Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

The intruder's floppy hat fell to the floor. He seemed to pause and look at it, as he would at a distraction from the linear and familiar course of things and the foregone conclusion that had already been decided for him and his victim.

From the corner of his eye Batist saw a gold-tipped canine tooth that the intruder licked with the bottom of his tongue. Then the arm snapped tight under Batist's chin again, and through the front screen Batist saw the world as a place where trees torn from their roots floated upside down in the rain.

"I'm fixing to pinch off your pipe for good, old man. That mean you don't get no more air. You'll just gurgle on the floor like a dog been run over across the t'roat. . . Where Robicheaux at?" the intruder said.

When Batist woke up, he was on his side, in the middle of the living room floor, his knees drawn up before him. The house was quiet, and he could see rain blowing through the screen, wetting the cypress planks in the floor, and he thought the hatted man in the rubber coat was gone.

Then he felt the intruder's gloved hand close on the bottom of his chin and tilt his face toward him, as though the intruder were arranging the anatomical parts on a store dummy.

"You went to sleep on me, old man. That's 'cause I shut off the big vein that goes up to your brain," the intruder said. He was squatted on his haunches, sipping from a half-pint bottle of apricot brandy. His eyes were turquoise, the scalp above his ears shaved bare, the color of putty.

"You best get out of here, nigger, while you still can," Batist said.

The intruder drank from the bottle, let the brandy roll on his tongue, settle in his teeth, as though he were trying to kill an abscess in his gum.

Batist raised himself into a sitting position, waiting for the intruder to react. But he didn't. He sipped again from the brandy, nestled one buttock more comfortably against the heel of his boot. His shirt and the top of his coat were unbuttoned, and a necklace of blue shark's teeth was tattooed across his collarbones and around his upper chest. Cupped in his right hand was a banana knife, hooked at the tip, the edge filed into a long silver thread.

"Fishing any good here?" he asked.

He reached out with one finger and touched Batist on the end of his nose, then tilted the brandy again, his eyes closing with the pleasure the liquor gave him.

Batist drove the bottle into the intruder's mouth with the flat of his hand, shattering the glass against the teeth, bursting the lips into a torn purple flower.

The intruder's face stiffened with shock, glistened with droplets of brandy and saliva and blood. But instead of reeling from the room in p

ain and rage, he rose to his feet and his right foot exploded against the side of Batist's head. He cleaned bits of glass out of his mouth with his fingers, spitting, as though there were peanut brittle on his tongue, his gashed lips finally reforming into a smile.

He bent over, the hooked point of the banana knife an inch from Batist's eye. He started to speak, then paused, pressed his mouth against his palm, looked at it, and wiped his hand on his raincoat.

"Now you made me work for free. You ain't got nowhere to go for a while, do you?" he said, and thumbed the buttons loose on his coat.

CHAPTER 17

Forty miles away, in the Atchafalaya Basin, the same night the intruder came to my house, Aaron Crown threaded an outboard through a nest of canals until he reached a shallow inlet off the river, where a steel-bottomed oyster boat lay half-sunk in the silt. The decks and hull were the color of a scab, the cabin eaten to the density of aged cork by termites and worms. The entrance to the inlet was narrow, the willows on each side as thick as hedges, the river beyond it running hard and fast and yellow with foam.

He sat on a wood stool inside the cabin, his skin slathered with mud, the stolen Enfield rifle propped between his legs, his eyes fixed on the river, which they would have to cross. The light was perfect. He could see far into the distance, like a creature staring out of a cave, but they in turn could not see him. He had told them no helicopters, not even for the news people. If he heard helicopters, he would be gone deep into the canopy of the swamp before anyone could reach the entrance to the inlet.

The state police administrator had said it was all a simple matter. Aaron only had to wade into the sunlight, his rifle over his head. No one would harm him. Television cameras would record the moment, and that night millions of people would be forced to acknowledge the struggle of one man against an entire state.

He remembered his original arrest for the murder of the NAACP leader and the national attention it brought him. How many men were allowed to step into history twice?

The state policeman had confirmed the arrangement, two or three years in a federal old folks facility, no heavy work, no lockdown, good food, a miniature golf course, a television and card room, long distance access to news reporters whenever he wanted.

But what if it went down wrong tonight? Even that could be an acceptable trade-off. Buford LaRose would be out there somewhere. Aaron squeezed the stock of the Enfield a little tighter in his palms, the dried mud on his palms scraping softly on the wood, his loins stirring at the thought.

He opened a can of potted meat and dipped a saltine cracker into it and chewed the cracker and meat slowly and then drank from a hot can of Coca-Cola. When the potted meat was almost gone, he split a cracker in half and furrowed out the meat from the seams at the bottom of the can, not missing a morsel, and lay the cracker on his tongue and drank the last of his Coca-Cola. He started to roll a cigarette, then saw a curtain of rain moving across the river's surface toward him, and inside the rain he saw three large powerboats with canvas tarps behind the cabins and the faces of uniformed men behind the water-beaded windows.

But where was the boat with the news people on it? He rose to his feet and let the tobacco roll off his cupped cigarette paper and stick to his pants legs and prison work boots. The wind was blowing harder now, whipping the willow and cypress trees, capping the river's surface. The uniformed men in the boats hadn't seen him yet and had cut back their throttles and were drifting in the chop, the canvas tarps flapping atop the decks.

South of the squall, the sky was filled with purple and yellow clouds, like smoke ballooning out of an industrial fire. He squinted into the rain to see more clearly. What were they doing? The state police administrator, what was his name, Tauzin, should have been out on the deck with a bullhorn, to tell him what to do, to take control, to make sure the news people filmed Aaron wading out of the swamp, his rifle held high above his head, a defiant hill-country man whose surrender had been personally negotiated by the governor of the state.

Something was wrong. One, two, three, then a total of four men had come out the cabin doors onto the decks of their boats, cautious not to expose themselves, the bills of their caps turned backward on their heads.

It couldn't be what he thought. The offer had come through a man he trusted in the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. The state policeman had given his word, also. And where was that damn Buford LaRose? Aaron knew Buford would never miss an opportunity like this one, to stand before the cameras, with a wetlands background, his aristocratic face softened by the lights of humanity and conscience.

Then a terrible thought appeared in a bright, clear space in the center of his mind with such vividness that his face burned once again with a memory that was sixty years out of his past, a little boy in rent overalls being shoved into a school yard puddle by a boy whose father owned the cotton gin, the words hurled down at him, Aaron, you 're dumber than a nigger trying to hide in a snowbank. It was the old recognition that his best efforts always turned out the same: he was the natural-born victim of his betters. In this case the simple fact was that Buford LaRose had already been elected. He didn't have to prove anything to anybody. Aaron Crown was nothing more than a minor nuisance of whom the world had finally tired and was about to dispose of as you would an insect with a Flit can.

Aaron saw this thought as clearly as he saw the face of the man with the inverted cap working his way forward on the lead boat, between the gunnel and cabin. They were like two bookends facing each other now. But Aaron refused to wince or cower, to let them see the fear that made his bowels turn to water. You'd like to do it, yessiree Bob, blow hair and bone all over the trees, but you're one of them kind won't drop his britches and take a country squat till somebody tells you it's all right. Aaron's hand crushed the aluminum soda can in his palm, the bottom glinting like a heliograph.