Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“My airplane?”

“That’s right.”

“How’d they fuck my airplane?”

“I think maybe somebody put sand in your gas tank.”

“Who’s this somebody you’re telling me about?”

“That’s all you get. You can make use of it or forget I was here.”

“Yeah? No shit? Fuck with my airplane.”

“If I were you, I’d check it out.”

“You see my airplane around here?”

“Well, I told you what I had to say, Sal. I’ll be going now.”

“Why you doing me these favors?” he said, and grinned at the two men, who were leaning against the dock rail.

“Because I don’t want a guy like you on my conscience.”

He winked at the two men, both of whom wore shades.

“Keep looking at that spot between those two islands,” he said to me, and pointed. “That’s it, right over there. Keep watching. You hear that sound? It’s an airplane. You know whose plane that is? You see it now, coming past those pine trees? It sounds like there’s sand in the gas tank? It looks like it’s going to crash?”

The milk-white amphibian came in low between the islands and touched down into the dark-blue surface of the water, the backwash of the propellers blowing clouds of spray in the air.

“Number one, I got locks on those gas tanks,” Sal said. “Number two, I got a pilot who’s also a mechanic, and he checks out everything before we go anywhere.” Then he looked at the other two men again and laughed. “Hey, man, let me ask you an honest question. I look like I just got off the boat with a bone in my nose and a spear in my hand? Come on, I ain’t mad. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Give me an honest answer.”

I turned to go.

“Hey, hey, man, don’t run off yet. You’re too fucking much.” His mouth was grinning widely. “Tell me for real. You think we’re all that dumb? That we weren’t going to catch on to all these games? I mean, I look that dumb to you?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“It was a good scam. But you ought to quit when you’re ahead. Foo-Foo promised the florist a hundred bucks if he should see the guy who sent the flowers and the note. So he came out yesterday and told us he seen the guy. So we found the guy, and the guy told us all about it. Charlie Dodds hasn’t been anywhere around here.”

“It looks like you’re on top of everything. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

He tried to hold his grin, but I saw it fading, and I also saw the hard brown glint in his eyes, like a click of light you see in broken beer glass.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen a little ways down the road,” he said. “I’m going to be playing cards with some guys in Nevada. Not Carl or Foo-Foo here. Guys you never heard of or saw before. I’ll just mention your name and the name of that shithole you come from. I’ll mention Purcel’s name, too. And I might throw Dixie’s in as a Lucky Strike extra. That’s all. I won’t say nothing else. Then one day a guy’ll come to your door. Or he’ll be standing by your truck when you come out of a barbershop. Or maybe he’ll want to rent a boat from you. It’s going to be a big day in your life. When it happens, I want you to remember me.”

His two men grinned from behind their shades. The sunlight was brilliant and cold on the lake, the wind as unrelenting as a headache.

CHAPTER

12

The story was on the front page of the Missoulian the next morning. The amphibian went down on the Salish Indian Reservation, just south of the lake. Two Indians who saw it crash said they heard the engines coughing and misfiring as the plane went by overhead, then the engines seemed to stall altogether and the plane veered sideways between two hills, plowing a trench through a stand of pines, and exploded. A rancher found a smashed wheelchair hanging in a tree two hundred yards away.

I wondered what Sal thought about in those last moments while the pilot jerked impotently against the yoke and Sal’s hired men wrenched about in their seats, their faces stretched with disbelief, expecting him to do something, and the horizon tilting at a violent angle and the trees and cliffs rushing up at him like a fist. I wondered if he thought of his father or his lover in Huntsville pen or the Mexican gambler whose ear he mutilated on a yacht. I wondered if perhaps he thought that he had stepped into history with Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly.

But I doubted that he thought any of these things. I suspected that in his last moments Sal thought about Sal.

I folded the paper and dropped it into the trash sack in the kitchen. Alafair was putting our Styrofoam cooler, with our sandwiches and soft drinks, on the front seat of the truck.