A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

The electric arc of a searchlight burst through the fog. It was hot and white and blinding to the eyes, and now the jugboat and the green, white-capping waves had the strange luminescence of objects lighted by a pistol flare.

A man's voice boomed through a bullhorn across the water: "This is the New Orleans Police Department. You're under arrest. Put down your weapons and lace your hands on your head."

Lionel's arm went up, and he aimed the nine-millimeter across the roof of the pilothouse.

"No!" Fontenot shouted. Then he shouted it again, "No!" His face was round and soft and full of disbelief.

But it was too late. Lionel and Boggs were both shooting now, the muzzle flashes from their guns almost lost in the searchlight's hot glare. I could hear the brass hulls from Lionel's pistol clinking on the pilothouse roof. Then the searchlight glass shattered and almost simultaneously two kneeling figures on the bow of the police boat, bill caps turned backward on their heads, began firing M-16 rifles on full automatic bullets off the deck rails, gear boxes, pots and pans and stove in the galley, scissored through the tin side of a bait well, and trapped Ray Fontenot helplessly against the back rail of the jugboat.

He tried to crouch down behind the corner of the pilothouse, his mouth wide and pink with words that no one could hear. His fists were balled, his wrists crossed in an X in front of his eyes; then the bullets danced across his life jacket, split the canvas like dry blisters popping, and his throat and great heaving chest erupted with red flowers. His mouth hung open as though he had swallowed a chicken bone.

I lay flat on the deck, my arms folded across the crown of my skull. Boggs was hunkered down behind the iron gear box that had held the crates of cocaine, and the M-16 rounds whanged off the top and the sides and sparked in the darkness. But he didn't wince. He kept firing, pumping the empty shell casings out on the deck, his body small and constricted with muscle like a rifleman's. His shotgun must have been loaded with double-aughts or deer slugs, because I could hear the damage to the police boat, the glass breaking, the hard slap of heavy shot across wood surfaces.

Then the police boat veered back into the fog, turning into its own wake, but not before one of the kneeling figures on the bow emptied his clip and bit into the auxiliary gasoline drum welded against the jugboat's deck rail. The gasoline gushed across the deck and drained into the engine well. I don't know what ignited it—a spark jumping off a metal surface, shorted wiring, or an exploded starter battery—but suddenly the deck was flaming, the gas drum was ringed with fire; then it blew with a whoompth, like a large furnace kicking on deep in the bowels of a tenement building.

I crawled across the deck, squeezed under the bottom rail, and rolled over the side. I could not see the police boat now, but before I dropped into the water I saw Jimmie Lee Boggs running for the stern, his hard, lean body silhouetted among the flames. Lionel was on his knees by the pilothouse, his hand pressed against a hemorrhaging wound in the center of his throat. His shoulders shook and convulsed as though he were trying to expel a piece of angle iron from his chest. He tried to catch Boggs's dungarees with his fingers as Boggs went past him. The back of Lionel's hand was scarlet and shining in the fire's light. But Boggs pulled the mooring line free, jumped from the stern rail onto the bow of his boat, and in seconds started the engine, opened the throttle full-out, and spun on the back of a breaking wave into the fog.

I treaded water and drifted away from the jugboat. It was burning brightly now, from bow to stern, and when the anchor rope burned through, it floated sideways in the swell, and a big wave broke against the pilothouse and turned to steam. The water was cold and smelled of oil and gas. In the distance I could hear the thinning sound of Boggs's cabin cruiser and the police boat in pursuit. I tried to save my strength and float on my back, but each time I rose with a wave, the water broke across my mouth and nose, and I had to right my head and churn with my hands and feet again.

The tide was coming in, and I couldn't swim against it to the oil platform. The Coast Guard was out there somewhere, but it had probably become occupied with the shrimper. The jugboat was only a red glow in the fog now. I heard another whoompth, a sound like boiling water, a rush of air bubbles, the hiss of steam rising from heated metal; the red glow died, and the fogbank was absolutely white.

A few minutes later it began to rain again. The rain danced on the water, drummed on my head, beat in my ears. So this is how your death comes, I thought. You don't buy it with the enemies of your dreams—the black-clad toy men whose breath, even in your sleep, stunk of

fish; a psychotic killer of children who tried to push an ice pick behind your ear; the Vegas hit man who handcuffed you to a drainpipe, taped your mouth, and spoke compassionately to you about the means of your execution while you stared helplessly at the white threads of light in his vacuous blue eyes. Instead, you slip down into a cold green envelope beneath the roll and pitch of the waves; you drift and bump across the sandy Gulf floor, your clothes stringing bubbles to the surface, your eyes a feast for crabs and eels.

Then the fog began to flatten on the water and break up into turning wisps and wraiths that hovered just above the waves, and the eastern sky went gray. A soft rose-colored light broke on the horizon, and I saw the quarter moon for the first time that night. Fifty yards away a round shape, like the back of an enormous seagoing turtle, floated in the swell. I swam to it, one long stroke at a time, breathing sideways, blowing water out my nose, until finally my hand struck the life jacket that was wrapped around the chest of Ray Fontenot.

I had to roll him over to get to the laces. His body was strung with kelp, his skin blistered with burns and streaked with oil, his sightless eyes poached in his head. I jerked the jacket free and put my arms through the openings and felt the tension and ball of pain go out of my lower back as I was suddenly made weightless, bobbing along in a cresting wave that swept me toward the Louisiana shore.

For a short time I fell asleep, then awoke to the sound of sea gulls, the shadows of pelicans gliding by overhead, the heavy, fecund smell that speckled trout make when they school up, the early sun like a red wafer over the long green roll of the Gulf.

Five minutes later I heard an outboard engine, and I tried to wave my arms above the waves. Then he saw me and turned his engine so that he made a wide circle and approached me with the waves at his stern. It was a bass boat, a long, aluminum, flat-bottomed boat designed for freshwater fishing, not for weather or being any distance from land. The man sitting at an angle in the stern, with the throttle of an Evinrude in his hand, wore Marine Corps utility pants, a gold and purple LSU jersey with Mike the Tiger on the front, a pale blue porkpie hat mashed down on his big head.

He cut the engine, drifted into me, then reached down and grabbed me by the back of the life jacket. His face was round and flushed red with windburn and the strain of lifting me.

"What's happening, Streak?" Cletus said.

I lay in the bottom of his boat, my skin numb and dead to the touch and wrinkled with water-soak. I could see the coastline, the tide breaking across the sandbar, and white cranes rising from a cypress swamp.

You went out after me in this? I wanted to say. But I was breathless with cold and the words wouldn't come.

"How you like civil service with the DEA?" he said above the engine's roar. "Those babies really know how to take care of you, don't they? Yes, indeedy, they do."

* * *

CHAPTER 9

Through my hospital room windows I could see the tops of oak trees, a pink two-story house with iron grillwork across the street, palm fronds on the esplanade, and, where the side street fed into St. Charles, the big green iron streetcar when it passed. My room was white, and the sunlight was bright above the oak trees outside.

My right eye was crimped partly shut by the tape that covered the stitches in my eyebrow. There were four stitches in my lip, and they felt like a large plastic insect when I moved my tongue across them. I slept through most of the morning, and at noon I ate a lunch of mashed potatoes, baked chicken, early peas, and Jell-O, and fell asleep again. Two hours later I was awakened by Minos's phone call.

"What happened out there?" he said.

I told him.

"How'd you know which hospital I was in?" I asked.

"Your buddy Clete called me. Look, I'm sorry about this, Dave. I really am. There's always risk in undercover work, but we usually do a better job of protecting our people."