Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

When he pushed the Play button I could hear all the noises that are endemic to jailhouses everywhere: steel doors clanging, radios blaring, a water bucket being scraped along a concrete floor, cacophonous and sometimes deranged voices echoing through long corridors. Then I heard the man's voice—like words being released from an emotional knot, the syntax incoherent, the rage and hateful obsession like a quivering, heated wire.

'You got mud people coming out of your sewer grates, you got—' he was saying when Motley came out of Baxter's office and Oswald Flat clicked off the recorder.

'Movie time,' Motley said, scratching at the side of his mustache.

'What's Nate Baxter on the rag about?' Clete said.

'What do you think, Purcel? He's just real glad to see you guys down here again,' Motley said.

'Get him transferred back to Vice. At least he could get laid once in a while,' Clete said. He looked at the expression on my face. 'You think I'm kidding? The transvestites in the Quarter really dug the guy.'

The four of us went inside Motley's office. He closed the door behind us and inserted a videocassette into a VCR unit.

'The guy's name was Jack Pelley,' Motley said. 'He had a dishonorable discharge from the Crotch for rolling queers in San Diego, priors in New Orleans for statutory rape and possession of child pornography. One federal beef for possession of stolen explosives. From what we can tell, he became an addict in the joint, muled tar for both the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia while he was inside, then jumped his parole about three years ago.'

'How'd he get picked up?' I said.

'He locked himself in a filling station rest room on Carrollton and wouldn't let anybody else in. When the owner opened the door, Pelley had his leathers down over his knees and was shooting into his thigh with a spike made out of an eyedropper. The Ruger was sitting on top of the toilet tank.'

'How far away was he from Hippo Bimstine's house?' I said.

'About two blocks,' Motley said. 'His pockets were full of rainbows, blues, purple hearts, leapers, you name it. I think somebody gave him the whole candy store to fuck up Bimstine's day.' He glanced at Oswald Flat. 'Sorry, Reverend.'

'Get on with hit,' Flat said.

Motley dropped the blinds on his office glass, turned off the overhead light, and started the VCR.

'The arresting officers put him in the tank,' Motley said. 'In five minutes half the guys in there were yelling through the bars at the booking room officer to move him to a holding cell. The guy had five-alarm gorilla armpit odor. Anyway, we messed up. We should have transferred him to a psychiatric unit.'

The film, made without sound by a security camera, was in black and white and of low grade, the images stark in their contrast, like those in booking room photography. But the tortured travail of a driven man, flailing above a self-created abyss, was clearly obvious. Like those of most speed addicts, his body was wasted, the skin of his face drawn back tightly over the bone, the eyes sunken into skeletal sockets. His head looked like it had been razor-shaved and the hair had grown out in a thin gray patina, the color of rat's fur, below a wide bald area. Beginning at the crown of his skull, right across the pate, was a tattoo of a sword, flanged by lightning bolts.

He paced about maniacally, urinated all over the toilet stool, banged with his fists on the bars, whipped at the walls with his leather jacket, then began slamming the iron bunk up and down on its suspension chains.

'This is where we blew it big-time,' Motley said. 'That cell should have been shook down when the last guy went out of it.'

The man in custody, Jack Pelley, raised the bunk one final time and crashed it down on its chains, then stared down at a piece of electrical cord that had fallen out on the concrete floor. He picked it up in both hands, stared at it, then began idly picking at the tape and wire coil that were wrapped on the end of it.

'What do you call them things?' Flat said.

'A stinger,' Motley said. He paused the VCR. 'It's like a home-made hot plate. Except our man here has got other plans for it. You sure you want to watch this, Reverend?'

'You got something on that tape worse than Saipan?' Flat answered.

Motley took a Baby Ruth out of his desk drawer, started the film again, sat on the corner of his desk, and peeled the wrapper off his candy bar while he watched the television screen.

Jack Pelley splashed water from the toilet bowl onto the cement floor of the cell, peeled off his leather trousers, flattened his skinny buttocks into the middle of the puddle, inserted the stinger's coil into his mouth, sank one hand into the toilet, then calmly fitted the other end of the stinger into a wall socket.

His head snapped back once, as though he had just mainlined a hot shot; his eyes widened, one arm trembled slightly inside the toilet bowl; his lips seemed to curl back momentarily from his clenched teeth, then his jaw fell open like that of someone experiencing an unexpected moment of ecstasy. Then he slumped against the stool, his head on his chest, as though he had tired of a wearisome journey and had simply gone to sleep.

'The ME said the shock shouldn't have killed him by itself,' Motley said. 'But he'd probably hyped eight or nine times in the twenty-four hours before he got busted. The ME said his heart looked like a muskmelon.'

'Have you got any registration on the Ruger?' I asked.

'The serial numbers are burned off,' Motley said.

'Sounds like the greaseballs,' Clete said.

'The greaseballs don't send speed freaks on a hit,' Motley said.