Heaven's Prisoners (Dave Robicheaux 2)

"Is that right?"

"Put it in the bank. I'll see you around. Thanks for the boudin."

I stood up to leave, and he rose from the table with me. His face was flat, heated, as unknowable as a shark's. Then suddenly he grinned, ducked into a boxer's crouch again, bobbed, and feinted a left at my face.

"Hey, got you!" he said. "No shit, you flinched. Don't deny it."

I stared at him.

"What are you looking at?" he said. "All right, so I was hot. You come on pretty strong. I'm not used to that."

"I've got to go, Bubba."

"Hell, no. Let's slip on the pillows. We'll take it easy on each other. Hey, get this. I went to this full-contact karate club in Lafayette, you know, where they box with their feet like kangaroos or something. I'm in the ring with this guy, and he's grunting and swinging his dirty foot around in the air, and all these guys are yelling because they know he's going to cut my head off, and I stepped inside him real fast and busted him three times before he hit the deck. They had to lead him back to the dressing room like somebody took his brains out with an ice cream scoop."

"I'm over the hill for it, and I still have to work this afternoon, anyway."

"Bullshit. I can see it in your eyes. You'd still like to take me. It's that long reach. It's always a big temptation, isn't it?"

"Maybe."

I was almost disengaged from Bubba and his mercurial personality when his wife walked through the French doors onto the patio. She was at least ten years younger than he. Her black hair was tied with ribbon behind her head; her skin was dark, and she wore a two-piece red and yellow flower-print bathing suit with a matching sarong fastened on one hip. In her hand she carried an open shoe box filled with bottles and emery boards for her nails. She was pretty in the soft, undefined way that Cajun girls often are before they gain weight in the middle years. She smiled at me, sat at the patio table, crossed her legs, arching one sandal off her foot, and put a piece of boudin in her mouth.

"Dave, you remember Claudette, from New Iberia?" Bubba said.

"I'm sorry, I'm a little vague on people from home sometimes," I said. "I lived in New Orleans for fourteen years or so."

"I bet you remember her mother, Hattie Fontenot."

"Oh yes, I think I do," I said, my eyes flat.

"I bet you lost your cherry in one of her cribs on Railroad Avenue," Bubba said.

"I'm not always big on boyhood memories," I said.

"You and your brother had a paper route on Railroad Avenue. Are you going to tell me y'all never got paid in rade?"

"I guess I just don't remember."

"She had two colored joints on the corner," he said. "We used to go nigger-knocking down there, then get laid for two dollars."

"Bubba just likes to talk rough sometimes. It doesn't bother me. You don't have to be embarrassed," she said.

"I'm not."

"I'm not ashamed of my mother. She had a lot of good qualities. She didn't use profane language in polite company, unlike some people I know." She had a heavy Cajun accent, and her brown eyes had a strange red cast in them. They were as round as a doll's.

"Bubba, will you make me a gin rickey?" she said.

"Your thermos is in the icebox."

"So? I'd like one in a glass, please."

"She can drink gin rickeys all day and not get loaded." Bubba said. "I think she's got hollow buns."

"I don't think Dave is used to our kind of talk," she said.

"He's married too, isn't he?"