Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“He called a bar in Vegas,” Nygurski said. “He said to the guy who answered, ‘Tell Charlie I’ve got a yard job for him up here.’ You know what that is?”

“No, that’s a new one.”

“I’ve heard a couple of Quentin graduates use it. It’s when they do somebody out on the yard. The last time we heard Sal say something like that on a tap, a witness against him got a .22 magnum round behind the ear. But we don’t know who Charlie is.”

I tossed another small stone in a gentle arc out on the water. It made a circle like a trout rising, then the circle floated on down the riffle into white water.

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” he said. “The Dios have lots of enemies.”

I brushed the gravel off my palms and I didn’t say anything for a while. The sun was hot now, and flies were hatching out of the cattails and rainbows popping at them in a shaded pool under the cliff.

“What do you think I ought to do?” I said finally.

“Maybe it’s time to go back to New Iberia.”

“You think he’d bring in a mechanic, risk his whole operation, because of pride?”

“Look, he’s got a little clout in the mob because he’s Frank Dio’s son. But basically Sal’s a loser. He’s a lousy musician, he did time for stolen credit cards, his wife dumped him after he broke her nose, his friends are bought-and-paid-for rummies and cokeheads. Then you come along and remodel his face while everybody gets to watch. What do you think a guy like that is feeling for you right now?”

“It won’t matter, then, if I go back to Louisiana or not.”

“Maybe not.”

I looked at my watch. Across the stream I saw a hawk drop suddenly into a meadow and hook a field mouse in its talons.

“Thanks for the fishing trip. I need to pick up my truck now,” I said.

“I’m sorry to be the one to drop this on you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Why in God’s name did you do it, Robicheaux?”

I didn’t sleep that night. As we say in AA, the executive committee held a session in my head. I thought about sending Alafair back to Louisiana, to stay with my cousin or Batist and his wife, but then I would lose all control over her situation. I doubted that Harry Mapes would make a move against either of us as long as my trial was pending and it looked like I was going to take the fall for Dalton Vidrine’s murder; but then again, you can’t second-guess a psychopath, and I believed that’s what he was.

I still wasn’t convinced by Dan Nygurski about Sally Dio’s calling Vegas to bring in a contract killer. The mob, or at least its members I had known in New Orleans, did not operate like that. They whacked out witnesses, Colombian competitors, and each other, but they didn’t hit ordinary people because of a personal grudge. Their own leadership didn’t allow it; it brought down too much heat on their operation and compromised their hard-bought relationships with politicians, police officials, and judges. Sally Dee was a vicious punk, but his father was smart and cautious, a survivor of gang wars and Mafia power struggles. I just didn’t believe they would be willing to blow it all over a broken tooth.

So the executive committee stayed in session until the false dawn and then adjourned with little resolved. As always when I was weak and drained and absolutely burnt-out with my own failed attempts at reasoning through a problem, I turned it over to my Higher Power; then I cooked sausage and eggs for our breakfast, walked Alafair to school, made arrangements for her to stay with the baby-sitter, put my .45 and an extra clip under the truck seat, and headed over the Divide for the Blackfeet Reservation.

My fan belt broke ten miles south of the reservation, and I hitched a ride with an Indian feed grower to a filling station at a four-corners four miles up the road. I bought a new fan belt, then started walking on the shoulder of the road back toward my truck. It was a mistake. Rain clouds drifted down over the low green hills to the east, shadowing the fields and sloughs and clumps of willows and cottonwoods; suddenly the sky burst open and a hard, driving rain stung my skin and drenched my clothes in minutes. I took cover against the rock face of a small hill that the road cut through, and watched the storm shower work its way across the land. Then a paintless and battered school bus, with adhesive tape plastered on its cracked windows, with bicycles, collapsed tents, shovels, and two canoes roped to its sides and roof, came highballing around the corner like a highway-borne ghost out of the 1960s.

When the driver stopped for me I could hear screws scouring into brake shoes, the twisted exhaust pipe hammering against the frame, the engine firing as if all the spark plug leads had been deliberately crossed. The driver threw open the folding door with a long lever, and I stepped inside of what could have been a time capsule. The seats had all been torn out and replaced with hammocks, bunks, sleeping bags, a butane stove, a bathtub, cardboard boxes bursting with clothes. A woman nursed a child at her breast; a white man with Indian braids sat on the floor, carving an animal out of a soap bar; another woman was changing an infant’s diapers on the backseat; a bearded man in a ponytail slept facedown in a hammock, so that his body looked like a netted fish’s suspended from the ceiling. I could smell sour milk, reefer, and burnt food.

The driver had dilated blue eyes and a wild red beard, and he wore leather wristbands and a fatigue jacket open on his bare chest, which was deeply tanned and scrolled with dark blue jailhouse tattoos. He told me to sit down in a wood chair that was located next to him at the head of the aisle. Then he slammed the door shut with the lever, crunched the transmission into gear, and we careened down the road in the blowing rain. I told him where I was going, and held on to a metal rail to keep from bouncing out of the chair.

“That’s a bad place to stand, man,” he said. “There’s fuckers come around that curve seventy miles an hour, crazy sonsobitches in log trucks think they own the fucking road. What one of them needs is somebody to wind up a brick on a string and put it through his window. You live around here?”

“No, I’m just a visitor.”

“That’s a weird accent. I thought maybe you was a Canuck.”

“No, I’m from Louisiana.”

His eyes were curious, and they moved over my face. The bus drifted toward the shoulder.

“Say, there’s a café up on the right. I think I’ll get off and get something to eat,” I said.

“I said we’d take you to your truck. You’ll get there, man. Don’t worry about it.”