A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"Why would he go back to a state where he's already been sentenced to the chair?"

"It doesn't make any difference where he is. There're warrants on him in three other states, and the FBI's after him as an interstate fugitive. Number two, he'll go where Tony Cardo tells him to go."

"I'm not up to it. You'll have to get somebody else."

"That's it, huh?"

"Yep."

He looked at me reflectively in the moonlight. I could see his scalp glisten through his thin crew cut.

"How you feeling?" he said.

"Fine."

"You're a good cop, Dave. The best."

After he was gone, I sat by myself in the yard awhile and tried to put my thoughts into separate envelopes. Then I gave it up and went inside to eat supper with Alafair at the kitchen table.

So the days went by and I watched the leaves fall and my neighbor harvest his sugarcane, which was now thick and gold and purple in the fields. Each evening I jogged three miles down the dirt road to the drawbridge on the bayou, the air like a cool burn on my skin, and as the sun set over the bare field behind my house I did sit-ups and stomach crunches in my backyard, curled a fifty-pound dumb-bell with my right arm, a ten-pound bar with my left, and sat down weary and glazed with sweat in the damp grass. I could feel my body mending, the muscles tightening and responding in my upper chest and neck the way they had before a bullet had torn through the linkage and collapsed it like a broken spiderweb.

But to be honest, the real purpose in my physical regimen was to induce as much fatigue in my body as possible. Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while I watched the rain pour down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.

Now I tried to contend with my own unconscious, and the dreams it brought, with a weight set, a pair of Adidas shoes, and running shorts.

Then one evening, a week after Minos had appeared again, a pickup truck with two cracked front windows, crumpled fenders, and a bumper that hung down like a broken mouth bounced through the depressions in my drive, the tailgate slamming on the chain, the rust-gutted muffler roaring like a stock-car racer. Tante Lemon's head barely

extended above the steering wheel; her chin was pointed upward, her small hands pinched on the wheel, her frosted eyes pinpoints of concern as she tried to maneuver through the trunks of the pecan trees. Dorothea sat next to her, one hand propped against the dashboard.

"She wanta tell you something," Tante Lemon said.

"Come in," I said, and I opened the truck door for her.

"We ain't got to do that," she said.

"Yeah, you do," I said.

They both followed me up onto the gallery. I opened the screen door. I wondered how many times Tante Lemon had walked through a white person's front door. Once inside, neither of them would sit until I told them to.

"What is it?" I said.

"Ax her," Tante Lemon said.

I looked at Dorothea. She wore an orange polyester dress and a straw purse on a strap, but her black pumps were scuffed and dusty.

"Tee Beau say maybe he can find out where that man's at," she said.

"You talked to him?"

She looked at her hands in her lap.

"You got to promise somet'ing, Mr. Dave," she said. "Tee Beau say you a good man. Tante Lemon say your daddy good to her, too. It ain't right if you try to trick Tee Beau, no."

"What do you mean?"

"You tole me Tee Beau can call you collect. From a pay phone. But you can find out where he's at that way, cain't you?"

"You mean trace the call?"