Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

She hung up. I sat down at the table and started eating again. Bootsie watched my face.

”Moleen's a grown man,“ I said. ”He's also a hypocritical sonofabitch.“

”He got her out of jail,“ Bootsie said.

”He paid somebody else to do it. Which is Moleen's style. Three cushion shots.“

”Too harsh, Streak,“ she said.

I drank out of my iced tea, sucked on a sprig of mint, finally squeezed my temples between my fingers.

”See you before five,“ I said.

”Watch your ass, kiddo,“ she said.

I took the old road into St. Martinville, along Bayou Teche and through cane fields and pastureland where egrets stood like spectators on the backs of grazing cows. Dot's was a ramshackle bar toward the end of the main artery that traversed the black district and eventually bled into the square where Evangeline was buried with her lover behind the old French church. Ironically, the bar's geographical location, set like a way station between two worlds, was similar to the peculiar mix of blood and genes in the clientele-octoroons and quadroons, red bones and people who were coal black but whose children sometimes had straw-colored curly hair.

Moleen sat in the gloom, at the far end of the bar, on a patched, fingernail-polish-red vinyl stool, his seersucker coat tight across his hunched shoulders, one oxblood loafer twisted indifferently inside an aluminum rung on the stool. I could smell his unwashed odor three feet away.

”She's worried about you,“ I said, and sat down next to him.

He drank from a glass of bourbon and melted ice, pushed two one-dollar bills out of his change toward the bartender.

”You want a drink?“ he said.

I didn't answer. I peeled back the edge of his coat with one finger.

He glared at me.

”A .2,5 caliber derringer. That's dumb, Moleen,“ I said. ”One of those is like bird shit hitting a brick.“

He pointed at his empty glass for the bartender. A deformed mulatto man with a shoe-shine box came through the front door in a burst of hot sunlight, let the door slam hard behind him, vibrating the glass and Venetian blinds. His face was moronic, his mouth a wet drool, his arms like gnarled oak roots that were half the length they should have been.

I looked away from him.

”You want your shoes shined?“ Moleen said, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

”I think a remark like that is unworthy of you,“ I said.

”I wasn't being humorous. His great-grandfather and mine were the same gentleman. If you think he's an eyeful, you should meet his mother.

Hang around. She comes in about seven.“

”I can't stop you from fucking up your life, Moleen, but as a law officer, I want you to hand over your piece.“

”Take it. I've never fired a shot in anger, anyway.“

I slipped it from inside his belt, cracked open the breech below the lip of the bar.

”It's empty,“ I said,

”Oh, yeah,“ he said absently, and took two steel-jac

keted rounds from his coat pocket and dropped them in my palm. ”They're going to take your friend Marsallus out.“

”Who?“

He tilted the glass to his mouth. His eyes were red along the rims, his face unshaved and shiny with a damp sweat.