Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

I got to my feet and tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white straw hat had leaped off the dock onto the concrete ramp and mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.

Batist came out of the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at me, then at the fleeing man.

"Batist, no!" I said.

Batist and I both stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the darkness.

I used the phone at the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the south.

"How come you ain't want me to stop him, Dave?" Batist said.

"He's deranged. I think it's PCP," I said. But he didn't understand. "It's called angel dust. People get high on it and bust up brick walls with their bare hands."

"He knowed who you was, Dave. He didn't have no interest in coming in till he seen you . . . This started wit' that old man from the penitentiary."

"What are you talking about?"

"That guard, the one you call Cap'n, the one probably been killing nigge

rs up at that prison farm for fifty years. I tole you not to have his kind in our shop. You let his grief get on your front porch, it don't stop there, no. It's gonna come in your house. But you don't never listen."

He pulled his folded cap out of his back pocket, popped it open, and fitted it on his head. He walked down the dock to his truck without saying good night. The tin roof on the bait shop creaked and pinged against the joists in the wind gusting out of the south.

CHAPTER 5

Monday morning the sky was blue, the breeze warm off the Gulf when I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus in Lafayette to talk with Buford LaRose. Classes had just let out for the noon hour, and the pale green quadrangle and colonnaded brick walkways were filled with students on their way to lunch. But Buford LaRose was not in his office in the English department, nor in the glassed-in campus restaurant that was built above a cypress lake behind old Burke Hall.

I called his office at the Oil Center, where he kept a part-time therapy practice, and was told by the receptionist I could find him at Red Lerille's Health and Racquet Club off Johnson Street.

"Are you sure? We were supposed to go to lunch," I said.

"Dr. LaRose always goes to the gym on Mondays," she answered.

Red's was a city-block-long complex of heated swimming pools, racquet ball and clay tennis courts, boxing and basketball gyms, indoor and outdoor running tracks, and cavernous air-conditioned rooms filled with hundreds of dumbbells and weight benches and exercise machines.

I looked for Buford a half hour before I glanced through the narrow glass window in the door of the men's steam room and saw him reading a soggy newspaper, naked, on the yellow tile stoop.

I borrowed a lock from the pro shop, undressed, and walked into the steam room and sat beside him.

His face jerked when he looked up from his paper. Then he smiled, almost fondly.

"You have a funny way of keeping appointments," I said.

"You didn't get my message?"

"No."

"I waited for you. I didn't think you were coming," he said.

"That's peculiar. I was on time."

"Not by my watch," he said, and smiled again.

"I wanted to tell you again I was sorry for my remarks at your party."

"You went to a lot of trouble to do something that's unnecessary."

The thermostat kicked on and filled the air with fresh clouds of steam. I could feel the heat in the tiles climb through my thighs and back. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my hand.