Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'You're right. Those two were fuckups. That's why they're off the board now.'

The sunlight seemed to harden and grow cold on the garden.

As best as I could reconstruct it, this is how Clete (and later a Lafourche sheriff's deputy) told me the story:

The previous night, out in a wetlands area southwest of New Orleans, a man who had been gigging frogs emerged terrified from the woods, his face whipped by branches and undergrowth, and waved down a parish sheriffs car with his shirt. It had started to rain, and ground fog was blowing out of the trees.

'They's a man got some other men tied up on the mudflat. Somebody got to get down there. He's fixin' to—' he said.

'Slow down, podna. It's gonna be all right. He's fixin' to what?' the deputy said.

'He's got one of them lil chain saws. Back yonder, right by the marsh.'

The deputy was young and only eight months with his department. He radioed his dispatcher, then made a U-turn in the middle of the highway and bounced down an abandoned board road that wound through thickly spaced trees and mounds of briar bushes webbed with dead morning glory vines. Sheets of stagnant water and mud splashed across his windshield, and an old road plank splintered under one wheel and whanged and clattered against his oil pan. But in the distance, through the blowing mist and the black silhouette of tree trunks, he could see a brilliant white chemical flame burning against the darkness. Then he heard the surge of a chain saw, and a second later, even louder than the erratic, laboring throb and shriek of the saw and the roar of his car engine, the sustained and unrelieved scream of a man that rose into the sky like fingernails scraping on slate.

The deputy snapped a tie-rod and spun out into a tangle of willow and cypress trees fifty yards before the road dead-ended at the marsh. He pulled his twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, sawed off at the pump and loaded with double-ought buckshot, from the clip on the dashboard and began running with it at port arms through the undergrowth.

In a clearing by the swamp's edge, next to a parked pickup truck with a camper shell in the bed, a Coleman lantern hissed on the ground like a phosphorous flare. The deputy could see the shadow of a huge man moving about on the far side of the truck. On the ground, partly obscured by the truck's tires, were the shapes of two prone men, their arms pinioned behind them, their faces bloodless and iridescent in the soft rain and the hissing light of the lantern.

The chain saw was idling on a piece of cardboard now. Then the deputy saw the large man bending over the shapes on the ground, a bouquet of roses scattered about his booted feet, pulling, working at something with his hands. The water and trees in the swamp were black, the shadows in the clearing changing constantly with the frenetic movements of the man, whose hands the deputy now knew were laboring at something tribal and dark, far beyond the moral ken of a youthful law officer, a glimpse into a time before the creation of light in the world, hands as broad as skillets, popping with cartilage, scarlet to the wrist, the fingers wet with the lump of heart muscle that they lifted from a man's chest cavity.

The deputy vomited on a tree, then tried to step into the clearing with his shotgun aimed at the man who had suddenly raised erect, a rain hat tied under his chin, a disjointed and maniacal stare in his eyes.

He wanted to yell Down on your face, hands on your head, or any other of the dramatic verbal commands that always reduce television criminals to instant prisoners, but the words hung like pieces of wet newspaper in his throat and died in the heavy air, and he tripped over a tangle of morning glory vines as though he were stumbling about in a dream.

Then the large man was running into the marsh, his legs ripping through islands of lily pads, water splashing to his waist, his shoulders humped, when the deputy let off the first round and sent a shower of sparks out into the dark. At first the deputy thought he had missed, had fired high, and he jacked another shell into the chamber, aimed at the base of the running man's spine, and pulled the trigger. Then he fired twice more and saw the man's shirt jump, heard the slugs whunk into his back.

But the running man crashed and tunneled through the flooded cypress and willows and was gone. The deputy's fifth shot peeled away through the trees like marbles rattling down a long wooden chute. He would swear later that he saw a half dozen rents in the shirt of the fleeing man. He would also get off duty that night and get so drunk in a Lockport bar that his own sheriff would have to drive him home.

'The pickup truck was boosted in Lafitte that morning,' Clete said. 'The guy with the silver beard was Jody Hatcher. He was a four-time loser, including one time down as an accessory in the rape of a child. The guy named Freddy is a blank. The feds think he might be a guy who dynamited a synagogue in Portland, but they're not sure… Streak, look at the bright side. There're two less of these guys on the planet. I tell you something else. They made a real balloon payment when they checked out. The M.E. said there was a look frozen in their eyes even he had trouble dealing with.'

Batist was cranking an engine out on the bayou. The wind was wrinkling the water and ruffling the cane in the sunlight.

'None of it makes any sense,' I said.

'It does to me. Buchalter doesn't leave loose ends.'

'Why does he go to the trouble of using the vigilante's MO?'

'Maybe he likes roses. Maybe he has shit for brains.'

'Maybe we're not dealing with Buchalter, either. What's this stuff about the deputy planting double-ought bucks in his back?'

'Maybe the guy doesn't want to admit he was so scared he couldn't hit a billboard with bird shot.'

I stood up to go inside. A pain spread out of my loins into my abdomen.

'You beat Buchalter, Streak. That's all that counts,' Clete said. 'I don't think I could have cut it. I'd have rolled over.'

'No, you wouldn't.'

He crushed his empty beer can in his hand.

'Let me take y'all to supper tonight,' he said.

'That sounds very copacetic,' I said.

'My second day in Vietnam a hard-nosed gunny gave me some advice about fear and memory and all that stuff: "Never think about it before you do it, never think about it after it's over."'