The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

She brought her knee sharply into my thigh. “Don’t try to put the slide on me, troop,” she said.

“I confronted Bledsoe.”

“By yourself?”

“Clete was close by. I was okay.”

She placed her hand on my chest. “Your heart is pounding.”

“I couldn’t be in the same room with him. It’s hard to explain. I had to get away from him.”

“He admitted he broke into our house? He threatened you?”

“That’s not the way he operates. The Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman. So are his acolytes.”

“Don’t talk like that, Dave.”

“I’m going to nail him. One way or another, I’m going to tack him to the side of the barn.”

She lay back down, the back of her head cupped by the pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then she said something I never believed I would hear her say. “I want to buy a pistol.”

IN THE MORNING, while I was still off the clock, I drove down to the south end of Lafourche Parish and parked in front of the crossroads bar where Bo Diddley Wiggins and I had gone to pick up Clete after Clete had shot at a man fleeing down a canal in an outboard boat. The bartender was alone in the bar, in a strap undershirt, sitting in front of a fan, trying to read a newspaper in the half-light. I opened my badge holder on the bar and asked him about the two men who had been there when I had come to collect Clete. There was a pad of body hair on the bartender’s shoulders and his eyebrows were laced with scar tissue, pinching his eyes at the corners so that they looked Asian rather than occidental.

“You know the guys who brought my friend in here?”

“They work for Mr. Wiggins. They drink beer here sometimes,” he said.

“I knew that when I came in. I need to know where they are now.”

“On Sunday, it’s hard to say.”

“I’m investigating a double torture-homicide. Would you like to answer my questions at the parish jail?”

He folded his newspaper over on itself and pushed it away. “There’s a fuel dock four miles down the road. You might find one of them there.”

“Thank you,” I said, scooping my badge holder off the bar.

“Hey!” he said when I was almost out the door.

“Yes?” I said.

“I drive thirty-four miles on bad roads to get to this job. I make six bucks an hour and tips. FEMA says in another mont’ I may get a trailer. How far you drive to work? Your house got a roof on it?”

I drove south to a fuel dock that was located at the junction of a brackish bay and a freshwater canal an oil company had cut into living marsh. Disintegrating pools of diesel oil floated on the water. A rusted barge la

y half submerged in the sawgrass. I could see a man in khaki clothes moving about in a small office that had been built on the end of the dock. He was watching an airboat roaring across the bay and he did not hear me walk up behind him.

“Whoa, you scared me!” he said when he turned around. Then he recognized me and reintroduced himself. He said his name was tolliver and that he was originally from Arkansas and had worked for Bo Wiggins for thirteen years.

“Your friend had a snootful, didn’t he?” he said. “Did he get home okay?”

“Did you see him shoot at somebody, Mr. Tolliver?”

“No, I heard a couple of distant pops, the way a shotgun sounds in the wind. A guy was taking off in an outboard and I thought this guy Purcel maybe was a robbery victim. That’s the only reason I got involved.”

He was a pleasant-looking man, his stomach and love handles protruding over his belt. His forearms were big and brown and on the tops they were covered with reddish hair. He smiled a lot. In fact, he was too pleasant and smiled much more than he should have.

“You don’t know who the man in the boat was?”