Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Anybody can be normal. Count your blessings,” Alafair said.

She turned in to a used-car lot that, only two weeks earlier, had been a cow pasture. The car seller was a notorious local character by the name of T. Coon Bassireau. His business enterprises had ranged from burial insurance to car-title loans to storefront counseling centers that billed Medicaid to treat street people who had to be taught the names of their illnesses. He also patented a vitamin tonic that contained 20 percent alcohol and was guaranteed to make the consumer feel better. He swindled pensioners out of their savings in a Mexican biotech scam and once dumped a bargeload of construction debris in a pristine swamp. But the big score for T. Coon came in the form of deteriorating train tracks across southern Louisiana. Whenever there was a freight derailment, particularly one involving tanker cars, he and his brother, a liability lawyer, distributed T-shirts to people in the neighborhoods along the tracks. The message printed on the back read: HAVE TOXIC SMELLS IN YOUR HOUSE FROM THE TRAIN WRECK? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A LARGE CASH SETTLEMENT. CALL T. COON BASSIREAU. T. COON IS YOUR FRIEND. The 800 number was emblazoned in red on the

front and back.

He stood proudly under the vinyl banner that stretched across his new car lot. Half a dozen American flags, their staffs speared into the ground, popped in the breeze. A battery-lit portable sign that read WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS glittered by the entranceway. T. Coon wore sideburns that flared like grease pencil on his cheeks, and a Stetson and a shiny magenta shirt with pearl snap buttons and a Stars and Bars belt buckle as big as the bronze plate on a heliograph. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots, a man at peace with both Caesar and God.

Gretchen walked past him without speaking and examined the two rows of junker cars and trucks T. Coon had assembled in the pasture. “You ladies want to go for a test drive?” he said. “You can do anyt’ing you want here. Just ax. For ladies like y’all, I’ll lower my price any day of the week and twice on Sunday and t’ree times on Monday.” He crossed his heart. “If I’m lying, dig me up and spit in my mout’.”

“Tell your mechanic to wipe the sawdust off the transmission cases,” Gretchen said.

“I’m lost here,” T. Coon said.

“You packed the transmission cases with sludge and sawdust to tighten up the gears. I bet you put oil on the brake linings to keep them from squeaking. The odometer numbers are a joke. I wouldn’t sit on the seats unless they’d been sprayed for crab lice.”

“I’m blown away by this,” he said.

“There’s not a car on the lot that’s not a shitbox. Your tires are so thin, the air is showing through. I think some of these cars came from Florida. They’re rusted with salt from the bottom up.”

“This is some kind of put-on.”

“Who are you that I should put you on?”

T. Coon’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth. “I’m making a living here.”

“You see that Ford truck with the chrome engine?”

“It’s a hot rod. It belongs to my nephew.”

“I ran the plate two days ago. It’s registered in your name. You use it as a leader and claim your nephew won’t sell it unless the figures are right. What are the right figures?”

“My nephew might take fifteen t’ousand.”

“Give me the keys,” Gretchen said.

She got in the pickup and fired it up and spun rubber on the grass and swung out on the highway, the dual exhausts throbbing on the asphalt. A few minutes later, she was back, the exposed chrome engine ticking with heat. She left the keys in the ignition and got out of the cab. “I’ll give you eight. In cash, right now. It’ll have to be re-primed and painted and the interior entirely redone. The only things good about it are the chop and channel jobs and the Merc engine and the Hollywood mufflers. The rest of it blows.”

“I cain’t believe I’m being verbally assaulted like this. I feel like I inebriated a whole bottle of whiskey and am having delusions.”

She opened her tote bag and removed a brown envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. “Tell me what you want to do,” she said.

“Make it nine,” he said.

“Make it eight.”

“Make it eighty-five hunnerd. The tires are almost brand-new.”

“That’s why you’re not getting seventy-five hundred,” she said. “Stop trying to see down my shirt.”

T. Coon wore a stupefied expression, like a man who had just gotten off a centrifuge. “We got to do some paperwork in my office, that li’l trailer over there. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll leave the door open. Jesus Christ, where you from, lady? You got your spaceship parked somewhere? You need a job? I’m serious here. I got an entry-level position we can talk about.” He looked at her expression to see what effect his words were having. “Okay, I was just axing.”

Half an hour later, Gretchen followed Alafair to a restaurant on the highway and bought seafood dinners for both of them. Through the window, Alafair could see a blue-black darkness taking hold in the sky and gulls that had been blown inland circling over a cane field. “I’ve got another favor to ask you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’d like to live my life the way you do. Maybe you could give me a reading list and some tips on things.”

“That’s flattering, but why not just be your own person?”

“If I was who I started out to be, I’d be in prison or worse. I’ve got an advantage over other people who write novels and make movies. I lived inside a world that most people couldn’t imagine. Did you ever see Wind Across the Everglades, the story of James Audubon trying to put the bird poachers out of business? I know those kinds of people, how they think and talk and spend their time. I know about racetracks and drug smuggling in the Keys and CIA people in Little Havana and the money that gets laundered through the pari-mutuel windows.”

“I think you’re probably a real artist, Gretchen. You don’t have to model yourself on me. Just stay true to your own principles.”