Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“We wrote our names on the wall, didn’t we?”

“Five feet high.”

“You ever miss the greaseballs?”

“That’s like missing bubonic plague.”

“Be honest. It was like being in the middle of a Dick Tracy comic strip. Who could invent guys like Didi Gee and No Duh Dolowitz? How about the broads? I used to think getting laid on the ceiling was a physical impossibility. After every Mardi Gras, I’d have to send my flopper to rehab.”

“Watch out for Woolsey, Clete. Most of the greaseballs were family men and had parameters. These guys don’t.”

“That’s the point. These cocksuckers ran up the black flag. Not us,” he said.

CLETE HAD A working relationship with skells of every stripe. One of the most resourceful was a totally worthless human being by the name of Ozone Eddy Mouton, who had cooked his head by shooting up with paint thinner and sniffing gas tanks and airplane glue and drinking dry-cleaning fluid in Angola. For a long time Ozone Eddy worked as a stall for a bunch of street dips in the Quarter, then upgraded as a money washer at the track, which cost him an ice pick through both kneecaps. On his last bust, the judge took mercy on him and gave him probation, contingent on his attendance at twelve-step meetings.

The lowest of the low-bottom groups in Jefferson and Orleans parishes was the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting, a collection of outlaw bikers, prostitutes, street bums, wet-brains, and violent offenders known in Angola as “big stripes.” After six weeks of dealing with Ozone Eddy, the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfuckers held what is called a group-conscience meeting, and Eddy was told to hit the bricks and never come back unless he wanted his head shoved up a Harley-Davidson exhaust pipe.

That was when he teamed up with No Duh Dolowitz, the Merry Prankster of the Mafia. No Duh and Ozone Eddy became legendary as architects of mayhem from Camden to Miami. They shot a paintball into the mouth of a right-to-work politician at a Knights of Columbus dinner. At a tar roofers’ convention in Atlantic City, they put cat turds among the breakfast sausages and flushed twenty-five M-80s down the plumbing and blew water out of the commodes all over the hotel. They freeze-wrapped the severed parts of a stolen cadaver and submerged them in the punch bowls at a bridal shower for the daughter of a Houston button man. They arranged for a busload of dancing transvestites to show up on a middle-school stage at a charitable event in Mississippi. I always thought their masterpiece was the night they hauled away a corrupt judge’s sports car from his driveway and returned it to the same spot before dawn, compacted into a gleaming block of crushed metal not much larger than a footlocker.

Ozone Eddy was to New Orleans what mustard gas was to trench warfare; you tried to stay upwind from him, but it was not an easy task.

MONDAY EVENING EDDY drove his car down a narrow street a couple of blocks from Audubon Park, the air as dense as a bruise, the trees throbbing with birds. He backed his vehicle into the driveway of a white one-story Victorian home that was elevated high above the lawn and had square pillars on the gallery, then he got out and mounted the steps and tapped on the door. The man who answered had a face that looked like it had been poured out of a pitcher of cream, the eyes the most brilliant blue Ozone Eddy had ever seen. The man was holding a book in one hand; behind him, a reading lamp burned inside a flowery shade. “Glad I caught you. I’m returning your tire,” Eddy said.

“What tire?”

“The one I borrowed. I got mine fixed, and I’m returning yours. I’m about to put it back on. I thought I’d tell you so you’d know what was going on.”

“Who are you? What are you talking about?”

“I ran over a nail and didn’t have a spare tire. I saw you had the same size tire as me. So I took yours and got mine fixed. Now I’m putting yours back on. Why are you making that face?”

“Your hair. It’s orange. Say that about my tire again.”

“I hate to tell you this, but you look like you haven’t seen sunlight in five hundred years. You got a vampire coffin in there? What’s with this about my hair? I just told you about your tire. You want it back or not?”

Lamont Woolsey walked down the steps and stared at his SUV. One corner of the frame was almost flush with the concrete. “You left it on the rim?”

“What if a neighborhood kid came by and pushed your SUV on top of himself? Besides, I needed the jack to change my own tire. Want to give me a hand? I’m late for my bridge club.”

“I told you what would happen,” a woman said from the passenger seat of the car. “Leave him his tire and forget it.”

“Who’s that?” Lamont asked.

“That’s Connie Rizzo, my cousin. She lives in your neighborhood. I was trying to do the right thing. Instead, how about you jam your bad manners up your nose?”

Lamont pushed Eddy in the chest with one finger. Eddy was surprised by the force and power in the man’s thrust. “You want trouble?” Lamont said, and speared him in the sternum again.

The woman got out of the van. She was dark-haired and lovely and had youthful skin and a bright red mouth. She wore a beige T-shirt and baggy strap overalls spotted with paint. “Keep your hands to yourself, you freak,” she said.

“Did you people get loose from an asylum?” Lamont said.

“No, but I think you escaped from the circus,” she said. “You lay off Eddy. You want to push people around, try me.”

“You’re cute,” Lamont said.

“Think so? Try this,” she said. She pulled a can of oven cleaner from her overalls and squirted it in his eyes and nose and mouth, stepping back as he flailed his arms, a steady stream flowing into his face.

In under thirty seconds, Lamont Woolsey was in the trunk of Eddy’s car, his wrists tied behind him with plastic ligatures, a black bag pulled down over his head, snugged tight with a drawstring under the chin.