Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'That's Dave yonder,' Batist said to him from behind the counter, seemingly relieved. He picked up a can of soda pop and went outside to drink it at one of the telephone-spool tables under the awning that shaded the dock.

Flat's eyes went up and down my body. His wife began eating a Moon Pie, chewing with her mouth or open while she stared idly out the window at the bayou.

'Looks like you're a hard man to grab holt of,' he said.

'Not really. I was up at the house.'

'Don't like to bother a man in his home.'

'What could I do for you, sir?'

'I belong to the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans.

I make no apology for hit. The town's a commode. But I don't like what got done to your colored boy.'

'Boy?'

His southern mountain accent grated like piano wire drawn through a hole punched in a tin can. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket, worked it into a back tooth, and measured me again with his bemused, pale eyes.

'You one of them kind gets his nose up in the air about words he don't like?' he said.

'Batist is older than I am, Reverend. People hereabouts don't call him a boy.'

'He probably ain't gonna get much older if you don't take the beeswax out of your ears. There's something bad going on out yonder. I don't like hit.' He waved his hand vaguely at the eastern horizon.

'You mean the vigilante?'

'Maybe. Maybe something a whole lot bigger than that.'

'I don't follow you.'

'Things falling apart at the center. I think it's got to do with the Antichrist.'

'The Antichrist?'

'You got woodpecker holes in your head or something?'

'I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'There's signs and such, the way birds fly around in a dead sky right before a storm. You had a president with the numbers in his name.' He puffed out both his cheeks. 'I can tell you're thinking, son. I can smell the wood burning.'

'What numbers?'

'Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six-six-six. The Book of Revelation says hit, you'll know him by the numbers in his name. I think that time's on us.'

'Could I get y'all anything else?'

'Does somebody have to hit you upside the head with a two-by-four to get your attention?' he said.

'Stop talking to the man like that, Os,' his wife said, opening another Moon Pie, her gaze fixed indolently on the willows bending in the breeze.

'That colored fellow out yonder's innocent,' he said to me. 'These murders, I don't care if hit's dope dealers being killed or not, they ain't done by somebody on the side of justice. People can pretend that's the case, but hit ain't so. And that bothers me profoundly. God's honest truth, son. That's all I come here to tell you.'

'Do you know something about the murders, Reverend?'

'You'll be the first to hear about hit when I do.' His face was dilated and discolored in the heat, as though it had been slowly poached in warm water.

After he and his wife drove away in their flatbed truck, the exact nature of their mission still a mystery to me, I called up to the house.