Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

Dear Mr. Roboshow,

I thought you was honest but you have shit on me just like them others. Thank God I am old and have got to the end of my row and cant be hurt by yall no more. But that dont mean I will abide your pity either, no sir, it dont, I have seen the likes of yall all my life and know how you think so dont try to act like you are

better than me. Also tell that prissy pissant Buford LaRose I will

settel some old bidness then finish with him too.

You have permision to pass this letter on to people in the press.

Sinserely yours,

a loyal democrat who voted for John Kennedy,

Aaron Jefferson Crown

Helen was waiting for me inside my office.

"Crown went after Jimmy Ray Dixon. Can you believe it?" she said.

I looked again at the letter in my hand. "What's his beef with Jimmy Ray?"

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"If Jimmy Ray knows, he's not saying. He seems to have become an instant law-and-order man, though."

She repeated the story to me as it had been told to her by NOPD. You didn't have to be imaginative to re-create the scene. The images were like those drawn from a surreal landscape, where a primitive and half-formed creature rose from a prehistoric pool of genetic soup into a world that did not wish to recognize its origins.

Jimmy Ray had been at his fish camp with three of his employees and their women out by Bayou Lafourche. The night was humid, the dirt yard illuminated by an electric mechanic's lamp hung in a dead pecan tree, and Jimmy Ray was on a creeper under his jacked-up truck, working with a wrench on a brake drum, yelling at a second man to get him a beer from inside the shack. When the man didn't do it fast enough, Jimmy Ray went inside to get the beer himself, and another man, bored for something to do, took his place on the creeper.

Aaron Crown had been crouched on a cypress limb by the bayou's edge, listening to the voices inside the lighted center of the yard, unable to see past a shed at who was speaking but undoubtedly sure that it was Jimmy Ray yelling orders at people from under the truck.

He released his grasp on the limb and dropped silently into the yard, dressed in a seersucker suit two sizes too small for him that he had probably taken from a washline or a Salvation Army Dumpster, and brand-new white leather basketball shoes with layers of mud as thick as waffles caked around the soles.

One of Jimmy Ray's employees was smoking a cigarette, staring at the mist rising from the swamp, perhaps yawning, when he smelled an odor from behind him, a smell that was like excrement and sour milk and smoke from a meat fire. He started to turn, then a soiled hand clamped around his mouth, the calluses as hard as dried fish scale against his lips, and he felt himself pulled against the outline of Crown's body, into each curve and contour, molded against the phallus and thighs and whipcord stomach, suspended helplessly inside the rage and sexual passion of a man he couldn't see, until the blood flow to his brain stopped as if his jugular had been pinched shut with pliers.

The man under the truck saw the mud-encrusted basketball shoes, the shapeless seersucker pants that hung on ankles scarred by leg manacles, and knew his last night on earth had begun even before Aaron began to rock the truck back and forth on the jack.

The man on the creeper almost made it completely into the open when the truck toppled sideways and fell diagonally across his thighs. After the first red-black rush of pain that arched his head back in the dirt, that seemed to seal his mouth and eyes and steal the air from his lungs, he felt himself gradually float upward from darkness to the top of a warm pool, where two powerful hands released themselves from his face and allowed light into his brain and breath into his body. Then he saw Aaron bending over him, his hands propped on his knees, staring at him curiously.

"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one," Aaron said.

He looked up at a sound from the shack, shadows across a window shade, a car loaded with revelers bouncing down a rutted road through the trees toward the clearing. His face was glazed with sweat, glowing in the humidity, his eyes straining into the darkness, caught between an unsatisfied bloodlust that was within his grasp and the knowledge that his inability to think clearly had always been the weapon his enemies had used against him.

Then, as silently as he had come, he slunk away in the shadows, like a thick-bodied crab moving sideways on mechanical extensions.

"How do you figure it?" Helen said.

"It doesn't make sense. What was it he said to the man under the truck?"

She read from her notepad: '"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one.'"

"I think Aaron has an agenda that none of us has even guessed at," I said.

"Yeah, war with the human race."

"That's not it," I answered.

"What is?"