Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

chewing.

"You got a rest room?" he asked.

"It's in the back, behind those empty pop cases."

"How much your razor blades?" he said to Batist.

"This ain't no drug sto'. What you after, man?" Batist said.

The man wiped his mouth with the flats of his fingers. The lines around his eyes were stretched flat.

Batist leaned on his arms, his biceps flexing like rolls of metal washers.

"Don't be giving me no truck," he said.

I eased along the counter until the man's eyes left Batist and fixed on me.

"I'm a police officer. Do you need directions to get somewhere?" I said.

"I got a camp out there. That's where I come from. I can find it even in the dark," he said.

With one hand he clenched his bedroll, which seemed to have tent sticks inside it, and walked past the lunch meat coolers to the small rest room in back.

"Dave, let me ax you somet'ing. You got to bring a 'gator in your hog lot to learn 'gators eat pigs?" Batist said.

Ten minutes passed. I could hear the man splashing water behind the rest room door. Batist had gone back out on the dock and was chaining up the rental boats for the night. I walked past the cooler and tapped with one knuckle on the bolted door.

"We're closing up, podna. You have to come out," I said.

He jerked open the door, his face streaming water. His dark blue

shirt was unbuttoned, and on his chest I could see the same scarlet network of lines that was tattooed on his arms. The pupils in his eyes looked broken, like India ink dropped on green silk.

"I'd appreciate your cleaning up the water and paper towels you've left on the floor. Then I'd like to have a talk with you," I said.

He didn't answer. I turned and walked back up front.

I went behind the counter and started to stock the candy shelves for tomorrow, then I stopped and called the dispatcher at the department.

"I think I've got a meltdown in the shop. He might have a stolen boat, too," I said.

"The governor in town?"

"Lose the routine, Wally."

"You hurt my feelings . . . You want a cruiser, Dave?"

I didn't have the chance to answer. The man in the white straw hat came from behind me, his hand inserted in the end of his bedroll. I looked at his face and dropped the phone and fell clattering against the shelves and butane stove as he flung the bedroll and the sheath loose from the machete and ripped it through the air, an inch from my chest.

The honed blade sliced through the telephone cord and sunk into the counter's hardwood edge. He leaned over and swung again, the blade whanging off the shelves, dissecting cartons of worms and dirt, exploding a jar of pickled sausage.

Batist's coffee pot was scorched black and boiling on the butane fire. The handle felt like a heated wire across my bare palm. I threw the coffee, the top, and the grinds in the man's face, saw the shock in his eyes, his mouth drop open, the pain rise out of his throat like a broken bubble.

Then I grabbed the tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on his forearm.

He flung the machete from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot. I thought I was home free. I wasn't.

He hit me harder than I'd ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.