“Get up,” the second man said. He had removed his coat and hung it on the back of a chair. His arms were clean of tattoos, firm with the kind of muscle tone that came from working out on machines at a health club. He placed one hand under Legion’s arm and sensed a power there he had underestimated, then for the first time he looked directly into Legion’s eyes.
He released Legion’s arm and reached for the automatic that was stuck down in the back of his slacks. Perhaps for just a moment he felt he had stepped into an improbable photograph that should have had nothing to do with his life, a frozen moment involving a primitive barroom with plank floors, ignorant people bent over their drinks, moonlit Spanish moss in the trees outside the windows, a swamp coated with a patina of algae that was dissected by the tracings of alligators and poisonous snakes.
The blackjack in Legion’s hand crushed the cartilage in the man’s nose and filled his head with a red-black rush of pain that was like shards of glass driven into the brain. He cupped his hands to the blood roaring from his flattened nose and saw his friend Sonny Bilotti try to back away, to raise a hand in protest, but Legion whipped the blackjack across Sonny’s mouth, then swung it across his jaw, breaking bone, and down on the crown of his skull and across his neck and ears, until Sonny Bilotti was on his knees, whimpering, his forehead bent to the floor, his butt in the air like a child’s.
Legion picked up the sports coat from the chair where the second man had hung it and wiped his blackjack on the cloth.
“This been fun. Tell Robicheaux to send me some more like y’all,” he said.
Then he dragged each man by his collar to the screen door and shoved him with his boot into a pool of dirty water.
But those guys weren’t cops, were they?” Perry said. “Who knows? Maybe they’re out of New Orleans,” I said.
“They sound like greaseballs?”
“Could be,” I replied, looking up the slope at my house among the trees, avoiding his stare.
“Why would greaseballs want to talk to Legion Guidry?”
“Ask him.”
“I tried to. He was in my office this afternoon. He’s convinced himself we’re writing a book together and he’s in it. He thinks you sent these guys to do him in and that maybe I helped you.”
“That’s the breaks,” I said.
“Say again?”
“Who cares what he thinks? Why do you represent a cretin like that, anyway?” I said.
“You’re a police officer I have to get out of jail on a felony assault and you call my other clients cretins?”
“Want to come in and have dinner?” I said.
“What’s between you and Legion Guidry? Did you sic a couple of wiseguys on him?”
“Adios,” I said.
“I think your pet hippo, that character Purcel, he’s mixed up in this, too. Tell him I said that. While you’re at it, tell him to keep his shit out of Barbara Shanahan’s life,” he said.
I picked the newspaper up off the lawn and walked through the deepening shade of the trees and up the steps of the gallery into my house. When I saw Bootsie at the sink, I kissed her on the back of the neck and touched her rump. She turned and threw a wet dish towel at my head.
The next day was Friday. I walked to Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and ate lunch by myself. It was dark and cool under the high, stamped-tin ceiling, and I drank coffee and watched the lunch crowd thin out at one o’clock. The front door opened and inside the glare of white light from the street I saw the slightly stooped, simian silhouette of Joe Zeroski. He headed for my table, brushing past a customer and a waitress. “I need to talk,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Not here. In my car.”
“Nope.”
“What, I got bad breath?”
“Is that a piece under your coat?”
“I got a permit. You believe that?”
“Sure, it’s a great country. Come to my office,” I replied.
He thought for a moment, his fingers working at his sides, his facial muscles like stone.