The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux 1)

"Tell me what happened."

The elevator door opened, and a nurse pushed out a wheelchai

r in which sat a pretty woman in a pink nightgown. She was smiling and she held a spray of flowers in her lap. We stepped inside and the doors closed behind us.

"He walked down to the Café du Monde for beignets, then stopped at the public restroom next door. The one that's under the levee. A black kid that was taking a piss in the wall urinal said Jimmie went into one of the stalls and closed the door. A minute later a guy came in, kicked open the door, and fired twice, point-blank. The kid says the gun had something on the barrel and it made a spitting sound. It sounds like a professional hit."

"What'd the guy look like?"

"The kid was scared shitless. He still is. We got him looking in mug books, but don't expect anything."

I clenched and unclenched my fists. The elevator was a slow one, and it kept stopping at floors where no one was waiting.

"Maybe this is the wrong time to tell you this, but some people are starting to think twice about your story," the captain said.

"How's that?"

"Maybe they were after you instead. Jimmie looks like your twin. There might be other explanations, but the local talent tends toward shotguns and car bombs."

"It's damn poor consolation to be believed because your brother was shot."

"People are human. Give an inch."

"I don't have that kind of charity. That's my whole family up there."

"I can't blame you. But for what it's worth, we've got uniforms all over the floor. Nobody'll get to him here."

"If he doesn't make it, you might be arresting me, Captain."

"I hate to hear you talk like that, Dave. It brings me great worry," he said.

Jimmie remained three more hours in the recovery room before they brought him into intensive care on a gurney. I wanted to go inside, but the surgeon wouldn't let me. He said both rounds had hit Jimmie at an angle, which was the only factor that saved his life. One had caromed off the skull and exited the scalp at the back of the head, but the second round had fractured the skull and put lead and bone splinters into the brain tissue. The surgeon's concern was about paralysis and loss of sight in one eye.

Captain Guidry had already gone back to the office, and I spent the rest of the afternoon alone in the waiting room. I read magazines, drank endless cups of bad coffee from a machine, and watched the light fade outside the window and the shadows of the oak trees fall on the brick-paved street down below. At eight o'clock I went downstairs and ate a sandwich in the cafeteria. I wanted to call Annie, but I thought I had already caused her enough traumatic moments and should spare her this one. Upstairs again, I talked with nurses, made friends with an elderly Cajun lady from Thibodaux who spoke English poorly and was afraid for her husband who was in surgery, and finally I watched the late news on television and went to sleep in a fetal position on a short couch.

In the morning a Catholic sister woke me up and gave me a glass of orange juice and told me it was all right to see my brother for a few minutes. Jimmie's jaws and head were wrapped thickly with bandages, almost like a plaster cast. His face was white and sunken, and both eyes were hollow and blackened as though he had been beaten with fists. An IV needle was taped down to the blue vein inside his right arm; an oxygen tube was attached to his nose; his bare chest was crisscrossed with curlicues of electronic monitoring wires. He looked as though all the life had been sucked out of him through a straw and the lighted machines around him had more future and viability than he.

I wondered what my father would think of this. My father brawled in bars, but he always fought for fun and he never bore a grudge. He wouldn't carry a gun for any reason, even when he played bourée with gamblers who were known as dangerous and violent men. But this was a different world from the New Iberia of the 1940s. Here people with the moral instincts of piranha would pump two bullets into the brain of a man they didn't know and spend the contract money on cocaine and whores.

There were small lights in Jimmie's dark eyes when he looked at me. His eyelids looked like they were made of paper, stained with purple dye.

"How you doing, boy?" I said. I rubbed the back of his arm and squeezed his palm. It was lifeless and felt like Johnny Massina's had when I shook hands with him the night of his execution.

"Did you see who it was?"

His throat swallowed and his tongue made small saliva bubbles on his lower lip.

"Was it this guy Philip Murphy?" I asked. "A late-middle-aged, frumpy-looking guy with glasses? Like somebody who'd be selling dirty postcards around a schoolyard?"

His eyes looked away from me, the lids fluttering.

"How about a dark little guy?"

Jimmie started to whisper, then choked on the fluids in his throat.

"All right, don't worry about it now," I said. "You're safe here. There's three uniformed cops with you, and I'll be in and out of here all the time. But while you get well, I'm going to find out who did this to us. You remember what the old man used to say—'You pull on dat 'gator's tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.'"

I smiled at him, then I saw his eyes flicker with an urgent light. His mouth opened and clicked dryly.