him?"

"Nothing. Thanks for the lunch. By the way, Johnny Massina told me about you smashing up Didi's rubber machines. The old man would have enjoyed that one."

"Like they say, you hear a lot of bullshit in the street, Dave."

I sat out on the deck of my houseboat that evening in the green-yellow twilight with a glass of iced tea and mint leaves, and disassembled my three pistols—my departmental .38 revolver, a hideaway Beretta .25, and a U.S. Army-issue .45 automatic. As I reamed out the barrel of the .45 with a bore brush, I thought about some of the mythology that Southern boys of my generation had grown up with. And like all myth, it was a more or less accurate metaphorical reflection of what was actually going on inside us, namely our dark fascination with man's iniquity. In moments like these I suspected that John Calvin was much more the inventor of our Southern homeland than Sir Walter Scott.

Southern Myths to Contemplate While Cleaning One's Guns—Substitute Other Biographical Names or Geographical Designations to Suit the Particular State in the Old Confederacy in Which You Grew Up:

1. A town in east Texas used to have a sign on the main street that read, "Nigger, don't let the sun go down on your head in this county."

2. Johnny Cash did time in Folsom Prison.

3. Warren Harding was part Negro.

4. Spanish fly and Coca-Cola will turn a girl into an instant drive-in-movie nymphomaniac.

5. The crushed hull of a Nazi submarine, depth-charged off Grand Island in 1942, still drifts up and down the continental shelf. At a certain spot on a calm n

ight, shrimpers out of Morgan City can hear the cries of drowning men in the fog.

6. A Negro rapist was lynched outside of Lafayette and his body put inside a red wooden box and nailed up in a pecan tree as a warning to others. The desiccated wood, the strips of rag, the rat's nest of bones hang there to this day.

7. The .45 automatic was designed as a result of a Filipino insurrection. The insurrectionists would bind up their genitals with leather thongs, which would send them into a maniacal agony that would allow them to charge through the American wire while the bullets from our Springfields and .30-40 Kraigs passed through their bodies with no more effect than hot needles. The .45, however, blew holes in people the size of croquet balls.

There is usually a vague element of truth in all mythology, and the basic objective truth about the .45 automatic is simply that it is an absolutely murderous weapon. I had bought mine in Saigon's Bring-Cash Alley, out by the airport. I kept it loaded with steel-jacketed ammunition that could blow up a car engine, reduce a cinder-block wall to rubble, or, at rapid fire, shred an armored vest off someone's chest.

The darkness of my own meditation disturbed me. My years of drinking had taught me not to trust my unconscious, because it planned things for me in a cunning fashion that was usually a disaster for me, or for the people around me, or for all of us. But by this time I also knew that I was involved with players who were far more intelligent, brutal, and politically connected than the kind of psychotics and losers I usually dealt with.

If I had any doubts about my last conclusion, they were dispelled when a gray, U. S. government motor-pool car stopped on the dock and a redheaded, freckle-faced man in a seersucker suit who could have been anywhere from fifteen to thirty years old walked down the gangplank onto my houseboat.

He flipped open his identification and smiled.

"Sam Fitzpatrick, U. S. Treasury," he said. "You expecting a war or something?"

* * *

FOUR

"It doesn't look like you believe me," he said. "Do you think I boosted the ID and a government car, too?" He wouldn't stop grinning.

"No, I believe you. It's just that you look like you might have escaped from 'The Howdy Doody Show.'"