Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

Our cells were unlocked at seven A.M. when a trusty and the night screw wheeled in the food cart, which every morning was stacked with aluminum containers of grits, coffee, and fried pork butts. Until lockup at five in the afternoon, we were free to move around in an area called the bull run, take showers, play cards with a deck whose missing members had been replaced with cards fashioned out of penciled cardboard, or stare listlessly out the window at the tops of the trees on the courthouse lawn. But most of the time I stayed in my cell, filling out loan applications or reading a stiffened, water-stained issue of Reader’s Digest.

I was sitting on the side of my iron bunk, which hung from the wall on chains, printing across the top of an application, when a shadow moved across the page. Silhouetted in the open door of my cell was the biker who had nailed his girl’s hands to a tree. He was thick-bodied and shirtless, his breasts covered with tattooed birds, and his uncut hair and wild beard made his head look as though it were surrounded by a mane. I could feel his eyes move across the side of my face, peel away tissue, probe for the soft organ, the character weakness, the severed nerve.

“You think you can cut it up there?” he said.

I wet my pencil tip and kept on writing without looking up.

“What place is that?” I said.

“Angola. You think you can hack it?”

“I’m not planning on being there.”

“That’s what I said my first jolt. Next stop, three years up in the Block with the big stripes. They got some badass dudes there, man.”

I turned to the next page and tried to concentrate on the printed words.

“The night screw says you’re an ex-cop,” he said.

I set my pencil down and looked at the opposite wall.

“Does that make a problem for you?” I said.

“Not me, man. But there’s some mean fuckers up on that farm. There’s guys that’ll run by your cell and throw a gasoline bomb in on you. Melt you into grease.”

“I don’t want to be rude, but you’re standing in my light.”

He grinned, and there was a malevolent light in his face. Then he stretched, yawned, laughed outright as though he were witnessing an absurdity of

some kind, and walked away to the window that gave onto the courthouse lawn.

I did push-ups, I did curls by lifting the bunk with my fingertips, I took showers, and I slept as much as I could. At night I could hear the others breaking wind, talking to themselves, masturbating, snoring. The enormous Negro sometimes sang a song that began, “My soul is in a paper bag at the bottom of your garbage can.” Then one night he went crazy in his cell, gripping the bars with both hands and bashing his head against them until blood and sweat were flying out into the bull run and we heard the screw shoot the steel lock bar on the door.

On the thirteenth day I received two visitors I wasn’t prepared for. A deputy escorted me down the spiral metal stairs to a windowless room that was used as a visiting area for those of us who were charged with violent crimes. Sitting at a wood table scarred with cigarette burns were Dixie Lee Pugh, one arm in a sling, his yellow hair crisscrossed with bandages, and my old homicide partner, Cletus Purcel. As always, Clete looked too big for his shirt, his sport coat, the tie that was pulled loose from his throat, the trousers that climbed above his socks. His cigarette looked tiny in his hand, the stitched scar through his eyebrow a cosmetic distraction from the physical confidence and humor in his face.

Clete, old friend, why did you throw it in?

They were both smiling so broadly they might have been at a party. I smelled beer on Dixie’s breath. I sat down at the table, and the deputy locked a barred door behind me and sat on a chair outside.

“You made your bail all right, huh, Dixie?” I said.

He wore a maroon shirt hanging outside his gray slacks, and one foot was bandaged and covered with two athletic socks. His stomach made a thick roll against the bottom of his shirt.

“Better than that, Dave. They cut me loose.”

“They did what?”

“I’m out of it. Free and clear. They dropped the possessions charge.” He was looking at the expression on my face.

“They lost interest,” Clete said.

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Come on, Dave. Lighten up. You know how it works,” Clete said.

“No, I think my education is ongoing here.”

“We already have a firm on retainer in New Orleans, and I hired the best in Lafayette. You know these local guys aren’t going to get tied up in court for months over a chickenshit holding bust.”