A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

We ate cereal and toast and drank coffee in the glass-enclosed breakfast room while the Negro houseman helped Paul get dressed. The early sun had grown pale and wispy in the east, and clouds that were as black as oil smoke were forming in a bank over the Gulf.

"It might be a rough day for a fishing trip," I said.

"It'll blow over," he said.

He fiddled with his watchband, tinked his coffee spoon nervously against his saucer, looked out at the darkening line across the southern horizon. Then he said, "You know where Kim might be?"

"No."

"The manager at my club said she didn't come into work yesterday and she doesn't answer her phone. She didn't call you?"

"Why would she call me?"

"Because she digs you."

He fluttered his fingers on the tablecloth. "I'd better send a car out to her place," he said. His eyes were narrowed, and they looked out through the glass and roved around the backyard. "Maybe she split. Eventually most of them do. I thought she might be different."

"Don't worry about her. She's probably all right," I said.

One of Tony's bodyguards, a black-haired man of about twenty-five, came into the kitchen for coffee. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and his beltless brown slacks hung down low on his flat stomach. He looked at us without speaking, then filled his cup.

"Put a shirt on when you walk around the house," Tony said.

The man walked back into the dining room without answering.

"It's a frigging zoo," Tony said. "I treat people with respect, I pay them decent wages, and they try to wipe their frigging feet on me. You know, I got a cousin runs a lot of action in Panama City. His wife tells him one day he's a drag, he's overweight, he's got bad breath, he's got a putz the size of a Vienna sausage, that the only thing he ever did for her was crush her two feet into the mattress every night. So she dumps him and starts making it with this county judge who's on the pad with the____family in Tampa. Except she and the judge both get juiced out of their minds one night, and both of them get busted while she's blowing the judge in her Porsche behind his nightclub. She gets out of jail in the morning, hung over and trembling and her picture on the front page of the Panama City newspaper, and then she goes home and finds out my cousin had her Porsche towed back to her house, and she thinks maybe something's going right after all, my cousin's going to forgive her and square the sodomy charge with the city. Except she sees the Porsche is sitting flat on its springs because my cousin had a cement truck fill it up with concrete. I ought to take lessons from him."

He looked again at the sky and at the trees blowing in the yard. He opened his mouth and scratched the tautness of his cheek with his fingernail.

"What's eating you, Tony?" I said.

"Nothing."

"You haven't gotten back into pharmaceuticals, have you?" I smiled at him.

"I'm cool," he said.

"You don't have to go into this deal. Let it slide if it doesn't feel right," I said.

I watched his face. His eyes still roved the backyard. Back out, partner,

I thought.

"I already committed you for fifty large," he said. "If you don't take it, I have to."

"I have to call Bootsie."

"I'll do it for you. While you go for your money with Jess. Nobody needs to know where we're going today, Dave."

"All right," I said. And there went my opportunity to tip Minos through the phone tap. Then I began to realize what was really on Tony's mind.

"I guess your little girl misses you," he said.

"Yes."

"After today it looks like you'll have everything you need to make your investors happy."

"I guess I will."