“What’s the clerk say?”
“The guy talked baby talk, like Elmer Fudd, and has lips that were ‘red like licorice.’ Fudd ate a bag of Ding Dongs and read the paper before he set the truck on fire.”
“This is the same truck that was stolen from here?”
“You got it.”
“How do you figure that one?”
“Our guy’s a nutcase?” she said.
The fireman was now inside the truck. He used the head of the crowbar to snap loose the handle on the freeze locker and pulled back the door on its hinges. He jumped down from the bumper, the ends of his mustache bouncing. He coughed wetly in his chest. “Y’all better take a look.”
The man inside the locker was bound hand and foot with ligatures, a strip of heat-baked tape hanging from his mouth. His eyes were wide, like those of someone holding his breath underwater. His forehead and bare feet were crusted with black blood, his hair and eyebrows singed, his clothes covered with burn holes. His skin had turned to orange marmalade. I hoped he had died of asphyxiation or a heart attack rather than from the burning gasoline that had curled around the bottom of the freeze locker.
“Recognize him?” Helen said.
“It’s Maximo Soza.”
“That’s him? I remember him being larger.”
“He was a small man inside and out.”
“Who’s the guy in the Jolly Jack suit?”
“I think the same guy who shot McVane.”
“How do you arrive at that?”
“He commits crimes no one would suspect him of. He does it for reasons that make sense to him but no one else. He builds the gallows and drops the trapdoor before anyone realizes he’s not a carpenter.”
“Who would want to pop one of Tony Squid’s guys?”
“Somebody who wants information about Tony or somebody who plans on popping Tony.”
“Mob guys don’t get popped without permission,” she said.
“That was in the old days. Whoever did this plans to leave a big footprint.”
* * *
AT 7:38 SUNDAY evening, I got a call from the man himself. “I’m all broken up. What the fuck is going on over there in Mosquito Town?”
“You said you were not going to call here again, Tony,” I said.
“Maximo was like a son to me.”
“Yeah, he was a great guy. Maybe he tortured Kevin Penny to death or put a kindhearted social worker in Lafayette General.”
“My people don’t do those kinds of things.”
“If the price were right, your people would work at Auschwitz.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
“None of your business.”
“I need to talk to her about the script. You’re not gonna believe who I got to play the role of the Confederate soldier.”