Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

Then through the humidity inside his mask, through the green chop against the glass, he must have realized that his worst fears as a diver—losing his electric light deep in the bowels of a sunken ship or perhaps being pulled down into a bottomless canyon by a mouthful of hooked teeth that snapped his bones as easily as sticks—were never legitimate fears at all, that the most terrible moment of his life was now being precipitated by his companions, for no reason that he could understand, in a way that made his screams, his waving arms, his last-second attempt to dive deep below the surface the impotent and futile gestures of a nightmare.

The cabin cruiser must have been hitting thirty-five knots when it plowed over him and the screws razored his body and left him floating like a rubber-wrapped tangle of mismatched parts in the boat's wake.

'Why were the guys on the boat running?' I said to Clete.

'They'd stolen it. Well, not exactly. It's owned by some millionaire yachtsman in Baltimore, but this alcoholic skipper keeps it for him in Biloxi. So the drunk thought he'd make a few bucks by renting it to these three guys. But at the last minute the three guys decided they didn't need to pay him the money after all, so instead they just stomped the shit out of him. They told him if he made a beef about it they'd catch him later and kick one of his own whiskey bottles up his ass.'

'Who were the guys?'

'The two in custody are just a couple of Biloxi beach farts who've been in and out of Parchman on nickel-and-dime B and E's. But dig this, the guy who got run through the propeller had some beautiful Nazi artwork on both arms—swastikas and SS lightning bolts.'

'So do most cons in the Aryan Brotherhood,' I said.

'But here's the kicker, mon. This guy was not homegrown. The Coast Guard found his passport on the cabin cruiser. He was from Berlin.'

'Do the guys in custody say what they were after?'

'They were hired by the German guy, but they claim the German guy wouldn't tell them what was down there. They thought maybe it was a scuttled boat with a lot of dope on it. Here's the real laugh, though. The Coast Guard says there's no boat down at that spot. What the beach farts and the skinhead probably saw on their sonar was an oil rig that sank there in a hurricane about twenty years ago.'

'Thanks for the information, Clete.'

'You want to talk to the guys in custody?'

'Maybe.'

'I'd do it soon. The rummy in Biloxi isn't filing charges, and the kraut's death is going down as accidental. I don't guess anybody's going to lose sleep over a skinhead getting turned into potted meat out on the salt.'

'Thanks again, Clete.'

'You think they were after that sub?'

'Who knows?'

'Hippo Bimstine does. I want in on this, mon. When Streak operates in the Big Sleazy, he needs his old podjo to cover his back. Am I right?'

'Right. Good night, Cletus.'

I heard him pop the cap on a bottle and pour it into a glass.

'Bless my soul, I love that old-time rock 'n' roll, when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide made their puds shrivel up and hide,' he said.

My palms felt stiff with fatigue, hard to fold closed, and my eyes burned as though there were sand behind the lids. Clete was still talking, rattling fresh ice into his glass, when I said good night a final time and eased the receiver down into the telephone cradle.

Tommy Lonighan's Sport Center was located on the edge of downtown New Orleans, in a late-nineteenth-century two-story brick building that had originally been a firehouse, then an automotive dealership in the 1920s, and finally a training gym for club boxers who fought for five dollars a fight during the Depression.

The interior smelled of sweat and leather and moldy towels; the canary yellow paint on the walls was blistered and peeling above the old iron radiators; the buckled and broken spaces in the original oak flooring had been patched over with plywood and linoleum. The bodybuilding equipment was all out of another era—dumbbells and weight-lifting benches, curling bars, even a washtub of bricks hung on a cable for pull downs. The canvas on the four rings had been turned almost black from scuff marks, body and hair grease, and kicked-over spit buckets.

But it was still the most famous boxing gym in New Orleans, and probably more Golden Gloves champions had come out of it than out of any other boxing center in the South. In the sunlight that poured down through the high windows, black, Latin, Vietnamese kids and a few whites sparred in headgear and kidney guards, clanked barbells up and down on a wide rubber pad, skipped rope with the grace of tap dancers, and turned timing bags into flying, leathery blurs.

A small, elderly white man, with a thick ear and a flat, toylike face, who was pulling the laces out of a box full of old gloves, pointed out Zoot to me.

'That tall kid about to break his nose on the timing bag,' he said. 'While you're over there, tell him he ain't carried the trash out to the Dumpster yet.'

The boy had his mother's elongated turquoise eyes and clear, light-brown skin. But he was unnaturally tall for his age, over six feet, and as slim and narrow-shouldered as if his skin had been stretched on wire. The elastic top of his trunks was sopping with the sweat that streamed in rivulets down his hairless chest. Each time his fist missed the timing bag, he would glance nervously a few feet away at another kid who had turned his timing bag into an explosion of sound and movement. Then Zoot would smash the bag with a right cross, snapping it back on the chain, try to connect with a left, miss, swing again with his right, and miss again.

'Try not to hit harder with one hand than the other,' I said. 'You have to create a kind of circular momentum.'

'A what?'