Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

He was wrong.

The muzzle of the M-16 rifle flashed in the rain just as the boat's bow rose in the chop, and the .223 round thropped past Aaron's ear, punching a neat hole in the wall behind him, its trajectory fading deep in the swamp. A second later the other uniformed men cut loose in unison, firing tear gas and M-16's on full automatic and twelve-gauge pump Remingtons loaded with double-ought buckshot.

But Aaron was running now, and not where they thought he would. While gas shells hissed on the deck and buckshot and .223 rounds perforated the oyster boat's cabin, crisscrossing the gloomy interior with tubular rays of light, he slid down the ladder inside the ship's steel hull, his rifle inverted on its sling, then exited the boat through the far side, where the plates had been stripped from a spar by a salvager. As he ran through a chain of sandbars and stagnant pools of water, he could hear the steady dissection of the cabin, glass breaking, bullets whanging off metal surfaces, shattered boards spinning out into the trees like sticks blown from a forest fire.

He glanced once over his shoulder after he kicked over the outboard. Fire. He hadn't imagined it. Their magazines had been loaded with tracers, and the oyster boat's cabin was liquid with flames.

Inside the caked patina of mud on Aaron's face, his eyes were as pink as Mercurochrome, filmed with the reflected glow of what he knew now had been the final demonstrable evidence of the lifetime conspiracy directed at him and his family. Somehow that gave him a satisfaction and feeling of confirmation that was like being submerged and bathed in warm water. He bit down on his molars with an almost sexual pleasure but could not tell himself why.

Late that same night, a voice with a peckerwood accent that did not identify itself left a message on my recording machine: "Buford got to you. I don't know how. But I'd just as lief cut the equipment off two shithogs as one."

CHAPTER 30

The account of Aaron Crown's escape from the state police is my re-creation of the story as it was related to me by a St. Martin Parish deputy in the waiting room down the hall from Batist's room at Iberia General. Clete Purcel and I watched the deputy get into the elevator and look back at us blank-faced while the doors closed behind him.

"What are you thinking?" Clete asked.

"It's no accident Mookie Zerrang came to my house the same night Crown was set up for a whack."

Clete leaned forward in his chair and rubbed one hand on the other, picked at a callus, his green eyes filled with thought. He had driven from New Orleans in two and a half hours, steam rising from the hood of his Cadillac like vapor off dry ice when he pulled under the electric arc lamps in the hospital parking lot.

"Zerrang's got to go off-planet, Streak," he said.

&nb

sp; "He will."

"It won't happen. Not unless you or I do it. This guy's juice is heavy-voltage, mon."

I didn't answer.

"You know I'm right. When they deal it down and dirty, we take it back to them under a black flag," he said.

"Wrong discussion, wrong place."

"There's a geek in Jefferson Parish. A real sicko. Even the wiseguys cross the street when they see him coming. But he owes five large to Nig. I can square the debt. Mookie Zerrang will be walking on stumps . . . Are you listening?"

I went to the cold drink machine, then put my change back in my pocket and kept on walking to the nurses' station.

"I have to talk to my friend," I said.

"Sorry, not until the doctor comes back," the nurse said. She smiled and did not mean to be impolite.

"I apologize, then," I said, and went past her and into Batist's room.

He was turned on his side, facing the opposite wall, his back layered with bandages. The intruder had used a type of ASP, a steel bludgeon, sold in police supply stores, that telescopes out of a handle. The one used by the intruder was modified with an extension that operated like a spring or whip, with a steel ball the size of a small marble attached to the tip. The paramedics had to cut away Batist's overalls and T-shirt with scissors and peel the cloth off his skin like cobweb.

His head jerked on the pillow when he heard me behind him.

"It's okay, partner," I said, and walked around the foot of the bed.

His right eye was swollen shut, his nose broken and X-ed with tape.

"I ain't felt a lot of it, Dave. He hit me upside the head first, 'cause I raised up and caught him another one in the mout'," he said.

I sat down on a chair by his bedside.

"I promise we'll get this guy," I said.