In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

"Everybody's been pretty polite here," he said.

I looked at his hand and at his face. I could smell the faint hint of his sweat through his deodorant, the nicotine on the backs of his fingers.

"But you keep offending people," he said. He raised his palm slightly, then set it on my shoulder again.

"Don't let your day get complicated," I said.

"It's time to let people alone, Mr. Robicheaux," he said. Then he began to knead my shoulder as a fellow ballplayer might out on the pitcher's mound.

I felt a balloon of red-black color rise out of my chest into my head, heard a sound behind my eyes like wet newspaper tearing, and for some reason saw a kaleidoscopic image of the blond girl in the black body bag, a long strand of algae-streaked hair glued to the gray flesh of her forehead.

I hit him so hard in the stomach that my fist buried itself up to the wrist right under his sternum and spittle flew from his mouth onto the tabletop. Then I came up out of the chair and hooked him in the eye, saw the skin break against the bone and well with blood. He tried to regain his balance and swing a sugar shaker at my face, but I spun him sideways, caught him in the kidney, and drove him to his knees between two counter stools. I didn't remember hitting him in the mouth, but his bottom lip was drooling blood onto his shirt front.

I didn't want to stop. I heard the roar of wind in sea shells, the wheels of rusted engines clanging cog against cog. Then I saw Cholo in front of me, his big square hands raised in placation, his mouth small with sound.

"What?" I said.

"It ain't your style, Loot," he was whispering hoarsely. "Ease off, the guy's new, he don't know the rules, Loot. Come on, this ain't good for nobody."

My knuckles were skinned, my palms ringing. I heard glass crunch under the sole of my shoe in the stunned silence, and looked down numbly at my broken sunglasses on the floor like a man emerging from a blackout.

Julie Balboni scraped back his chair, took his gold money clip from his slacks, and began counting out a series of ten-dollar bills on the table.

He didn't even look up at me when he spoke. But everybody in the restaurant heard what he said. "I think you're losing it, Dave. Stop being a hired dildo for the local dipshits or get yourself some better tranqs."

Chapter 8

It was ten a.m. Batist had gone after a boat with a fouled engine down the bayou, and the bait shop and dock were empty. The tin roof was expanding in the heat, buckling and pinging against the bolts and wood joists. I pulled a can of Dr Pepper out of the crushed ice in the cooler and sat outside in the hot shade by myself and drank it. Green dragonflies hung suspended over the cattails along the bayou's banks; a needlenose gar that had probably been wounded by a boat propeller turned in circles in the dead current, while a school of minnows fed off a red gash behind its gills; a smell like dead snakes, sour mud, and rotted hyacinth vines blew out of the marsh on the hot wind.

I didn't want to even think about the events of this morning. The scene in the restaurant was like a moment snipped out of a drunk dream, in which I was always out of control, publicly indecent or lewd in the eyes of others.

The soda can grew warm in my palm. The sky in the south had a bright sheen to it like blue silk. I hoped that it would storm that afternoon, that rain would thunder down on the marsh and bayou, roar like grapeshot on the roof of my house, pour in gullies through the dirt and dead leaves under the pecan trees in my yard.

I heard Bootsie behind me. She sat down in a canvas chair by a spool table and crossed her legs. She wore white shorts, sandals, and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. There were sweat rings under her arms, and the down on top of her thighs had been burned gold by the sun.

We met at a dance on Spanish Lake during the summer of 1957, and a short time later we lost our virginity together in my father's boathouse, while the rain fell out of the sunlight and dripped off the eaves and the willow trees into the lake and the inside of the boathouse trembled with a wet green-yellow light.

But even at that age I had already started my long commitment to sour mash straight up with a sweating Jax on the side. Bootsie and I would go separate ways, far from Bayou Teche and the provincial Cajun world in which we had grow up. I would make the journey to Vietnam as one of our new colonials and return with a junkyard in my hip and thigh and nocturnal memories that neither whiskey nor army hospital dope could kill. She would marry an oil-field pilot who would later tip a guy wire on an offshore rig and crash his helicopter right on top of the quarter-boat; then she would discover that her second husband, an accounting graduate from Tulane, was a bookkeeper for the Mafia, although his career with them became short-lived when they shotgunned him and his mistress to death in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack.

She had lupus disease that we had knocked into remission with medication, but it still lived in her blood like a sleeping parasite that waited for its moment to attack her kidneys and sever her connective tissue. She was supposed to avoid hard sunlight, but again and again I came home from work and found her working in the yard in shorts and a halter, her hot skin filmed with sweat and grains of dirt.

"Did something happen at work?" she said.

"I had some trouble at Del's."

"What?"

"I busted up one of Baby Feet Balboni's lowlifes."

"In the restaurant?"

"Yeah, that's where I did it."

"What did he do?"

"He put his hand on me." I set down my soda can and propped my forearms on my thighs. I looked out at the sun's reflection in the brown water.

"Have you been back to the office?" she said.