Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"What?"

"What if Val Chalons is not Lou Kale's kid?"

But other events that evening, involving an anachronistic New Orleans player, would soon take our minds off the letters we had just composed.

chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

Johnny Wineburger had erotic dreams, but not of a kind that he understood. Sometimes he woke throbbing and hard in the morning, and briefly recalled a fleeting glimpse of an undressed woman, a pale, black-haired creature wrapped in mist, but the dream never contained a face or a name. In some instances, the figure kissed his hands, then put his fingers in her mouth. In some instances, she bit down on them, hard, her eyes veiled by a skein of shiny hair. The pain he felt was not entirely an unpleasant one.

Johnny did not know what the dream meant. A friend of his in the life, a kid named Jimmy Figorelli or Jimmy Fig or sometimes Jimmy Fingers, who had been with the First Cav at Khe Sanh, told Johnny to talk to a psychiatrist.

"Why?" Johnny asked.

"It means you got repressed desires to be a bone smoker," the Fig said.

"How you know that?"

" 'Cause that's what the shrink told me," the Fig replied.

But in truth Jericho Johnny didn't really care what the dream meant. Women were interesting on occasion but not terribly necessary in his life. In fact, if asked what was important in his life, he would not have had a ready answer. He had graduated from a Catholic high school and his parents had gone to temple, but he himself never took religion seriously. Nor had he ever understood people's apparent worries about moral issues. If there were any mysteries to life or human behavior, he failed to recognize them. You were born, you hung around a while, then you died. You had to read books to find that out?

At age nineteen he carried a union card with both the Teamsters and the Operating Engineers. That's when he met the Calucci brothers and picked up a cool five hundred bucks for popping the snitch who sent Tommy Fig's old lady to the women's prison at St. Gabriel.

He'd always heard the first hit was the hard one. Not so. It was a breeze. The guy was in his car at the Fair Grounds, eating a chili dog with melted cheese on it. Johnny walked up to the open window, put a Ruger behind the guy's ear, and pulled the trigger three times. The guy still had the plastic fork sticking out of his mouth when Johnny drove off with a young friend he helped throw a newspaper route.

If Johnny had an ethos, what some would call a worldview, it was one that operated in his head like shards of light and sometimes sound. His second hit wasn't on a dirtbag at a racetrack parking lot. The target was the cousin of Bugsy Siegel, a guy who, like Bugsy, had made his bones with Murder, Incorporated. This dude was a stone killer — smart, armed, and with no mercy for the poor schmucks he took out.

Johnny and his partner had gotten on the train at Jacksonville, headed south along the Florida coast, their sawed-off double-barrel shotguns broken down inside their suitcases. The evening sky was pink and blue, the ocean sliding in long fingers up empty beaches, miles and miles of orange groves slipping past the Pullman's windows. It was the most beautiful evening of Johnny Wineburger's life.

Just outside of West Palm, the sun went down in the 'Glades and a black shade fell across the land. Johnny and his partner fitted the pieces of their shotguns together, plopping twelve-gauge shells packed with double-aught bucks into the open breeches. When their train passed another train headed in the opposite direction, Johnny and his pal kicked open the door to the bedroom occupied by Siegel's cousin.

Then one of the most peculiar moments in Johnny's life occurred. In the jittering light and roar of noise created by the trains passing each other, amid the flashes of gunfire and explosions of wadding and pellets inside the closed room, all the color drained out of the world. The entire earth reduced itself to a black-and-white ink wash that was like the reductive nature of his dreams. Life was simpler than he had ever thought. You pulled the trigger and the target exploded. In this instance, the target was holding a pitcher of martinis and was dressed in a robe with a fur collar, as a king might be. In fact, the shower of gin and broken glass sparkled like a crown in the dead man's hair. But the power he had represented was now Johnny's, just as if the dead man's testosterone had been injected into his own.

On his second hit he had found the secret few button men shared: Clipping a rat or a dirtbag was scut work for pay; clipping a king was both an acquisition and a high that had no equal.

But times had changed. The Giacano family had crashed and burned with the death of Didi Gee, and Asians and black street pukes had flooded the projects with crack and turned New Orleans into a septic tank. Punks the Italians would have thrown off a roof now jackrolled family people and sometimes shot them to death just for fun. There was no honor in the life anymore. There was no money in it, either.

The pukes ran the dope and did drive-bys on school yards. The government not only legalized lotteries and casinos but encouraged addiction in its citizenry. The income for a fence or good house creep was chump change compared to the amounts corporate CEOs scammed off their investors through stock options.

But a guy still had to pay the bills. The twenty grand Jericho Johnny had borrowed from the shylocks, at a point and a half a week, was eating him alive. So push came to shove and he took this gig out here in Bumfuck. Why not? He didn't invent the world's problems. Almost everyone he popped had it coming. Some he wasn't sure about, but that was their grief, not his. Everybody got to the boneyard. Which was better, catching a big one in the ear or dying a day at a time with tubes up your nose and a catheter clamped on your joint?

It was dark when he parked his car in a turnrow between two sugar cane fields and began walking up Bayou Teche toward the ancient plantation home that was legendary for the strange people who lived inside it and the overgrown trees and plants that seemed intent on pulling the house back into the earth. The moon was down, the sky black with rain clouds. Through the oaks in the yard he could see lights in the windows, a gas lamp burning in the driveway. Jericho Johnny stopped on the edge of the cane and felt the breeze blow against his skin and realized he was sweating.

A candy-striped awning swelled with the breeze off the bayou. There were white feathers scattered on the grass and the crumpled bodies of pigeons floating among the lily pads along the bayou's bank. What kind of geek shoots pigeons in his yard? Johnny wondered. Talk about no class. Somebody should ship the guy's whole family to Iraq, he told himself.

He was starting to feel uncomfortable about the job. Maybe he was over the hill for it. No, it was something else. He was fooling around with guys who thought real men hit golf balls. Their wives were all neurotic, talked constantly in hush-puppy accents, and treated their husbands like dildos. So their men whocked golf balls like they wanted to kill the tee, got their ashes hauled in Miami, then went back home and pretended they weren't cooze-whipped dipshits. Another bunch that should be humping a pack in a sandstorm, Johnny thought.

But his cynicism and bitter humor provided no relief for the quickening of heart that he felt, the dryness in his mouth, and the loops of sweat under his armpits. What was wrong?

He pulled back the receiver on his silenced Ruger and checked to see if a .22 long round was seated in the chamber. Up ahead he saw fireflies in the trees and smelled an autumnal odor of dead leaves and gas on the wind. Time to get it over with, pop the dude, and get back to New Orleans, he thought. In his mind's eye, he saw himself back in his saloon, eating a small white bowl of gumbo, the rain falling on the elephant ears and banana trees outside his back windows.

He moved along the edge of the trees at the back of the Chalonses' property, past the back porch, the lighted kitchen, the porte cochere that glowed an off-yellow from a bug lamp. Then he stopped under a cedar tree and gazed at the shotgun house down by the bayou. It was paintless and gray, made of very old cedar, with a tin roof and a brick chimney that reminded him of a decayed tooth. The wind puffed off the bayou and Jericho Johnny heard a solitary pecan ping hard against the roof and roll loudly down the metal.

In the light of the gallery, he could see a little boy playing in the yard. Bad news, Johnny thought. Nobody said anything about a kid being around. Bad karma, bad options. That's what happened when you messed with amateurs. No class at all.

He went up the slope toward the main house, into trees black with shadow, his face pointed at the ground so no light would reflect off it. Then he made an arc that took him back down toward the water, past the yard where the child was playing.

He moved quickly along the grassy slope, through a vegetable garden and over a half-collapsed rick fence. Through a side window of the shotgun house he could see a fat black woman rolling pie dough on top of a table.