The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux 1)

Jet airliners lifted off the runway across the road and roared over the top of the bar into the lavender sky. The building was constructed of cinder blocks that had been painted purple; the door was fingernail-polish red; and the interior smelled of cigarette smoke, refrigerated air, and bathroom antiseptic. Behind the bar was a burlesque runway where a stand-up comic with a face like crinkled parchment went through a lifeless and boring routine that no one at the tables or bar listened to. In the middle of his routine, some bikers in the corner plugged in the jukebox and turned it on full tilt.

The bartender was a big man, about thirty, with a huge granite head that was bald and shining on top with oiled ducktails combed back on the sides. He wore black trousers, a white shirt, and a black velvet vest like a professional bartender, but his thick arms and neck and massive chest and the wooden mallet on a shelf behind him indicated something about his other potential. I asked him about Gail Lopez.

"You don't recognize me, Lieutenant?" he asked, and smiled.

I squinted at him in the smoke and against the glare of lights on the burlesque stage.

"Five or six years ago, right?" I said. "Something about driving a Picayune delivery truck over a Teamster steward."

"Actually, it's been eight years and I never really got to tell my side of that story, Lieutenant. But it don't matter now. I'm always walking toward something rather than away from something. You know what I mean? Let me ask a little favor of you, though. My PO don't need to know about this situation, does he? He's a good guy and kind of protective and he don't want me working in no shitholes, but some of the guys down at the union hall hold a grudge and don't want to give me my card back and there ain't many places I can make six bucks an hour and tips. Hell, it's degrading to work in a dump like this. I got to pick up cigarette butts from the urinals with my hands and scrub out toilets and mop up the vomit every time one of these fuckers pukes. What do you want to drink? It's on me."

"Uh, nothing right now. What about Gail Lopez?"

"Well, all these broads get a lot of traffic, you know what I mean? It's a lowlife clientele here, Lieutenant. Greasers, hitters, bull dykes, jerks that like to get in my face till they're way out on the edge, you know what I mean? There's a guy comes in here every night and melts Demerol down in a glass of Wild Turkey, then when I say 'Nice weather we're having' or 'Hard rain we had this afternoon,' he says 'No duh.' I ask him if he wants another drink and he says 'No duh.' 'You want some more peanuts?' 'No duh.' 'You're in the wrong place to be a wise-ass.' 'No duh.'"

"No, Charlie, I'm talking about a guy who looks like a human freckle."

"I haven't seen him. Look around you, Lieutenant. A guy like that in here would stand out like shit in an ice cream factory. Anyway, ask her. She'll be here in an hour."

I sat through two floor shows that consisted of a half-dozen naked girls dancing to a three-piece band whose instruments could have been tuned to a snare drum. The girls wore thin gold chains around their ankles and stomachs, and their faces seemed lit with some inner narcissistic pleasure that had nothing to do with the world outside them. They undulated and raised their arms above their heads as though they were moving in water, and occasionally their eyes would meet and light with some secret recognition.

During all this the bartender washed glasses indifferently in a tin sink while his cigarette ashes fell into the dishwater. Someone in back caught his attention and he left the bar a few minutes, then returned with an uncomfortable look on his face.

"Lieutenant, I got an embarrassing situation here," he said. "The manager, Mr. Rizzo, is very happy you're here and he don't want you to pay for anything. But a guy that sits at the bar drinking 7-Up with a piece showing under his coat is kind of like—"

"Anthrax?" I said.

"Well, if you notice, there's nobody else at the bar, Lieutenant, which is not meant as a reflection on you, but on the degenerate pus-bags that drink in here. Even the guy that gets off saying 'No duh' to me is sitting way in back tonight. You got to understand the degenerate mind. See, they all got hard-guy fantasies, but when they take it out too far and step on the nuts of some heavy-metal badass, like some cat that just got out of Angola and has already got a Coke bottle kicked up his ass, I got to bail them out."

I paid for the 7-Ups I'd drunk and waited another half hour at a small table in a dark part of the room. Gail Lopez didn't show up. I gave the bartender my office card with my telephone number and asked him to call me if she came in. He put down his bar rag and leaned forward and spoke a few inches from my face.

"One of her boyfriends is a tall Nicaraguan dude with a mustache," he said. "Don't let him blind-side you, Lieutenant. One night out in the parking lot he cut a guy from his armpit down to his liver. He's the kind of cat if you got to dust him you take him off at the neck."

I drove back out to the Mexican girl's apartment in Metairie and found the tape still in place between the door and the jamb. I told the building manager that I couldn't ask him to open the apartment, but I suspected that if he did, all he would find would be empty clothes hangers. It took him less than two minutes to get the passkey.

I was wrong, however. She hadn't simply left behind empty clothes hangers. In the wastebasket were several crumpled travel brochures that advertised scenic tours of the Caribbean, not San Antonio and hairdressing school. Fitzgerald, you poor fish, I thought.

I was tired when I drove home along Lake Shore Drive, past the amusement park with its Ferris wheel lighted against the sky, past the University of New Orleans and its quiet, dark lawns and black trees, and I entered into a self-serving dialogue with myself that almost extricated me from my problems. Let Fitzgerald's own people take care of him, I thought. Illegal guns and explosives are their jurisdiction, not yours. You took on an obligation about the murdered black girl in the bayou and you fulfilled it, whether you wanted to or not, when you translated Julio Segura's brains into marmalade. If you're interested in revenge against Philip Murphy, Starkweather, and the little Israeli, you're in the wrong line of work. Somewhere down the road they'll step in their own flop and somebody'll be there to put them away. So disengage, Robicheaux, I told myself. You don't have to be a long-ball hitter every time. A well-placed bunt has its merits.

I had almost achieved some tranquility by the time I parked my car on the

short, darkened street that dead-ended into a sand dune and three coconut palms and the dilapidated dock where I kept my houseboat moored. A smooth, hard path with salt grass growing on the edges cut through the dune, and the waving palm fronds made shadows on the sand and the roof of my houseboat. I could hear the water slapping against the hull, and the moonlight fell across the lake itself in a long silver band. I walked across the gangplank with the wind cool in my face, the bend of the wood easy and familiar and comforting under my foot, the froth of the incoming tide sliding up on the sand under me. The mahogany and yellowish brown teak and glass panes and brass fittings of my boat were as rectangularly beautiful as metal and wood could be. I opened the hatch, stepped down into the main cabin, and turned on the light switch.

Bobby Joe Starkweather rose up quickly from the floor and swung a short length of pipe at my face. It was crowned on one end with a pipe bonnet and wrapped with friction tape on the other. I ducked and put my hands in front of me and took part of the blow on my forearm, but the cast-iron bonnet raked down the side of my face and my ear felt torn loose from my head. I tried to get my .38 out of my belt holster, but someone pinned my arms to my sides from behind and the three of us fell into my rack of musical records on the far wall. My collection of historical jazz, old seventy-eight records that were as stiff and delicate as baked ceramic, shattered in black shards all over the floor. Then a third man was on top of me, a tall man with a pencil mustache and pomade-scented, reddish Negroid hair, and I was covered by their hands, arms, thighs, scrotums, buttocks, knees, their collective weight and strength and visceral odor so powerful and smothering now that I couldn't move or breathe under them. I felt a needle sink into my neck, an unspoken wish clicked dryly in my throat, and my mouth locked open as though the joints of my jaw had been broken. Then my trio of friends squeezed the remaining air out of my chest, the blood out of my heart, the light from my eyes.

* * *

SIX

I awoke in an auto garage of some kind. The roof was made of tin and it was raining outside. I was stretched out on a wooden table, my arms handcuffed around a post behind me, my feet tied to another post at the opposite end. The only light came from a mechanic's portable lamp that was hung on one wall among rows of tools, fan belts, grease guns, and clusters of sparkplug wires. The air was close and hot and smelled of oil and rust. When I turned my head, my neck felt as though it would crack like a dry flower stem.

Then I saw Sam Fitzpatrick in a wooden chair four feet from me. His forearms were tied flush to the arms of the chair, wrapped with clothesline from the elbow to the wrist so that his hands stuck out like broken claws; his clothes were torn, streaked with grease and blood, and his battered and bleeding head hung down in the shadow, obscuring his face. By his feet was a telephone crank, the kind that was used on army field phones.

"Sam," I said.

He made a sound and moved his head.

"Sam, it's Dave Robicheaux," I said. "Where are they?"