I stopped at a small wooden lunch stand run by a Negro, set back in a grove of oak trees. We sat at one of the tables in the shade and ordered pork chop sandwiches and dirty rice. The smoke from the stove hung in the sunlit branches of the trees.
"What's this about Immigration?" Minos said.
"I heard they busted both Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero."
"Where'd you get that?" He watched some black children playing pitch-and-catch next to the lunch stand. But I could see that his eyes were troubled.
"From a bartender in New Orleans."
"Sounds like a crummy source."
"No games. You knew that a government agency of some kind had a connection with Dartez or his body wouldn't have disappeared. You just weren't sure about Victor Romero."
"So?"
"I think Immigration was using these guys to infiltrate the sanctuary movement."
He put his hand on his chin and watched the children throwing the baseball.
"What does your bartender friend know about Romero now?" he said.
"Nothing."
"What's this guy's name? We'd like to chat with him."
"So would Bubba Rocque. That means that Jerry—that's his name, and he works at Smiling Jack's on Bourbon—is probably looking for a summer home in Afghanistan."
"You never disappoint me. So you've managed to help scare an informant out of town. Just out of curiosity, how is it that people tell you these things they don't care to share with us?"
"I stuck a cocked .45 up his nose."
"That's right, I forgot. You learned a lot of constitutional procedure from the New Orleans police department."
"I'm correct, though, aren't I? Somehow Immigration got these two characters into the underground railway, or whatever the sanctuary people call it."
"That's what they call it. And no matter what you might have figured out, it's still not your business. Of course, that doesn't make any difference to you. So I'll put it another way. We're nice guys at the DEA. We try to lodge as many lowlifes as we can in our gray-bar hotel chain. And we respect guys like you who are well intended but who have their brains encased in cement. But my advice to you is not to fuck with Immigration, particularly when you have an illegal in your home."
"You don't like them."
"I don't think about them. But you should. I once met a regional INS commissio
ner, an important man wired right into the White House. He said, 'If you catch 'em, you ought to clean 'em yourself.' I wouldn't want somebody like that on my case."
"It sounds like folksy bullshit to me," I said.
"You're a delight, Robicheaux."
"I don't want to mess up your lunch, but aren't you bothered by the fact that maybe a bomb sent that plane down at Southwest Pass, that somebody murdered a Catholic priest and two women who were fleeing a butcher shop we helped create in El Salvador?"
"Are you an expert on Central American politics?"
"No."
"Have you been down there?"
"No."
"But you give me that impression just the same. Like you've got the franchise on empathy."