Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

gs about you, Steve. Weren’t you in the Witness Protection Program? What happened on that deal?” I said.

“What do you mean ‘what happened’?”

“You were one of the guys who gave up Didi Gee. But you’re obviously not a federally protected witness anymore.”

“Because that tub of guts had his insides eaten out by the Big C. I heard the mortuary had to stuff his fat ass into a piano crate,” he replied.

“You go way back with the Giacano family?” I asked.

“Yeah, I knew Didi when he used to carry a bloodstained baseball bat in the backseat of his convertible.”

“Ever hear about a couple of cops on a pad snuffing a woman in Lafourche Parish back in the sixties?” I asked.

His eyes cut sideways out the window. He seemed to study the swirls of color in the sky. The sun was almost down now, and small waves from a passing tugboat rippled back over the mudflat under the diner’s pilings.

“Yeah, I remember that. A whore?” he said.

“Yeah, Zipper said the same thing. They killed a whore,” I said, my face expressionless, the skin tight against the bone, my hands folded one on top of the other.

“She had something on them. That’s all I remember,” he said.

“No names?” I said.

“No, I don’t know anything else about it.”

“But you’re sure she was a whore? That’s what you called her, right?” I said.

“You got some trouble with that word?” he asked.

“No, not really,” I said, and took my eyes off his and scratched a place on my forehead.

He raised a finger to the counterman to order a beer for himself, then said, “I got to take a drain.”

Clete leaned forward in the booth.

“Quit baiting the guy,” he said.

“He knows more,” I said.

“He’s a gumball. You get what you see. Be thankful. We got the name of the shooter.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and followed Steve Andropolis into the men’s room and shot the dead bolt behind me. The room was small, the air fetid and warm, with a wood enclosure around the toilet. I reached under my seersucker coat and slipped my .45 from its clip-on holster. I pulled back the slide and released it, chambering the top round on the magazine.

I stood back from the door on the toilet enclosure and kicked it open. Andropolis had been tucking his shirt into his trousers when the door hit him in the back and knocked him off balance against the wall. He tried to push the door back into my face, but I stomped it again, harder this time, ripping the top hinge and screws loose, pinning him in a half-crumpled position against the toilet bowl. I held on to the side of the stall with my left hand and drove my shoe through the door, again and again, splintering plywood into his face.

Then I flung the door off him and pointed the .45 at his mouth. A twelve-inch strip of desiccated wood was affixed to his cheek with three rusty nails.

“I wanted to apologize to you, Steve. I lied out there. I was bothered by the word ‘whore.’ When a subhuman sack of shit calls my dead mother a whore, that bothers me. Does that make sense to you, Steve?”

He closed his eyes painfully and pulled loose the splintered board that was nailed to his cheek.

“I’ve heard about you, you crazy sonofabitch. What do I know about your mother? I’m a spotter. I never capped anybody in my life.”

“You tell me who killed her, Steve, or your brainpan is going to be emptied into that toilet bowl in ten seconds.”

He began getting to his feet, blood draining in a long streak from his cheek.

“Fuck you, Zeke,” he said, and drove his fist into my scrotum.