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

"What for? I don't give a good fuck what y'all do here," he replied.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd watch your language," I said.

"She can't handle it?" he said.

"Stand over by my truck until we're finished," I said.

"What do you think y'all gonna find?" he said.

"You never know, Murph. You were a cop. People get careless sometimes, mess up in a serious way, maybe even forget they had their picture taken with one of their victims."

Tiny webs of brown lines spread from the corners of his eyes.

"What are you talking about?"

"If I'd been you, I wouldn't have let Cholo take my picture with Baby Feet and Cherry LeBlanc over in Biloxi."

His blue eyes shuttered back and forth; the pupils looked like black pinheads. The point of his tongue licked across his bottom lip.

"I don't want her in my stuff," he said.

"Would you like to prevent me from getting in your 'stuff,' Mr. Doucet?" Rosie said. "Would you like to be charged this morning with interfering with a federal officer in the performance of her duty?"

Without ever removing his eyes from her face, he lifted a Lucky Strike with two fingers from the pack in his shirt pocket and put it in the corner of his mouth. Then he leaned back against my truck, shook open his Zippo lighter, cupped the flame in his hands, sucked in on the smoke, and looked away at the pecan trees bending and straightening in the wind and an apple basket bouncing crazily across a field.

On his work table were a set of Exacto knives, tubes of glue, small bottles of paint, tiny brushes, pieces of used sandpaper, and the delicate balsa-wood wing struts of a model airplane pinned to a blueprint. Outside, Doucet smoked his cigarette and watched us through the door and showed no expression or interest when I dropped his Exacto knives into a Ziploc bag.

His desk drawers contained Playboy magazines, candy wrappers, a carton of Lucky Strikes, a thermos of split pea soup, two ham sandwiches, paper clips, eraser filings, a brochure advertising a Teamster convention in Atlantic City, a package of condoms.

I opened the drawer of his work table. In it were more sheets of sandpaper, an unopened model airplane kit, and the black-handled switchblade knife he had lent me to trim back the insulation on an electrical wire in my truck. I put it in another Ziploc bag.

Doucet yawned.

"Rosie, would you kick over that trash basket behind his desk, please?" I said.

"There's nothing in it," she said, leaning over the corner of the desk.

My back was turned to both her and Doucet when I closed the drawer to the work table and turned around with an aluminum-handled utility knife in my fingers. I dropped it into a third plastic bag.

"Well, I guess this covers it," I said.

Through the door I saw his hand with the cigarette stop in midair and his eyes lock on the utility knife.

He stepped toward us as we came out of the building.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said.

"You have a problem with something that happened here?" I said.

"You planted that," he said, pointing at the bag with the utility knife in it. "You sonofabitch, you planted it, you know you did."

"How could I plant something that belongs to you?" I said. "This is one of the tools you use on your airplane models, isn't it?"

Rosie was looking at me strangely.

"This woman's a witness," he said. "You're salting the shaft. That knife wasn't there."

"I say it was. I say your fingerprints are all over it, too. It's probably going to be hard to prove it's not yours, Murph."