Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

n aiding and abetting charge against him stick. But that might turn out to be the best luck he could have ever had, I thought.

I turned on the radio and listened to the L.S.U. - Georgia Tech game the rest of the way home.

Bootsie was washing dishes when I walked into the kitchen. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a purple shirt with green and red flowers printed on it. The tips of her hair were gold in the light through the screen.

"What's going on, boss man?" she said, without turning around.

I put my hand on her back.

"There's an all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet in Lafayette for six-ninety-five," I said.

"I already started something."

"I used all the wrong words the last couple of days," I said.

She rinsed a plate and set it in the rack. She gazed at a solitary mockingbird that stood on the redwood table.

"There're some things a woman has a hard time accepting. It doesn't matter what caused them to happen," she said.

She picked up another plate and rinsed it. I felt her weight lean forward, away from the touch of my hand.

"You want to go to afternoon Mass?" I said.

"I don't think I have time to change," she answered.

That night I took Alafair and a friend of hers to a movie in New Iberia and for ice cream afterward. Later, I found things to do in the bait shop, even though the fishing season was almost over and few customers would be there in the morning. Through the black silhouette of trees up the slope, I could see the lighted gallery of our house, the darkened living room, Bootsie's shadow moving on the drawn shades in our bedroom.

I called my A.A. sponsor, an ex-roughneck and barroom owner named Tee Neg, who'd had seven years sobriety when he walked into a bait and liquor store owned by a black man and had asked for a bucketful of shiners, then on an impulse, with no forethought other than his ongoing resentment over the fingers he'd pinched off on a drill pipe, had changed his order to a quart of whiskey and stayed drunk for the next five years. His next A.A. meeting was at Angola Prison.

I told him about what had happened between me and Bootsie. I knew what was coming.

"You took a drink over it?" he said.

"No."

"Hey, you ever get drunk while you was asleep?"

"No."

"Then go to bed. I'll talk to you in the morning, you." He hung up.

After all the lights in the house went out, I walked up the slope and went inside and lay down on the living room couch in the dark.

Wally, the dispatcher, called at one in the morning.

"The St. Martin Parish sheriff's office is interviewing some hysterical kids at Henderson Swamp. I can't make sense out of it. You want to go up there?" he said.

"Not really."

"It sounds like Aaron Crown. That's where you think he's hid out at, right?"

"What sounds like Aaron Crown?"

"The one tore up these two people. They say the walls of the houseboat is painted with blood. The guy held the girl while he done the man, then he done it to the girl."

"You're not making sense, Wally."

"That's what I said. The deputy called it in didn't make no sense. So how about hauling your ass up there?"