Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'I was raised by my aunt,' she said. 'She was a prostitute. A white man tried to rape her behind a bar on Calliope. She shot him to death. What do you think about that?'

'Did she go up the road for it?'

'Yes.'

'So even in death he raped her. Drop the dime on Baxter if he gets near you or makes another off-color remark.'

She stood up and walked cooly to a trash can, dropped her paper cup and unfinished pastry in it, and sat back down on the stone bench. Her flowered blouse puffed with air in the breeze.

'Don't try to stonewall me about this contract stuff,' she said. 'Who is it the greaseballs don't clip?'

'Politicians.'

'Who else?'

'Ordinary people who are on the square. Particularly influential ones.'

'Come on, Robicheaux.'

'Would you not call me by my last name, please? It reminds me of the army.'

'Who else?'

'They don't do made guys without the commission's consent.'

'That's it?'

'Cops,' I said.

She looked me evenly in the eyes, biting down softly on the corner of her lip.

That night I dreamed of a desolate coastline that looked like layered white clay. On it was a solitary tree whose curled, dead leaves were frozen against an electrical blue sky. The ocean should have been teeming with fish, but it, like the land, had been stricken, its chemical green depths empty of all life except the crew of a German submarine, who burst to the surface with emergency air tanks on their backs, their bone-hard, white faces bright with oil. They gathered under the tree on the beach, looking over their new estate, and I realised then that they had the jowls and mucus-clotted snouts of animals.

They waited for their leader, who would come, as they had, from the sea, his visage crackling with salt and light, and, like Proteus, forever changing his form to make himself one of us.

A psychologist would smile at the dream and call it a world destruction fantasy, the apocalyptic fear that a drunk such as myself carries around in his unconscious or that you see on the faces of religious fundamentalists at televised revivals.

But when I woke from the dream I sat in the dark and thought about the preacher's words, about things coming apart at the center, about blood-dimmed tides and mackerel-crowded seas that could wrinkle from continent to continent with the reverberating brass gong of the millennium, and I did not sleep again until the trees outside were black and stiff with the coming of the gray dawn.

* * *

chapter seventeen

Two days later, at five-thirty on Saturday morning, Bootsie heard a car turn into our driveway. She stood at the window in her nightgown and looked through the curtain.

'It's somebody in a pink Cadillac,' she said.

'Maybe he's just turning around,' I said from the bed. There was mist in the trees outside and a cool smell blowing through the window.

'No, they're just sitting there. Two people.'

'Batist probably hasn't opened the shop yet. I'll go down,' I said.

'Dave—'

'It's all right. Bad guys don't park in your drive at sunrise.'

I dressed in a pair of khakis, old loafers, and a denim shirt, and walked out on the gallery. The light was on in the bait shop. The Cadillac was parked in the shadows under the trees, but I could see two figures in the front seat. The air smelled like flowers and damp earth. I walked across the yard toward the car. To my right I could hear Tripod scratching against the screen on his hutch.