"The Giacanos got long memories. As long as we stay under Mr. Raphael's protection, we're gonna be okay. But you owe money and so do I. In the life, that's the dog collar around your neck. It don't go away easy."
"You?" she said.
"I owe every sports book in Houston and New Orleans. People like us all got some kind of Jones. That how come we're pimps and whores. Who wants to be normal, anyway? It's a drag."
He thought he had both reassured her and lightened her mood.
"Lou?"
"What?"
"You're not gonna try to hurt Jimmie Robicheaux, are you?"
He stood up from the bed, screwing his fingers into his temples, a squealing sound leaking from his teeth.
During the next hour, Lou paced the floor, hyperventilating, drinking ice water, blowing out his breath as though he had pulled a freight car up a grade.
"Stop climbing the walls," she said.
"If this don't work, bucketloads of shit are going through the fan."
"Maybe we end here. Maybe our names are written in water and one day the water just dries up," she said.
"Don't say stuff like that. We're not living inside a country-and-western song."
"Come on, sit down," she said. She took him by the arm and guided him to the wood chair by the window. His arm was as hard as a log in her hands. He was chewing gum rapidly in one jaw, snapping it loudly, his throat cording with blue veins.
"I got a confession to make. I was gonna let them hang you out to dry," he said.
"But you didn't."
She pushed her fingers deep into his shoulders. His eyes closed briefly, then he surged to his feet, like a man who believed the Furies awaited him in his sleep.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"Coming apart. I ain't up to this." He jammed a chair under the doorknob and shot himself up with enough heroin to blow the heart out of a draft horse, his mouth rictal when the rush took him.
That afternoon Ida heard the strangest conversation she had ever heard in her life, one that would always remain with her as a testimony to the efficacy of fear.
Another rainfront had swept across the wetlands, smudging out the woods and the fleet of mothballed ships rusting in the bay. She heard the engine of a powerful car coming up the road, then a black Cadillac driven by a Negro chauffeur turned into the yard, the hood steaming in the rain. A tall man got out of the back and walked quickly under an umbrella into the house, lifting his shined shoes out of the puddles like a stork. It was obvious the men drinking beer in the living room had not been expecting him. The rhythm of their conversation faltered, the loud laughter fading, then trailing into total silence. Through a space in the door, she saw them all rise as one from their chairs while the tall man folded his umbrella and hung the crook on a hat rack.
The tall man's cheeks were lean, his hair freshly clipped and as black as India ink, the press in his suit impeccable. He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and read silently from it, then replaced it in his pocket. Lou Kale watched from the kitchen door, the China white he'd shot up singing in his blood, his face incapable of forming a definable expression. Oddly, Lou was the only person in the room the tall man acknowledged.
Then he said, "I understand there's a woman here by the name of Ida Durbin."
"Yes, sir, she's back yonder," the voice of Bob Cobb said.
"Why are you keeping her here?" the tall man said.
"She's just visiting, helping clean and such, Mr. Chalons," Cobb said.
"That's not my understanding," Raphael Chalons replied.
"I was gonna fix her lunch, but she didn't want —" Dale Bordelon began.
"Would you ask her to come out here, please?" Chalons said.
Ida heard a chair creak, then footsteps approaching the bedroom. She stepped back from the door just as Bordelon opened it. A smile was carved on his face, like a crooked gash in a muskmelon. "Mr. Chalons wants to know if everything is okay," he said. "We was telling him you can leave anytime you want."