Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"Dave, you either get your act together or we seek other alternatives. None of them good."

"You want my shield?"

"I won't be a party to what you're doing," she said.

"Doing what?"

"Ripping yourself apart so you can get back on the bottle. You don't think other people read you? Give yourself a wake-up call." She wadded up a piece of paper and tossed it angrily at the wastebasket.

That evening I went to an AA. meeting in a tan-colored, tile-roofed Methodist church, not far from the railway tracks. From the second-story window I could see the palm trees in the churchyard, the old brick surfacing in the street, the green colonnade of an ancient fire-house, the oaks whose roots had wedged up the sidewalks, and the strange purple light the sun gave off in its setting.

Across the railway tracks was another world, one that used to be New Iberia's old redlight district, whose history went back to the War Between the States. But today the three-dollar black prostitutes and five-dollar white ones were gone and the cribs on Railroad and Hopkins shut down. Instead, white crack whores, called rock queens, and their black pimps worked the street corners. The dealers, with baseball caps reversed or black silk bandannas tied down skintight on their scalps, appeared in the yards of burned-out houses or in the parking lots of small grocery stores as soon as school let out. After sunset, unless it was raining, their presence multiplied exponentially.

They offered the same street menu as dealers in New Orleans and Houston: weed, brown skag, rock, crystal meth, acid, reds, leapers, Ecstasy, and, for the purists, perhaps a taste of China white the customer could cook and inject with a clean needle in a shooting gallery only four blocks from downtown.

Down the hall, on the second floor of the Methodist church, was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Most of the attenders there had been sentenced by the court. Few were people you would normally associate with criminality. Almost all of them, in another era, would have been considered run-of-the-mill blue-collar people whose lives had nothing to do with the trade on Hopkins and Railroad avenues.

But on that particular evening I was not thinking about the ravages of the drug trade. Instead, I was wondering how long it would be be fore I walked into a saloon and ordered four inches of Black Jack or Beam's Choice with a long-neck Dixie on the side.

Then I looked across the room and saw a man who was geographically and psychologically out of place. He saw me staring at him and raised one meaty paw in recognition. His eyes were like merry slits, his jowls glowing with a fresh shave, his sparse gold hair oiled and flattened into his pate. I crossed the space between us and sat in the chair next to him.

"This is a closed meeting of A. A. What are you doing here?" I said.

"I checked it out. It's an open meet. Besides, I belong to Overeaters Anonymous, which means I probably got trans-addictive issues. That means I can go to any fucking meeting I choose," Fat Sammy Fig-orelli replied.

"That's the worst bullshit I ever heard. Get out of here," I said.

"Fuck you," he said.

"Is there a problem over there?" the group leader said.

Sammy didn't speak during the meeting. But afterward he helped stack chairs and wash coffee cups and put away all the AA. literature in a locker. "I like this place," he said.

"You're about to have some major trouble," I said.

"Fm gonna have trouble? You're beautiful, Robicheaux. Take a walk with me," he said.

I followed him down the stairs, into the darkness outside and the odor of sewer gas and wet leaves burning. "If you're using AA. to " I began.

"You drunks think you're the only people who got a problem. How would you like food to be your enemy? Anybody can stay off booze a him nerd percent. Try staying off somethi

ng just part way and see how you feel," he said.

"What's your point?"

"My sponsor says I got to own up to a couple of things or I'm gonna go on another chocolate hinge, which don't do my diabetes a lot of good. Max Coll not only cowboyed a couple of high-up guys in Miami, he stiffed the sports book they owned for a hundred large. The word is he's gonna be hung by his colon on a meat hook. Last point, there's a guy around here you don't want to mess with."

He stopped and lit a cigarette. The cigarette looked tiny and innocuous in his huge hand. He watched a car full of black teenagers pass, their stereo thundering with rap music, his face clouding with disapproval.

"Which guy?" I said.

"A guy who hurts people when he don't have to. You want to find him, follow the cooze. In the meantime, don't say I ain't warned you."

Then he labored down the sidewalk toward his Cadillac, his football-shaped head twisted back at the sunset.

"Come back here," I said.

He shot me the finger over his shoulder.