Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“He scares me. I can’t shake the feeling.”

* * *

EVER HAVE CONFLICT with the concept of mercy? I’m talking about those challenges to our Judeo-Christian ethos that require us to forgive or at least not to judge and to surrender the situation to a Higher Authority. That’s badly put. The challenge is not the venerable tradition. The real issue lies in the possibility that the person to whom you’re extending mercy will repay your trust by cutting you from your liver to your lights.

That’s why I hated to be in the proximity of Spade Labiche. There was an accusatory neediness in his face, a baleful light in his eyes, as though others were responsible for his lack of success and the monetary gain and happiness that should have been his. Friday morning, he opened my door without knocking. “Can I throw up on your rug for a minute?”

How about that for humor?

“I’m pretty busy, Spade.”

He looked over his shoulder. “I got to talk to somebody. How about it, Robicheaux? You know the score, man. Not many people around here do.”

“Come in.”

“Thanks,” he said. He sat down in front of my desk and lit a cigarette.

“Not in the building, partner.”

“I forgot.” He mashed out the cigarette on the ins

ide of my trash basket and let the butt fall on top of my wastepaper. There was a razor nick on his jawline and one under his left nostril. I could smell cloves on his breath. “What’s the update on this guy with the cannon that blows heads off at eight hundred yards?”

“There isn’t any.”

His face looked like a white prune. “No prints, no brass, no feds involved, no guesses about the identity of the shooter?”

“Nope.”

“Look, I knew people in Miami who had a couple of hotels rigged to set up congressmen and business types out for a good time. The skanks would be in the bar and get these guys juiced up and in front of a hidden camera that would film stuff you couldn’t buy in Tijuana. They’d squeeze these poor bastards for years. They had a perv working them, a guy they called Smiley. He never took a pinch, not for anything.”

“What kind of perv?”

“He gets off on splattering brain matter, that kind of perv.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I think my number is up,” he said. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “It’s a feeling you get. It’s like malaria or rheumatic fever. You feel sick all over and can’t shake it. I tried to tell you this before, man. You wouldn’t listen.”

“The first time I went down a night trail, I couldn’t stop my teeth from clicking,” I said. “A kid on point hit a trip wire and was screaming in the dark. We had to go after him. There were toe poppers all over the place. I didn’t think I could make myself walk through them. Then an old-time line sergeant whispered something to me I never forgot: ‘Don’t think about it before you do it, Loot, and don’t think about it after it’s over.’ What’s this dog shit about a sex sting in Miami?”

He pressed a hand against his stomach, grimacing. “I think I got an ulcer.”

I opened my drawer and threw him a roll of TUMS. “Catch.”

“You’re a coldhearted man.”

“This perv named Smiley is going to take you out?”

“People think I know things I don’t. I was in vice. You know what that means. I dealt with twenty-dollar whores and dime-bag black pukes. The average IQ was minus-ten.”

“You took juice from Tony Nine Ball?”

“Not juice. Tony’s associates had some stuff on me. So I cut their guys some slack a couple of times. Possession charges, nothing else. In Miami, not here.”

“What stuff?”

“Those cameras I mentioned in the hotels? There was this one working girl I thought was on the square. They got me good on the video. I was married.”