"Are you sure Keats wasn't in the car when Romero shot at you?" he said.
"Not unless he was hiding on the floor."
"Then how did he get into the Toyota, and what did somebody have to gain by blowing up his shit and then dumping him with a car we were bound to find?"
"I don't know."
"Give me your speculations."
"I told you, I don't know."
"Come on, how many people had reason to snuff him?"
"About half the earth."
"Around here, how many people?"
"What are you getting at?"
"I'm not sure. I just know I want Bubba Rocque, and the people who could help me put him away keep showing up dead. That pisses me off."
"It probably pissed Keats off a lot worse."
"I don't think that's clever."
"I've got a revelation for you, Minos. Homicide isn't like narcotics. Your clientele breaks the law for one reason—money. But people kill each other for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes the reasons aren't logical ones. Particularly when you're talking about Keats and his crowd."
"You know, you always give me the feeling you tell other people only what you think they should know. Why is it that I always have that feeling about you?"
"Search me."
"I also have the feeling that you don't care how these guys get scratched, as long as they're off the board."
I walked down to the Toyota's open passenger door, rested my arm on top, and looked inside again. There wasn't much of significance to see: shards of glass on the floorboards, two exit holes in the cloth of the passenger's seat, pieces of splintered lead embedded in the dashboard, a long furrow in the headliner. A warm, wet odor rose from the upholstery.
"I think Romero drove the Toyota out here to dump it," I said. "I think Keats was supposed to meet him with another car. Then for some reason Romero blew him away. Maybe it was just an argument between the two of them. Maybe Keats was supposed to whack him and it didn't go right."
"Why would Keats want to whack Romero?"
"How the hell should I know? Look, we shouldn't even be talking about Romero. He should have been sent up the road when he first got busted. Why don't you turn the screws on your colleagues?"
"Maybe I have. Maybe they're not happy with the situation, either. Sometimes these assholes get off their leashes. One time we put a street dealer in the protected-witness program and he paid us back by shooting a liquor store clerk. It works out like that sometimes."
"I'm not sympathetic. Come on, Cecil. See you around, Minos."
Cecil and I headed down the levee past boat rentals, the bait shops and beer joints, the fish camps set up on stilts. Out in the water, the strips of moss on the dead cypress trees lifted and fell in the wind. I bought Cecil a catfish plate in a Negro café in Breaux Bridge, then we drove back to New Iberia while the heat danced on the road in front of us.
I spent the next two hours doing paperwork at the office, but I couldn't concentrate on the forms and folders that were spread around my desktop. I was never good at administration or clerical tasks, primarily because I always felt they had little to do with the job at hand and were created for people who made careers of running in place. And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was far greater than any theft of my goods or money.
I fixed a cup of coffee and stared out the window at the trees in the sunlight. I called home to check on Alafair, then called Batist at the dock. I went to the rest room when I really didn't have to go. Then once again I looked at my uncompleted mileage report, my time and activity report, my arrest reports on local characters who had already bonded out and would probably be cut loose altogether before court appearance. I opened the largest drawer in my desk and dropped all my paperwork into it, eased the drawer shut with my shoe, signed out of the office, and went home just in time to see a taxicab leave Robin Gaddis with her suitcase on my front porch.
She wore patent leather spiked heels with Levi's, and a loose blouse that looked as if it was touched with pink and gray shades from a watercolor brush. I turned off the truck's engine and walked toward her across the dead pecan leaves in the yard. She smiled and lighted a cigarette, blowing the smoke up into the air, and tried to look relaxed and pleasant, but her eyes were bright and her face tight with anxiety.
"Wow, this is really out among the pelicans and the alligators," she said. "You got snakes and nutrias and all that stuff crawling around under your house?"
"How you doing, Robin?"
"Ask me after I'm sure I'm back on earth. I flew on one of those greaseball airlines where the pilot's got a three-day beard and blows garlic and Boone's Farm all over the place. We were dropping through the air pockets so fast you couldn't hear the engines, and all the time they're playing mambo music on the loudspeakers and I'm smelling reefer out of the front of the plane."