The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

That’s what you think, you idiot, Otis says to himself, and is surprised by the virulence of his own thoughts. Chapter 4

I T’S SATURDAY EVENING and long lines of automobiles are streaming out of New Orleans, northbound on Interstate 10, although rumors have already spread that there is not a motel room available all the way to St. Louis, Missouri.

But for the glad of heart, life goes on full-throttle in the French Quarter. In a corner bar off Ursulines, one in which Christmas lights never come down, Clete Purcel has positioned himself at a window so he can watch a shuttered cottage across the street, in front of which a black male is smoking a cigarette in an illegally parked panel truck. The rain has stopped and the air is unnaturally green and contains the dense, heavy odor of the Gulf. There is even a rip of bone-white light in the clouds, as though the evening sunset is about to resume. The black male in the panel truck is talking on a cell phone and blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, where it seems to hang in the air like damp cotton. Then he twists his head and stares at the bar, and for a moment Clete thinks he has been made.

But the black man is watching a woman in spiked heels and skintight shorts walking rapidly down the sidewalk, her sequined, fringed purse swinging back on her rump. The owner of the bar is opening all the doors, filling the interior with a bloom of fresh air that smells of brine and wet trees. The revelers inside react as though a bad moment in their lives has come and gone.

“You want another drink? It’s on the house,” the owner says.

“I look like I can’t pay for my drinks?” Clete says.

“No, you look like you got the heebie-jeebies. Maybe you ought to get yourself laid.”

Clete gives the owner a look, one that makes the owner’s eyes shift off Clete’s face. The owner is Jimmy Flannigan, an ex-professional wrestler who now wears earrings and has a full-body wax done at a parlor on Airline Highway.

“So don’t get laid. But you’re making my customers nervous. No one likes to get stepped on by out-of-control circus elephants.”

Clete has long ago given up contending with Jimmy’s insults. “I got news for you. The Apocalypse could blow through this dump and your clientele wouldn’t notice,” he says.

Jimmy pours into Clete’s glass from a Scotch bottle with a chrome nipple on it. The Scotch swirls inside the milk like marbled ice cream. “What’s eatin’ you, Purcel? Just off your feed?” he says.

Clete drinks his glass half empty. “Something like that,” he says.

How can he explain to Jimmy Flannigan the sense of apprehension and the déjà vu that dries out his mouth and causes his scalp to tighten against his skull? Or describe helicopters lifting off a rooftop into a sky ribbed with strips of blood-red cloud while Mobs of terrified Vietnamese civilians fight with one another and plead with United States Marines to let them on board? You learn it soon or you learn it late: There are some kinds of experience you never share with anyone, not even with people who have had their ticket punched by the same conductor you have.

Clete returns to the window and tries to concentrate on the black man parked across the street. The black man is Andre Rochon, a twenty-three-year-old bail skip whose forfeited bond is less consequential than the information he can provide on two other bail skips who are into Clete’s employers, Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, for thirty large.

Two drinks later the scene has not changed. And neither has the knot of anxiety in Clete’s stomach or the band of tension that keeps tightening like a strand of piano wire wrapped around his head.

Clete is convinced he’s watching a meth drop in the making. The two other players are the Melancon brothers, full-time wiseasses with busts on both their sheets for strong-arm robbery, illegal possession of firearms, and intimidation of witnesses. Clete suspects that one or both of the Melancon brothers is about to show up at the shuttered cottage.

But nothing seems to happen either outside or inside the cottage, and the man in the panel truck is becoming restless, turning his radio on and off, starting and restarting his engine.

What to do? Clete asks himself. Take down Rochon as a penny-ante bail skip or gamble that the Melancon brothers will show up? When the storm makes landfall late tomorrow night or early Monday morning, the lowlifes will either go to work looting the city or be blown like flotsam in every direction. Either way, it will be almost impossible to get a net over Rochon and the Melancons.

Clete decides it’s Showtime.

He puts an unlit cigarette in his mouth, combs his hair in the mirror behind the bar, and fits on his porkpie hat. His cream-colored slacks are pressed, his oxblood loafers shined, his Hawaiian shirt taut on his massive shoulders. A hideaway .25 is Velcro-strapped to his ankle, a slapjack and penlight in one trouser pocket, a set of cuffs in the other. He wishes he were on a plane, lifting above highways that are clogged with automobiles, buses, and trucks, their headlights all pointing north. Or over in New Iberia, where he has a second office and a room he rents at an old motor court on East Main. But you don’t surrender the place of your birth either to evil men or natural calamity, he tells himself, and wonders if he will feel the same in twenty-four hours.

“You decided to meet a lady friend after all?” Jimmy says.

“No, I got an appointment in the street with a piece of shit that should have been a skid mark on the bowl a long time ago,” Clete says. “If it gets rough outside in the next few minutes, I don’t want NOPD in on it. You with me on that?”

“At this bar, nine-one-one is a historical date.”

“You’re a beaut, Jimmy. Put a couple of inner tubes on the roof.”

“What about you?”

“Ever hear of circus elephants drowning in New Orleans? See, no precedent.”

Clete steps out on the sidewalk. The light has gone out of the sky, and clouds are rolling blackly over his head. He can feel the barometer dropping rapidly now and he smells an odor that is like sulfur or rotten eggs or water beetles that have washed into the sewer grates and died there. Andre Rochon stares straight ahead, his wrists resting idly on the steering wheel, but Clete knows that Rochon has either made him for a cop or a bondsman and is deciding whether to brass it out or fire up his truck and bag-ass for North Rampart.

Clete crosses the street and opens his badge holder and hangs it in front of Rochon’s face. “Step out of the vehicle and keep your hands where I can see them,” he says. “That’s not a suggestion. You do it or you go to jail.”

His words are all carefully chosen, indicating in advance to Rochon that he has viable choices, that with a little cooperation and finesse he can skate on the nonappearance and have another season to run.

Rochon steps out onto the asphalt and closes the door behind him. He wears tennis shoes without socks and paint-splattered slacks and an LSU T-shirt scissored off at the midriff and armpits. His arms are scrolled with one-color tats. He smells of funk and the decayed food in his teeth. His face is narrow, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. He strokes the exposed skin of his stomach, as a narcissist might. He probes his navel with one finger. “You a PI, blood?” he says.