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

The driver of the wrecker began winching the Buick's weight off its back wheels.

"I wouldn't hang around here if I was you," Doobie said to me.

"Why not?" Rosie said.

"Because he don't have legal authority here. Because he made a mistake and nobody here'll probably hold it against him. Why piss people off, Robicheaux?"

"What are you saying, Doobie?"

"So you got to go up against Internal Affairs in your own department. That don't mean you're gonna get indicted in Lafayette Parish. Why put dog shit on a stick and hold it under somebody's nose?"

Behind us, an elderly fat mulatto woman in a print dress came out on her porch and began gesturing at us. Doobie Patout glanced at her, then opened the passenger door to the wrecker and paused before getting in.

"Y'all can rake spinach out of that ditch all you want," he said. "I ran a metal detector over it last night. There's no gun in it. So don't go back to New Iberia and be tellin' people you got a bad shake over here."

"Y'all gonna do somet'ing 'bout my garden, you?" the woman shouted off the porch.

The wrecker drove off with the Buick wobbling on the winch cable behind it. At the corner the wrecker turned and a hubcap popped off the Buick and bounced on its own course down the empty dirt road.

"My, what a nasty little man," Rosie said.

I looked back at the footprints in the vegetable patch. They exited in the Johnson grass and disappeared completely. We walked into the shade of the oaks and looked back at the road, the bits of broken glass that glinted in the dirt, the brilliant glare of sunlight on the white shell parking lot. I felt a weariness that I couldn't find words for.

"Let's talk to some of the neighbors, then pack it in," I said.

We didn't have to go far. The elderly woman whom we had been ignoring labored down her porch steps with a cane and came toward us like a determined crab. Her legs were bowed and popping with varicose veins, her body ringed with fat, her skin gold and hairless, her turquoise eyes alive with indignation.

"Where that other one gone?" she said.

"Which one?" I said.

"That policeman you was talkin' to."

"He went back to his office."

"Who gonna pay for my li'l garden?" she asked. "What I gone do wit' them smush tomato? What I gone do wit' them smush eggplant, me?"

"Did you see something last night, auntie?" I said.

"You ax me what I seen? Go look my li'l garden. You got eyes, you?"

"No, I mean did you see the shooting last night?"

"I was in the bat'room, me."

"You didn't see anything?" Rosie said.

The woman jabbed at a ruined eggplant with her cane.

"I seen that. That look like a duck egg to you? They don't talk English where y'all come from?"

"Did you see a woman in a white car outside your house?" I said.

"I seen her. They put her in an ambulance. She was dead."

"I see," I said.

"What you gone do 'bout my garden?"