The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“Not right now. Thanks for offering. After you saw the kid in the water and the one half inside the boat, did you go outside?”

“By the time I got my clothes on, one guy had loaded the wounded one all the way into the boat and was already down to the corner. Another guy was running.”

“They were all black?”

“As far as I could tell. It was dark.”

“And you saw nobody else on the street or on a porch or in a house window?”

“No, I didn’t.”

I opened the manila folder in my hand and read from the notes given to me over the phone by an FBI agent working out of Baton Rouge. “The Feds and the guys from NOPD believe the shot had to come from this side of the street.”

“Maybe it did. I wouldn’t know.”

“The only occupied houses in immediate proximity to the shooting were yours and your next-door neighbor’s.”

“I have no argument with other people’s conclusions as to what happened here. I’ve told you what I heard and what I saw.” He looked at his watch. “You want to see the Springfield?”

“If you don’t mind.”

He went upstairs and returned with the rifle, handing it to me with the bolt open on an empty magazine. “Am I a suspect in the shooting?”

“Right now, we’re eliminating suspects.”

“Why didn’t your friends take my firearm? That’s what I would have done.”

“Because they didn’t have a place to store evidence. Because they didn’t have a warrant. Because the system is broken.”

But there was another reality at work as well, one I hadn’t shared with him. The round that had struck Eddy Melancon’s throat and emptied Kevin Rochon’s brainpan never slowed down and the metal tracings inside the wounds it inflicted would be of little evidentiary value.

I lifted the rifle to my face and sniffed at the chamber. “You just oiled it?”

“I don’t remember exactly when I cleaned it.”

“Can I see the ammunition that goes with it?”

“I don’t even know if I have any.”

“What kind of ammunition do you fire in it?”

“It’s a thirty-aught-six-caliber rifle. It fires thirty-aught-six-caliber rounds.”

I was sitting in a burgundy-colored soft leather chair, an autumnal green-gold light filtering through the trees outside. But the comfortable ambience did not coincide with the sense of disquiet that was beginning to grow inside me. “That’s not my point, sir. This is a military weapon. Do you fire metal-jacketed, needle-nosed rounds in it?”

“I target shoot. I don’t hunt. I shoot whatever ammunition is on sale. What is this?”

“It’s illegal to hunt with military-type ammunition, because it passes right through the animal and wounds instead of kills. I think the two shooting victims got nailed with a metal-jacketed rather than a soft-nosed round. One other thing. You keep referring to the DOA as a ‘kid.’ You call the other looters ‘guys.’”

“I didn’t notice.”

“You’re correct, the DOA was a teenager. The wounded man and his brother are both adults. The man who fled was probably a guy by the name of Andre Rochon, also an adult. You speak of these guys with a sense of familiarity, as though you saw them up close.”

He rolled his eyes. He started to speak, then gave it up. He was sitting in a chair at his desk, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling. His stolid face and square hands and scrubbed manner made me think of a farmer forced to go to church by his wife. I continued to stare at him in the silence. “Listen, Mr. Robicheaux—”

“It’s Dave.”

“I’ve told you what I know. Right now there are thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi waiting to hear from their insurance carrier. That’s me. I wish you well, but this conversation is over.”