A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

He works the receiver and knocks the barrel clean of mud on his jeans. He casually points it behind my ear, lets the iron sight bite into my scalp.

"You thought the zips were going to get you, but I'm the one can make you cry," he says.

I woke up with the sheets twisted across my chest, my body hot in the cold square of moonlight that shone through the window. Outside, the pecan trees were black against the sky. I lay awake until dawn, when the light became gray, then pink, in the flooded cypress on the far side of the bayou. Then I tried to sleep again, but it was no use. I helped Batist open up the bait shop, and at eight o'clock I drove to work at the sheriff's office and began processing traffic accident reports, my eyes weak with fatigue.

That afternoon, four days after Tante Lemon and Dorothea's visit, I drove to Minos Dautrieve's house in Lafayette. He lived in the old part of town on the north side, a neighborhood of Victorian homes, deep lawns, enormous live oak trees, iron tethering posts, gazebos, screened galleries, and cascading leaves. He had grown up in a shotgun farmhouse outside of Abbeville, but I always suspected that inside his cynicism he had a jaded reverence for the ways of late-nineteenth-century southern gentility.

We sat on cushioned wood lawn chairs in his backyard and drank lemonade amid the golden light and the leaves that scratched across the flagstones, or floated in an old stone well that he had turned into a goldfish pond.

"You already talked to the sheriff?" he asked.

"He says it's between me and you. I'll be on lend-lease to the Presidential Task Force, but my salary will still come from the department. Evidently everybody thinks this task force is big stuff right now."

"You're not impressed?"

"Who cares what I think?"

"Come on, you don't believe we're winning the war on drugs?" He was smiling. He had to squint against the yellow orb of sun that shone through the oak limbs overhead.

"The head of the DEA says the contras deal cocaine. Reagan and the Congress give them guns and money. It's hard to put all that in the same basket and be serious about it," I said.

He stopped smiling.

"But there's one difference," he said. "No matter what those guys in Washington do, we still send the lowlifes up the road and we trash their operation everywhere we can."

"All right."

"I'm not making my point very well,, though."

"Yes, you are. Look, I respect your agency, I appreciate its problems."

"Respect's not enough. When you work for the federal government, you have to obey its rules. There's no area there for negotiation."

"This whole business was your idea, Minos."

"It's a good idea, too. But let's look at your odometer again. Sometimes you've had a way of doing things on your own."

"Maybe that's a matter of perception."

"You remember that guy you busted with a pool cue in Breaux Bridge? They had to use a mop to clean up the blood. And the guy you cut in half through an attic floor in New Orleans? I won't mention a couple of other incidents."

"I never dealt the play. You know that."

"I can see you've had a lot of regret about it, too."

"I'm just not interested in the past anymore."

"There are some people who aren't as confident in you as I am."

"Then let them do it."

He smiled again.

"That happens to be what I told them," he said. "It didn't light up the room with goodwill. But seriously, Dave, we can't have Wyatt Earp on the payroll."

"You're the skipper. If I do something that causes problems for your office, you cut me loose. What's the big deal?"

"You know, I think you have another potential. Maybe in scholarship. Like reducing the encyclopedia to a simple declarative sentence."