Heaven's Prisoners (Dave Robicheaux 2)

He saw me look at the side of his face. He bit off a hangnail, spit it off the end of his tongue, and looked at the wrecker cable quivering against the surface of the water.

"Sorry," he said.

A cloud of yellow sand mushroomed under the water, and suddenly the rear end of the Toyota burst through a tangle of lily pads and uprooted cattails into the sunlight. The tow-truck driver dragged the car clear of the water's edge and bounced it on the bank, the broken back window gaping like a ragged mouth. Two St. Martin Parish sheriff's deputies opened the side doors, and a flood of water, silt, moss, yellowed vegetation, and fish-eels cascaded out on the ground. The eels were long and fat, with bright silver scales and red gills, and they writhed and snapped among the buttercups like tangles of snakes. The man in the front seat had fallen sideways so that his head hung out the passenger's door. His head was strung with dead vines and covered with mud and leeches. Minos tried to see over my shoulder as I looked down at the dead man.

"Jesus Christ, half his face is eaten off," he said.

"Yep."

"Well, maybe Victor wanted to be part of the bayou country."

"It's not Victor Romero," I said. "It's Eddie Keats."

* * *

9

A DEPUTY STARTED to pull him by his wrists onto the grass, then wiped his palms on his pants and found a piece of newspaper in the weeds. He wrapped it around Keats's arm and jerked him out on the ground. The water sloshed out of Keats's suede cowboy boots, and his shirt was unbuttoned and pulled up on his chest. There was a black, puffed hole the size of my thumb in his right ribcage, with a seared area around the skin flap, and an exit wound under the left arm pit. The deputy nudged Keats's arm with his shoe to expose the wound better.

"It looks like somebody scooped it out with a tablespoon, don't it?" he said.

The coroner motioned to two paramedics who stood by the back of an ambulance parked at the top of the levee. They pulled the gurney out of the ambulance and started down the slope with it. A black body bag was folded under one of the canvas straps.

"How long has he been in the water?" I asked the coroner.

"Two or three days," he said. He was a big, fat, bald man, with a shirt pocket full of cigars. His buttocks looked like watermelons. He squinted in the brightness of the sun's reflection off the water. "They turn white and ripen pretty fast in this weather. He hasn't gotten mushy yet, but he was working on it. Y'all know him?"

"He was a low-level button man," I said.

"A what?"

"A contract killer. The bargain-basement variety," Minos said.

"Well, somebody sure stirred his hash for him," the coroner said.

"What kind of gun are we talking about?" Minos said.

"It's going to be guesswork because there's no bullet. Maybe some fragments, but they won't help much. Offhand, I'd rule out a rifle. The muzzle flash burned his skin, so it was pressed right up against him. But the angle was upward, which would mean the shooter would have to hold the rifle low and depress the stock he fired, which wouldn't make much sense. So I'd say he was killed with a pistol, a big one, maybe a .44 Magnum or a .

45 loaded with soft-nosed shells or hollowpoints. He must have thought somebody stuffed a hand grenade down his throat. Y'all look perplexed."

"You might say that," Minos said.

"What's the problem?" the coroner said.

"The wrong guy's in the car," I said.

"He sounds like the right guy to me. Count your blessings," the coroner said. "You want to look through his pockets before we bag him up?"

"I'll be over to St. Martinville later," I said. "I'd like a copy of the autopsy report, too."

"Hell, come on over and watch. I'll have him apart in ten minutes." His eyes were bright and a smile worked around the corners of his mouth. "Relax. I just like to have a little fun with you guys sometimes. I'll have a copy ready for you by tonight."

The paramedics unzipped the body bag and lifted Eddie Keats into it. A fish-eel fell out of his pants leg and flipped in the weeds as though its back were broken.

A few minutes later, Minos and I watched the ambulance, the coroner's car, and the two St. Martin parish sheriff's cars disappear down the levee. The two-truck driver was having trouble with his winch, and he and Cecil were trying to fix it. A hot wind blew across the marsh and ruffled the water and flattened the buttercups around our feet. I could smell the schools of bluegill that were feeding on the mosquitoes on the shade of the willow islands.

Minos walked down to the Toyota and rubbed his thumb over one of my .45 holes in the trunk. The hole was smooth and silver around the edges, as though it had been cut by a machinist's punch.