Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"I could have used a telephone. I come here in trust. Don't mess it up," he said.

"What do you want, Aaron?"

"Give me your pistol. . . I'll give it back. I promise. I ain't gonna harm nobody, either."

His hand moved down my arm and slipped the .45 free from my fingers. He smelled like humus and wool clothes full of wood smoke and dried sweat.

"I got you! Sonofabitch if I didn't! Slickered you good!" he said. He squatted and roared at his own humor, slapped his thigh with one hand. "Didn't have nothing but this old corncob pipe I got out of a garbage can! How you like that!"

"Why don't you act your age?"

"Did y'all use the same kind of smarts against them Viet Cong?" He danced like an ape under the overhang of withered banana leaves.

"You going to give me my piece back?" I said.

"Cain't do that." Then his face went as blank and stark as a sheet of tin under the starlight. "I want you to set up my surrender to Buford LaRose."

When I didn't reply, he said, "You deaf? Just set it up. Out in the country somewheres. He'll go for it. It'll make him a big man."

"I don't know if I trust what you've got in mind, partner."

"They sent a little pisspot Eye-talian after me. Man I was in jail with and knowed where my camp was at. Some people is cursed by their knowledge."

"What are you saying?"

His eyes were wide, lidless, burning with certainty about the adversarial nature of the world.

"You might say I talked to his conscience. He said me and you are the shit on somebody's nose and it's suppose to get wiped off before a certain governor gets sworn in. He was at a point in his life he didn't want to keep no secrets."

"I don't like what you're telling me, Aaron."

"They treated me worsen they would a nigger rapist. You think I give a fuck about what you don't like? . . . We got a mutual interest here."

"No, we don't."

He put the .45 under my jaw. "Then you walk to the shed."

"You're starting to seriously piss me off, Aaron."

He pushed the barrel harder into my throat. "LaRose used my daughter and throwed her away. Then he sent me to the penitentiary. You side with them, then you're my enemy."

His face was bloodless, his dilated nostrils radiating gray hair. He wasn't a bizarre old man anymore, or even a pitiful and ignorant victim. For some reason, as I stared into the vacuity of his eyes, I was absolutely convinced he would have found reason to wage war against Buford LaRose's world even if Buford LaRose had never existed.

"I'm not going in that shed, Aaron. It ends here," I said.

He breathed loudly in the darkness. His tongue looked like a gray biscuit inside his mouth.

"I done cut your phone line already. I'll give you back this later. But don't come after me," he said.

"You're a foolish man, sir."

"No, I'm a dead one. That's what they call people in the Death House, the Dead Men. Wait till you feel that big nigger's hand on you. Or one of yourn up at the house. See how goddamn liberal you are then."

"What did you say?"

But he was gone, running like a crab through the trees, his prison work boots crashing in the leaves.

I sat on the floor by the couch where Bootsie slept. Her eyes opened into mine.