The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux 1)

"I get lots of compliments like that. You New Orleans people are full of fun. I hear you've been taking a little heat for me."

"You tell me."

"Are you going to offer me some iced tea?"

"You want some?"

"Not here. You're too hot, Lieutenant. In fact, almost on fire. We need to get you back on the sidelines somehow. I'm afraid it's not going to be easy. The other team is unteachable in some ways."

"What are you talking about?"

"They have fixations. Something's wrong with their operation and they target some schmoe that's wandered into the middle of it. It usually doesn't do them any good, but they think it does."

"I'm the schmoe?"

"No, you're a bright guy with stainless steel balls, evidently. But we don't want to see you a casualty. Let's take a ride."

"I'm taking a lady to the track tonight."

"Another time."

"No, not another time. And let's stop this business of Uncle Sam talking in his omniscience to the uninformed local flatfoot. If the shit's burning on the stove, I suspect it's yours and it's because you federal boys have screwed things up again."

He stopped grinning. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then wet his lips. He suddenly seemed older.

"You have to have faith in what I tell you, Lieutenant," he said. "You're a good man, you've got courage, you've never been on a pad, you go to Mass on Sundays, you treat the street people decently, and you put away a lot of the bad guys. We know these things about you because we don't want you hurt. But believe me, it's dumb for the two of us to be out here in the open talking to each other."

"Who's this 'we' you're talking about?"

"Uh, actually the 'we' is more or less just me, at least right now. Come on, I'll explain it. Trust me. Somebody who looks like Howdy Doody has got to be a straight shooter. Besides, I'll buy you a poor-boy sandwich on my expense account."

So this was the state of the art down at the Federal Building, I thought. We didn't see much of the federal boys, primarily because they operated on their own as a rule, and even though they said otherwise, they looked down upon us as inept and uneducated. On the other hand, we didn't have much liking for them, either. Any number of television serials portray the feds as manicured, dapper altruists dressed in Botany 500 suits, who dispassionately hunt down the oily representatives of the Mafia and weld the cell door shut on them. The reality is otherwise. As Didi Gee would probably point out, syndicate gangsters have little fear of any police agency or court system. They own judges, cops, and prosecutors, and they can always get to a witness or a juror.

The Treasury Department is another matter. Law enforcement people everywhere, as well as criminals, consider Treasury agents incorruptible. Within the federal government they are to law enforcement what Smokey the Bear and the U. S. Forest Service are to environmental integrity. Even Joe Valachi, the Brooklyn mob's celebrity snitch, had nothing but admiration for the T-men.

Fitzpatrick drove us across town to a Latin American restaurant on Louisiana Avenue. We sat at an outdoor table in the small courtyard under the oak and willow trees. There were electric lights in the trees and we could see the traffic on the avenue through the scrolled iron gate. The banana trees along the stone wall rattled in the wind. He ordered shrimp and oyster poor-boy sandwiches for us and poured himself a glass of Jax while I sipped my iced tea.

"You don't drink, do you?" he said.

"Not anymore."

"Heavy sauce problem?"

"You not only look like a kid, you're as subtle as a shithouse, aren't you?" I said.

"Why do you think I brought us to this restaurant?"

"I don't know."

"Almost everybody working here is a product of our fun-in-the-sun policies south of the border. Some of them are legals, some bought their papers from coyotes."

"That's only true of about five thousand restaurants in Orleans and Jefferson parishes."

"You see the owner over by the cash register? If his face looks out of round, it's because Somoza's national guardsmen broke all the bones in it."

He waited, but I didn't say anything.

"The man running the bar is an interesting guy too," he said. "He's from a little village in Guatemala. One day the army came to the village and without provocation killed sixteen Indians and an American priest from Oklahoma named Father Stan Rother. For kicks they put the bodies of the Indians in a U.S. Army helicopter and threw them out at high altitudes."