Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'It's too late for contrition, Hippo. This guy Buchalter has left my wife a memory that she'll never quite get rid of.'

'You can put out a hit in this town for five hundred bucks. Did you know that, Dave? For a hundred, you can have a guy remodeled with a ball peen hammer and Polaroids left for you in a bar on Claiborne. You want a ph

one number? Or you want to keep hanging your ass out in the breeze and blaming me for your troubles?'

'I didn't know you and Tommy Bobalouba grew up together, Hippo. It explains a lot.'

'No kidding?'

'No kidding.'

'Sounds real clever.'

'Not really. You're both full of shit!'

'I wish I had a wit like that,' he said, then held up the videocassette in his hand. 'Then I could explain how there're people can watch stuff like this for fun in my own country and nobody cares. Hey, Dave, if they ever fire up the ovens again, I'll probably be one of the first bars of soap off the conveyor belt. But you and your kind won't be far behind. You don't mind letting yourself out, do you?'

I drove back toward New Iberia, through Baton Rouge, across the wide yellow sweep of the Mississippi into the western sun and the Atchafalaya marsh. I noticed a wallet stuck down in the crack of the passenger's seat. It was Clete's and must have slipped out of his back pocket before I dropped him off at his office. When I got off I-10 at Breaux Bridge I stopped at a convenience store and called him on a pay phone, then headed down the back road through St. Martinville, past the old French church and the spreading oaks on Bayou Teche where Evangeline and her lover are buried, and through the cooling afternoon and waving fields of green sugarcane into New Iberia.

I pulled into the dirt drive and parked under the oaks at the foot of my property. The house was deep in shadow, my neighbor's cane field and the woods that bordered it silhouetted against a blazing sunset. Bootsie's car was parked by the side of the house, the trunk open and sacked groceries still inside. The front rooms of the house were dark, the rose-print curtains fluttering in the windows, but the light was on in the kitchen. Batist was out on the dock, pushing pools of rainwater out of the folds in the awning with a broom handle.

'You need any help closing up?' I called.

'Ain't much bidness this afternoon. The rain brung in everybody early,' he said.

'Is Alafair down there?'

'She gone to the show wit' some ot'er children.'

I waved at him and walked up the slope toward my house, lifted two sacks of groceries out of Bootsie's car trunk, and walked around to the back door. Fireflies had started to light in the trees, and the dome of lavender sky overhead reverberated with the drone of cicadas. The house was still; no sound came from the radio on the kitchen windowsill, which Bootsie almost always listened to while she fixed supper.

I hefted the grocery sacks in my arms, opened the back screen with my shoe, and let it slam behind me. The wood planks of the back porch were littered with pet bowls and dry cat food. Through the doorway all the surfaces in the kitchen looked bright and clean, but I could smell okra burning and hear water hissing through a kettle top and scorching in the fire.

'Bootsie?' I said.

Out front, the tin roof on the gallery pinged in the cooling air.

'Bootsie?' I said again, hitching the sacks up against my chest.

I walked into the kitchen and started to set the sacks on the drain board; I saw her sitting at the breakfast table, motionless, her' posture rigid, her eyes straight ahead, one hand resting on top of the other.

'Bootsie, what's wrong?' I said.

Then I saw the film of perspiration on her brow and upper lip, the flutter in her throat, the rise and fall of her breasts. Her mouth opened stiffly, and her eyes broke and fastened on mine; they were charged with a light I had never seen in them before.

'Get out, Dave. Run! Please!' she said, her voice seeming to crack and rise from a great depth at the same time.

But it was too late. The blond man with a neck like a tree stump, with hands that had the power of vise grips, stepped out of the hallway into the light. He wore a Panama hat with a flowered band tilted on his head and a boyish, lopsided smile. His pleated white slacks, tropical shirt printed with green and yellow parrots, and shined, tasseled loafers gave him the appearance of a health enthusiast you might see on a morning television show, perhaps with a beach at his back. In the shadow of his hat brim you could hardly see the spray of blackheads that fanned back from his eyes like cat's whiskers.

'Come on in, Dave. I'm glad you're here. We weren't sure when you'd be back. We're going to work this thing out. Hey, I was listening to your records. I love them,' he said.

Behind him, seated on a chair turned backwards in the hallway, was a small man with defective eyes and a head shaped like a tomato. There was even a furrow in his scalp, with a twist of hair in it, like the indentation and stem of a tomato freshly torn from the vine. In his hands was a military-issue crossbow, the kind sometimes used in special operations, with a steel-flanged arrow mounted on the bowstring. The small man's elbows were propped on the back of the chair, and his eyes, which were crossed, one locking intermittently by the bridge of his nose, were sighted in their peculiar way along the arrow's shaft at the side of Bootsie's face.

* * *

chapter eleven

They had drawn the blinds on the windows now, and the small man with crossed eyes was drinking from a bottle of milk at the breakfast table and spitting pistachio shells into a paper bag. After he had locked my wrists behind me with the handcuffs he'd found on my dresser he bound Bootsie's forearms to her chair with electrician's tape, then crisscrossed it through her breasts and wrapped it around the back of the chair. The man named Buchalter watched with a small .25 caliber Beretta in the palm of his hand, a torn smile like that of Will Rogers at the corner of his mouth.