Jolie Blon's Bounce (Dave Robicheaux 12)

“I got a pacemaker. Please don’t do it, suh,” the light-skinned man said, his voice and accent reverting to a subservient identity he had probably thought was no longer part of his life.

The man with the stun gun waited. “Joe?” he said. He had an unshaved, morose face, with big jowls and eyebrows that were like shaggy hemp. His stomach was so large his shirt wouldn’t tuck into his belt.

“I’m thinking,” Joe replied.

“They’re niggers, Joe. They start lying the day they come out of the womb,” the man said.

Joe Zeroski shook his head. “They got no percentage in standing up for a guy is hurting their business. Y’all wait for me at the cars,” he said.

Joe Zeroski’s crew drifted back through the crypts to their cars and the rented moving van. Joe stepped out in front of the black men and pulled a .45 automatic from his belt. He racked a round into the chamber and set the safety.

“You guys kneel down. Don’t move your hands from your head,” he said.

Joe waited until they were all on their knees, their faces popping with sweat now, mosquitoes buz

zing about their ears and nostrils, their eyes avoiding any contact with his.

“You ever hear why some guys use a .22?” he said. “Because the bullet bounces around inside the skull and makes a mess in there. That story is shit. The guys use a .22 just don’t like noise. So they got to put one through the temple, one in the ear, and one through the mouth. That’s supposed to be a Mob hit. But it gets done that way just because some guys don’t like noise. No other reason.

“I carry ear plugs and use a gun that makes an exit hole like a half dollar. See?”

Joe screwed a rubber plug into his ear, then removed it and put it back in his coat pocket.

“There’s a building with a steeple on it across the bayou. You keep looking at it and don’t turn around till sunrise. If you want your brains running out your nose, turn around while I’m still here. Remember my name. Joe Zeroski. You want to make yourself some cash, come see me with the name of the man killed my daughter. You want to lose your life, fuck with me just once.”

Minutes later the moving van and the two cars drove away.

At dawn the pastor of a ramshackle fundamentalist church, with a wood cross and a facsimile of a bell tower nailed on the roof, walked down the sloping green lawn of his rectory to take his wash off the clothesline. He stopped in the mist drifting off the bayou and stared openmouthed at a row of black men kneeling on the opposite bank, their hands clasped on the crowns of their skulls like prisoners of war in a grainy black-and-white news film.

CHAPTER 11

The sheriff was surprisingly calm and reflective as he sat down in my office Monday morning. “For years I’ve been trying to put these pimps and drug dealers out of business. Then the goddamn Mafia comes in and does it in one night,” he said.

“They’ll be back,” I said.

“What do you know about this guy Zeroski?”

“He’s an old-time mechanic. Supposedly, he hung it up after he accidentally shot a child by the St. Thomas Project.”

“Eventually we’ve got to run him out of town. You know that, huh?”

“Easier said than done,” I replied.

The sheriff got up from his chair and gazed out the window at the old crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. “Who beat you up, Dave?” he said.

At noon I signed out of the office to interview a woman in St. Mary Parish, down the bayou, who claimed to have awakened in the middle of the night to find a man standing over her. She said the man had worn leather gloves and a rubber mask made in the image of Alfred E. Neuman, the grinning idiot on the cover of Mad magazine. The man had tried to suffocate her by pressing his hands down on her mouth and nose, then had fled when the woman’s dog attacked him.

Unfortunately for her, she was uneducated and poor, a cleaning woman at a motel behind a truck stop, and had filed reports of attempted rape twice in the past. The city police had blown off her claims, and I was about to do the same when she said, “He smelled sweet inside his mask, like there was mint on his breath. He was trembling all over.” Then her work-worn face creased with shame. “He touched me in private places.”

It wasn’t the kind of detail that people imagined or manufactured. But if the intruder at her home had any connection to the death of either Linda Zeroski or Amanda Boudreau, I couldn’t find it. I handed her my business card.

“You coming back to hep me?” she said, looking up at me from a kitchen chair.

“I work in Iberia Parish. I don’t have any authority here,” I said.

“Then why you got me to tell you all them personal t’ings?” she asked.

I had no answer. I left my card on her kitchen table.