Jolie Blon's Bounce (Dave Robicheaux 12)

His blackjack and S&W .38 were in his glove compartment. He popped it open and removed the .38 and laid it on the passenger seat, where it vibrated with the motion of the truck. After Robicheaux had thrown it in his unflushed toilet bowl, he’d had to wash it with a garden hose outside, then take it apart and soak it in gasoline overnight, before reassembling and oiling the parts. But the gasoline had softened the blueing, which came off on his cleaning rag and streaked and dulled the uniform blue-steel shine that had defined the pistol he had always been proud to own.

But Robicheaux gonna have his day, too, he told himself. Maybe Perry LaSalle, too, who Legion had convinced himself was writing a book exposing Legion as a blackmailer and molester of Negro field women and the murderer of a New York journalist. Because he had convinced himself that the educated, the well-traveled, the technologically sophisticated, all belonged to the same club, one that had excluded him for a lifetime, treating him little differently from the Negroes, serving him his food in their backyards, on tin plates and in jelly jars that were kept in a special cabinet for people of color and white trash.

But no one could say he hadn’t gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.

He mashed out his cigarette in the ashtray and took a six-pack of hot beer off the floor and ripped the tab off a can and drank it half empty, the foam curling down his wrist and forearm. Up ahead, the lavender Cadillac roar

ed through a red light.

I bet that cowboy hitting on you now, bitch, he thought. But that’s just the previews. You cain’t even guess what it gonna be like tonight. You gonna see, you.

He finished his beer and tossed the can out the window. He looked in the wide-angle mirror and watched the can bounce crazily in the middle of the road.

Zerelda drove where Marvin pointed, in this instance down a winding road bordered with ditches that were brimming with rainwater, to a dirt driveway that led past a church whose roof was embedded with a fallen persimmon tree. They passed a house that was stacked inside with baled hay, and Marvin told her to park behind the house, in a stand of slash pines and water oaks, and to cut the ignition and the headlights. The hood of the Cadillac smoked in the rain, the engine ticking in the silence. There was no sound at all from the trunk.

“I got a place fixed up for us in the house. Food and soda, bedrolls, mosquito repellent, a Coleman lantern, paper towels, a mess of board games. I dint forget anything, I don’t think,” Marvin said, his lips pursed.

“Board games? We’re gonna play board games here?” she said.

“Yeah, or anything you want to do. Till I can get rid of him.” He nodded toward the trunk. “I’m gonna hide the Cadillac in a barn back in them trees. I’ll borrow a car for us till I can buy us one in Texas. We’ll cross into Mexico on the other side of Laredo.”

“You think I’m staying with you? That’s the plan? After you shot Clete and beat the shit out of me?” she said.

“What did you expect? You wouldn’t do anything I tole you. I think it was the way you was brought up, Zerelda. I’d like to have kids with you, but you’re gonna have to change your attitude about a lot of things.”

“Are you insane? I wouldn’t let you touch the parings from my toenails.”

“See? That’s what I mean. It’s being around them Sicilian criminals all your life. They give you that potty mouth,” he said.

He pulled the keys out of the ignition and stepped out into the drizzle, the Beretta hanging from his right hand. He walked around the front of the car and opened the door for her. She could smell the odor of ozone and humus and evaporated salt in the air and the drenched earth out in the sugarcane fields, a fecund heaviness she had always associated with life and birth, then the wind changed and an execrable stench struck her face like a fist.

“God, what is that?” she said.

“It’s them pigs. They shouldn’t be penned up like that. The germs gets in the groundwater, too. This state don’t have no environmental direction. Fact is, I’m gonna turn them poor critters out right now,” he said.

He walked to the hog pen and kicked down the rails on one side, then threw dirt clods at the hogs to spook them into the woods. But they milled in circles, grunting, and stayed inside the confines of the pen. He watched them, perplexed, and sprayed an atomizer of breath freshener into his mouth.

“That’s some dumb animals,” he said, then saw Zerelda walking toward the road.

She felt his hand clench her under the arm and turn her back toward the house.

“You’re a handful, woman. I’m gonna need to keep an eye on you,” he said.

She looked at his chiseled profile, the smoothness of his complexion, his country-boy good looks and the vacuous serenity in his eyes, and she wondered, almost desperately, who lived inside his skin, whom she should address herself to.

But she realized his attention was diverted now, that he was staring at a pickup truck that had stopped on the road and was backing up to the small wooden bridge over the rain ditch. He chewed on his lip, hesitating only a moment, then pushed the Beretta inside her blouse, flat against her back, and began walking with her toward the truck.

“The man who taught me sales always said ‘A good salesman is a good listener. The customer will always tell you what he wants if you’ll just listen,’” Marvin whispered in her ear. “Just smile at this fellow while he talks. We’ll tell him what he needs to hear and he’ll go on about his bidness. There ain’t nothing to it.”

She watched a man in a straw hat and khaki shirt and trousers get out of the truck, a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up and down the road, as though lost, then approached them, his boots hollow sounding on the wooden bridge that spanned the rain ditch. He nodded his head deferentially.

“I got lost on the turn-off to Pecan Island, me,” he said.

“Just go a half mile back. This road here don’t go nowhere except down to the bay,” Marvin said.

The man in the straw hat puffed on his cigarette and looked down the road, bemused.

“You could have fooled me. I t’ought this went to Abbeville,” he said.