A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

the back of my neck. In the reflection of the running lights the blood from my mouth looked purple on the backs of my hands. My ears were filled with sound: the waves bursting against the bow and hissing back along the hull, Jimmie Lee Boggs's heated breathing, a buoy clanging somewhere beyond the oil platform, a thick, obscene noise like wet cellophane crackling when I tried to swallow.

"Lionel, you got two minutes to load the stash and come back with my shotgun," Boggs said. "Don't fuck up my morning."

"We'll transfer the goods. There's no problem, Jimmie Lee," Fontenot said.

"I didn't think there was," Boggs said.

Out of the corner of my vision I could see Fontenot and Lionel carrying the crates back to Boggs's boat. Their rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the deck.

"I'll hand it up to you," I heard Fontenot say.

"Why don't you take swimming lessons, go to the Y?" Lionel said.

"You know why I like a shotgun?" Boggs asked me. His dungarees were bell-bottomed and dark with water above his white socks.

"No hands, no face," he said. "Think of a broken cherry pie."

The jugboat dropped off the edge of a big wave and slapped hard against the water. Then I heard someone behind me.

"Here it is," Lionel said.

"Thank you, my man," Boggs said.

"What do you want to do with his boat?" Lionel said.

"I'll open up the cocks and down she goes."

"Hurry all this up, it's gonna be light."

"Just get the fat man on board and let me worry about the rest of it."

Lionel walked away toward the stern, and I saw Boggs's feet and legs move in front of me. I heard him rack a shell into the chamber of a shotgun.

"Would you look up here so I could have your attention a minute?" he said.

I raised my head slowly, my eyes traveling over his thighs, which were tensed against the roll of the deck, his flat stomach under his gray suspenders, his sawed-off pump shotgun with a stock that had been wood-rasped into a pistol grip, his red mouth crimped in expectation, as though he had just sucked on a salted lime. My split eye throbbed, blood and saliva ran off my lip, my pulse roared in my ears.

"Boggs…" I said.

He didn't answer.

"Boggs…"

I opened my mouth to let it drain. I spit on myself.

"Boggs…"

"What?" he said.

"You'd fuck up a wet dream. Shoot and be done with it."

I saw his eyes narrow. They were liquid and rheumy, like a lizard's, the whites flecked almost entirely red with broken blood veins. His right hand, wrapped around the trigger guard, was white and ridged with bone. The edges of his eyes trembled with anger. His tongue tasted his lip, and he looked like a man whose sexual satisfaction was about to be denied him.

"We gotta go, Jimmie Lee," Lionel said from the stern.

But Boggs's attention had shifted. He stared out into the fog, the shotgun at port arms, his dyed, threadlike hair wet and stuck against his scalp like a duck's feathers. Then I saw and heard it, too: the glow of running lights in the fog, the drone of a big engine, of boat screws that cut a deep trough in the water.

Suddenly no one was interested in me. I raised up slowly from all fours and sat back on my heels. Lionel had been trying to push Fontenot's huge weight up onto the bow of the cabin cruiser, but they were both frozen now on the stern of the jugboat. Fontenot's neck looked like a turtle's inside his life jacket.