Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“It’s Iberia Parish, but what do you care?” I said. “You’re going to do something for me, right? Because you don’t want Lafayette vice down here, do you? You’re a reasonable guy, Don.”

He bit down on the corner of his lip and looked away from my face.

“I got a number I can call,” he said.

“Not tonight you don’t.”

I could see his lip discolor where his tooth continued to chew on it. He blew air out his nose as though he had a cold.

“I don’t want trouble.”

“You shouldn’t pimp.”

“How about lightening up a bit?” He looked at the two remaining customers in the bar. They were young and they sat at a table in the far corner. Behind them, through the opened blinds, headlights passed on the wet street.

“Two of your girls are in room six. You need to get them out,” I said.

“Wait a minute…”

“Let’s get it done, Don. No more messing around.”

“That’s Mr. Mapes. I can’t do that.”

“Time’s running out, partner.”

“Look, you got a beef here or something, that’s your business. I can’t get mixed up in this. Those broads don’t listen to me, anyway.”

“Well, I guess you’re a stand-up guy. Your boss won’t mind you getting busted, will he? Or having heat all over the place? You think one of those girls might have some flake up her nose? Maybe it’s just sinus trouble.”

“All right,” he said, and held his palms upward. “I got to tell these people I’m closing. Then I’ll call the room. Then I’m gone, out of it, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, I’m out of it, right?” he said.

“I’m already having trouble remembering your face.”

Five minutes after the bartender phoned Mapes’s room the two prostitutes came out the front door, a man’s angry voice resounding out of the room behind them, and got into a convertible and drove away. I opened the wooden toolbox in the bed of my pickup truck and took out a five-foot length of chain that I sometimes used to pull stumps. I folded it in half and wrapped the two loose ends around my hand. The links were rusted and made an orange smear across my palm. I walked across the gravel under the dripping trees toward the door of room 6. The chain clinked against my leg; the heat lightning jumped in white spiderwebs all over the black sky.

Vidrine must have thought the women had come back because he was smiling when he opened the door in his boxer undershorts. Behind him Mapes was eating a sandwich in his robe at a wet bar. The linen and covers on the king-sized bed were in disarray, and the hallway that led into another bedroom was littered with towels, wet bathing suits, and beer cups.

Vidrine’s smile collapsed, and his face suddenly looked rigid and glazed. Mapes set his sandwich in his plate, wet the scar on his lower lip as though he were contemplating an abstract equation, and moved toward a suitcase that was opened on a folding luggage holder.

I heard the chain clink and sing through the air, felt it come back over my head again and again, felt their hands rake against the side of my face; my ears roared with sound—a rumble deep under the Gulf, the drilling-rig floor trembling and clattering violently, the drill pipe exploding out of the wellhead in a red-black fireball. My hand was bitten and streaked with rust; it was the color of dried blood inside a hypodermic needle used to threaten a six-year-old child; it was like the patterns that I streaked across the walls, the bedclothes, the sliding glass doors that gave onto the courtyard where azalea petals floated on the surface of a lighted turquoise pool.

CHAPTER

4

Alafair woke up with an upset stomach the next morning, and I kept her home from school. I fixed her soft-boiled eggs and weak tea, then took her down to work with me in the bait shop. The sun had come up in a clear sky that morning, and the trees along the dirt road were bright green from the rain. The myrtle bushes were filled with purple bloom in the sunlight.

“Why you keep looking down the road, Dave?” Alafair asked. She sat on one of the phone-cable spools on the dock, watching me unscrew a fouled spark plug from an outboard engine. The canvas umbrella in the center of the spool was folded, and her Indian-black hair was shiny in the bright light.

“I’m just admiring the day,” I said.

I felt her looking at the side of my face.

“You don’t feel good?” she said.