Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"I think so. He doesn't rattle easy, does he? Oh-oh, here he comes."

Scruggs put one hand on the bar, his foot on the brass rail, not three feet from us.

"Has that worm talked to you yet?" he said to Harold.

"He's waiting right here for you," Harold said, and lifted a brown bottle of mescal from under the bar and set it before Scruggs, with a shot glass and a saucer of chicken wings and a bottle of Tabasco.

Scruggs took a twenty-dollar bill from a hand-tooled wallet and inserted it under the saucer, then poured into the glass and drank from it. His eyes never looked directly as us but registered our presence in the same flat, lidless fashion an iguana's might.

"You got a lot of brass," I said to him.

"Not really. Since I don't think your bunch could drink piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel," he replied. He unscrewed the cork in the mescal bottle with a squeak and tipped another shot into his glass.

"Some out-of-town hitters popped Ricky Scar. That means you're out of the contract on Willie Broussard and you get to keep the front money," I said.

"I'm an old man. I'm buying quarter horses to take back to Deming. Why don't y'all leave me be?" he said.

"You use vinegar?" Clete said.

This time Scruggs looked directly at him. "Say again."

"You must have got it on your clothes. When you scrubbed the gunpowder residue off after you smoked Alex Guidry. Those .357s leave powder residue like you dipped your hand in pig shit," Clete said.

Scruggs laughed to himself and lit a cigarette and smoked it, his back straight, his eyes focused on his reflection in the bar mirror. A man came up to him, made a bet, and walked away.

"We found the photos you buried in the jar. We want the rest of it," I said.

"I got no need to trade. Not now."

"We'll make the case on you eventually. I hear you've got a carrot growing in your brain. How'd you like to spend your last days in the jail ward at Charity?" I said.

He emptied the mescal bottle and shook the worm out of the bottom into the neck. It was thick, whitish green, its skin hard and leathery. He gathered it into his lips and sucked it into his mouth. "Is it true the nurse's aides at Charity give blow jobs for five dollars?" he asked.

Clete and I walked out into the parking lot. The air was cool and smelled of the fields and rain, and across the road the sugarcane was bending in the wind. I nodded to Helen Soileau and a St. Landry Parish plainclothes who sat in an unmarked car.

An hour later Helen called me at the bait shop, where I was helping Batist clean up while Clete ate a piece of pie at the counter. Scruggs had rented a house in the little town of Broussard.

"Why's he still hanging around here?" I asked Clete.

"A greedy piece of shit like that? He's going to put a soda straw in Archer Terrebonne's jugular."

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I left the office early and worked in the yard with Alafair. The sun was gold in the trees, and red leaves drifted out of the branches onto the bayou. We turned on the soak hoses in the flower beds and spaded out the St. Augustine grass that had grown through the brick border, and the air, which was unseasonably cool, smelled of summer, like cut lawns and freshly turned soil and water from a garden hose, rather than autumn and shortening days.

Lila Terrebonne parked a black Oldsmobile with darkly tinted windows by the boat ramp and rolled down the driver's window and waved. Someone whom I couldn't see clearly sat next to her. The trunk was open and filled with cardboard boxes of chrysanthemums. She got out of the Oldsmobile and crossed the road and walked into the pecan trees, where Alafair and I were raking up pecan husks and leaves that had gone black with water.

Lila wore a pale blue dress and white pumps and a domed straw hat, one almost like Megan's. For the first time in years her eyes looked clear, untroubled, even happy.

"I'm having a party tomorrow night. Want to come?" she said.

"I'd better pass, Lila."

"I did a Fifth Step, you know, cleaning house. With an ex-hooker, can you believe it? It took three hours. I think she wanted a drink when it was over."

"That's great. I'm happy for you."

Lila looked at Alafair and waited, as though an unstated expectation among us had not been met.

"Oh, excuse me. I think I'll go inside. Talk on the phone. Order some drugs," Alafair said.