A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

I heard his thumb cock the hammer. I turned off the ignition switch, and we drifted sideways with the waves and dipped down breathlessly into a trough.

"Oops," Fontenot said, and his mouth made an O inside the yellow hood of his raincoat.

"Go forward and throw out the anchor, Ray," Lionel said. "We'll swing tight against the rope, and he can come around and tie on the stern."

"I think we're doing it the hard way," Fontenot said.

"It's the way he wants it. I ain't arguing with him."

"The tropics beckon, Lionel. We don't want to waste time out here."

"Tell him that. The guy's got a hard-on about our man here. It's like talking to a vacant lot."

Fontenot got up from his chair and made his way along the deck, holding on to the rail. His yellow raincoat glistened in the turning fog. I heard the clank of the chain and the X-shaped welded pieces of railroad track that I used for an anchor as he pitched them off the bow. The jugboat swung with the incoming tide toward the coast and straightened against the anchor rope. The cabin cruiser idled past us, then turned in a circle and came up astern. It was a Larson, built for speed and comfort, its paint as white and flawless as enamel.

"I want you to know something before all this goes down," Lionel said.

I started to turn my head toward him. He nudged the automatic against my ear.

"No, keep your eyes straight ahead," he said. "I want you to know it's not personal. I don't like ex-cops, I don't think they should have ever let you in on a buy, but that's got nothing to do with this. We've been somebody's fuck too long, it's time we got what's ours. You just came along at a real bad time."

I heard the engine of the cabin cruiser die; then somebody threw a knotted rope from the bow onto the roof of the jugboat's pilot-house.

"That other thing," he said, "that other thing I didn't have anything to do with."

From the direction of his voice I could tell that he was now looking toward the stern.

"What other thing?" I said.

Then his voice came back toward the side of my face: "Are you kidding, man? You were taking the guy up to Angola to fry. What do you think a guy like that feels about you? I'm sorry for you, man, but I got nothing to do with it."

I didn't care about the pistol behind my ear now. I turned woodenly in the pilot's seat and looked up at the bobbing, moored bow of the cabin cruiser. As Tee Beau had said, Jimmie Lee Boggs had cut his hair short and dyed it black, but every other detail about him was as though he had walked out of a familiar dream: the mannequinlike head, the pallid skin, the lips that looked like they were rouged, the spearmint-green eyes with a strange light in them.

He wore rubber-soled canvas shoes, dungarees, a heavy blue wool shirt with wide gray suspenders, and when he stepped from the cabin cruiser onto the back rail of the jugboat and grabbed Ray Fontenot's hand, his forearm corded with muscle and his stomach looked as flat and hard as boiler plate.

He put one hand on the edge of the pilothouse's roof and leaned over me. Salt spray dripped from his face, and I could smell snuff on his breath.

"Been thinking of me?" he asked.

"I thought maybe you couldn't find us," Fontenot said. "It's thick out there."

"Lionel told me on the radio y'all would be coming past an oil platform," Boggs said. "I just lay south of the rig and listened for your engine. This thing sounds like a garbage truck."

Then Boggs looked down at me again. I still sat in the pilot's seat. His wrists looked as thick as sticks of firewood.

"This guy give you any trouble?" he said.

"Not really," Fontenot said. He had removed his raincoat and was putting on a life jacket.

"You guys get the stuff on board. I'll take care of it here," Boggs said. He took the nine-millimeter from Lionel's hand.

Fontenot cleared his throat. "We wonder if you… if we really need to do that, Jimmie Lee," he said.

"You got a problem with it?" Boggs said.

"The man isn't likely to call the law," Fontenot said.

"You got that right," Boggs said.