In the dream, he wanted to wrap his arms over his face or dive into the water. But he couldn’t move or run or even drop the burning lighter from his hand. When he would wake, he would believe for just a moment that his terror was the result of a nightmare and that his motor control was now restored, that he could walk to a bathroom and urinate into a bowl while the day and the world adjusted to his needs. But his paralysis encased him like concrete. He would push out his tongue on his lips and close and open his eyes in the dark, waiting for either movement or sensation to find its way back into his body. He would drop his eyes to where his hands lay on the sheet and wait for them to obey his mental commands. That’s when he would hear a scream inside his head that was louder than any voice he had ever heard in the actual world.
Eddy studied the curtains of rain sliding down his window and the patterns of shadow they made on his skin. When the two men in hospital greens entered his room, he thought they were going to check his catheter or sponge-bathe him or hold a glass drinking straw to his mouth. Or maybe they would talk to him. His voice box had been spared. As long as he could talk, he still possessed a measure of control in his life. He could talk to these guys about his recovery. There must be ways to repair spinal breaks, he thought. Yeah, it was just a matter of getting to a better hospital in Houston or Boston or New York, places like that. Bertrand must have stashed the money from the house score. There would be plenty for good doctors and rehab programs. Yeah, let these local motherfuckers go play wit’ their bedpans, he told himself.
One of the men in greens stared down at Eddy, his face floating above him like a white balloon. “How you feeling?” he asked.
“I’m feeling okay,” Eddy whispered.
Why had he answered like that? Like some kid spitting watermelon seeds and tap-dancing for Mr. Charlie. That’s not the way he had talked to the hospital personnel before. What was different about this guy?
“Because we want you to be comfortable for the ride down to the OR,” the same man said.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Eddy said.
“Everything is haywire, Eddy. This storm really screwed us up,” the man said. He yawned and looked at his watch. “Let’s get you down the hall. I got to get home to my kids.”
The second man positioned a gurney next to Eddy’s bed. When a tree of lightning printed itself against a backdrop of black sky, Eddy saw the man’s face clearly. It was concave, the eyes recessed, the head elongated and bald, the lips the pink shade of an eraser on a pencil. The second man began disconnecting the wires and tubes that only moments earlier Eddy had looked upon as an annoyance.
“What you doin’, man?” he said.
The man with the concave face smiled down at him. “Relax. You’re in good hands,” he said.
Then the two men in greens lifted him as though he were weightless and set him gently on the gurney. As they pushed him through the corridor toward the elevator, they kept glancing down at him with benevolent expressions, their hands patting him reassuringly whenever he started to speak. On the first floor he heard the elevator doors open, then he felt the gurney’s wheels rumbling through a passageway. A moment later there was a whoosh of air and the sound of doors sliding again, and he could smell rain and engine exhaust and hear sirens pealing through the streets.
The two men lifted the gurney and loaded it into the back of an ambulance.
“Who y’all? What y’all doin’ to me?” Eddy said. “Help!”
The man with the concave face and recessed eyes got inside with him and shut the door. Eddy’s weight shifted on the gurney as the ambulance pulled out onto the street and drove away at high speed.
“Scared?” the man said.
“Ain’t scared of nothing,” Eddy replied. “Not of no peckerwoods, not of nothing.”
“You ought to be,” the man said, inserting a chocolate bar into his mouth. He smiled as he chewed on the chocolate.
CLETE PURCEL worked out of his secondary office on main and stayed at our house, but he returned to New Orleans three times in his pursuit of the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon. He used a city map to re-create the possible routes Bertrand Melancon could have used in his escape from Otis Baylor’s neighborhood immediately following the shooting. He walked through backyards and alleys and at a residential intersection found a woman throwing the remnants of her kitchen onto her terrace, smashing dishes and glass-ware on the flagstones.
“Can I help you?” she said when she saw him watching her. Sweat was leaking out of her hair band.
He showed her his PI badge and told her about the shooting down the street. He gave her the date and the approximate time the shooting took place.
“I know all about it. I think they got what they deserved,” she said. She wore a halter and shorts and flip-flops, and she had chestnut hair that hung in strands on her brow. Her skin was unnaturally white and dotted with moles. Clete doubted if she was the type who would be seen in halter and shorts were it not for the intense heat inside her house.
“Two of those guys are still on the loose. I’d like to find them. They were in a green aluminum boat, with an outboard motor on it.”
“What, you think they’re parked somewhere on the street waiting for you?”
“No, I think they dumped some stolen property around here. I’d like to recover it for my client.”
She walked out on the edge of her lawn. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the intersection. There were blue veins in the tops of her breasts. “I saw an outboard like that almost hit an airboat full of cops. A black man was in the stern. It looked like another guy was slumped down in the bilge. They swung around behind my house and went up the alley. Were they the ones you’re after?”
“It sounds like them. Did they stop?”
“I wish they had.”
“Pardon?”
“If looters broke into my house, I was going to serve them ham sandwiches I’d filled with rat poison. I mixed the poison with mustard so they couldn’t taste it. I made a dozen of them.”