Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

He made a sliding blues chord high up on the guitar’s neck, then ran it all the way down to the nut.

“I learned that from Sam Hopkins,” he said. “I went out to his house in the Fifth Ward in Houston. People said them nigras’ll leave you bleeding in the street for the garbageman to find. They treated me like royalty, man.”

“I spent some time Wednesday in some courthouses east of the Divide.”

His face went blank.

“I found some of the deals you made over there.”

He continued to look out at the lawn and the bees lifting off the clover.

“I’m not an expert on the oil business, but I saw some peculiar stuff in those lease files,” I said.

“They’re public records. A person can look all they want to.” He began fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

“Every time you leased up a big block of land for Star Drilling, there was a hole or two left in it.”

He lit his cigarette and smoked it with his elbow propped on the belly of his guitar.

“Those holes were leased or bought up by one of Sal’s businesses in Vegas,” I said. “The same company name is on some of the deals you made for him around Flathead Lake.”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“So he does want into the oil and gas business.”

“He wants to cover his action every way he can. He’s shooting for the big score in gambling and lake property development, he wants in on the gas domes on the East Front. In the drilling business, it don’t matter if they tap in on top of your property or not. As long as you’re in the pool, part of the dome, you’re going to get royalties. That ain’t all he’s got on his mind, either. They make a big strike over there, it could be like that pipeline deal up in Alaska. All them sonsofbitches are horny, and they got plenty of money for dope, too. Them conservation people are hollering because the gas is full of hydrogen sulfide, it stinks like rotten eggs, but they ought to hear what Sal’s got planned for the place.”

“So you took Star over the hurdles?”

“That’s about it.”

“And you helped Sal start out in a brand-new enterprise.”

“You want me on the cross? I told you I done it. I ain’t lied about it.”

“But that’s not all of it.”

“What?”

“Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes had to know what you were doing.”

“At first they didn’t, but Vidrine heard about it from another guy who was working the same township and range as me. He told Mapes, and they stuck it to me at the motel one night. I thought they were going to drop the dime on me with the home office, but they just wanted me to piece off the action. Sal said no problem. It cost him a little coke. Everybody was happy.”

“You’ve got to give me something I can use against Mapes.”

“I got nothing to offer. I told you all of it. They’re like piranha in a goldfish bowl. You stick your finger in it, you take back a polished bone.”

I left him thumbing the bass string on his guitar and staring out at the lawn, as though the blue and green shades in the grass held a secret for him. A few minutes later he came into the house and changed into an old shirt and a pair of ripped and faded pink slacks and drove off toward the smoking stacks of the pulp mill west of town.

After he was gone, I sat alone in the silence of the house with the realization that there was nothing I could do today to help my case. I knew of nothing I could do tomorrow or the next day either. I had run out of options. The time has come, I thought, to think not in terms of what to do but instead of where to go. Any jail or prison is a bad place. The person who thinks otherwise has never been in one. Angola is worse than most. The man who would willingly submit to do time unjustly in a place like that would take pleasure in his own crucifixion, I thought. It was a big country, and there were lots of places to get lost in it.

But the idea of being a permanent fugitive from the law was so strange and removed from any concept I had ever had about my fate in this world

that thinking about it left me numb and staring at phantasms in the air.

Annie, I thought.

But she came to me only in the darkness, and her visits had become less frequent and her voice had grown weaker across the water and in the din of the rain. I had only myself to depend on now, and my Higher Power and the AA program that I followed. Maybe, as I had told Dixie Lee in the hospital, it was time to look at the things that I had rather than at the problems that seemed to beset me without a solution. I was sober, even though I had set myself up for a fall by not attending meetings. When I had wanted to join Annie in that watery place more than anything in the world, I had gone into therapy rather than let that morning arrive when I would awaken in the blue-gray light, sit quietly on the side of my bed in my underwear, and fit the iron sight of my .45 against the roof of my mouth. And, last, I had Alafair, who was given to me inside a green bubble of air from below the Gulf’s surface.