Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“I don’t know why she hooked up with me, but why question the fates?” he said.

“She looks like a nice girl.”

“You better believe she is. Her husband got killed falling trees over by Lincoln. A Caterpillar backed over him, ground him all over a rock. She spent five years opening oysters in a restaurant in Portland. Did you see her hands?”

I nodded.

“Then she was waiting tables in that Indian beer joint. You ought to check out a reservation bar. Those guys would make great pilots in the Japanese air force.”

“They’re going to send me up the road unless I nail Mapes.”

He pushed at the thick scar on his eyebrow with his finger.

“You’re really sweating this, aren’t you?” he said.

“What do you think?”

“I can’t blame you. An ex-cop doing time. Bad scene, mon. But I got off the hook, zipped right out of it, and if anybody should have gone up the road, it was me. Tell your lawyer to get a couple of continuances. Witnesses go off somewhere, people forget what they saw, the prosecutor loses interest. There’s always a way out, Streak.”

His girl brought out a tray filled with ham sandwiches, glasses of iced tea, a beet and onion salad, and a fresh apple pie. She sat down with us and ate without talking. The three moles by the corner of her mouth were the size of BBs.

“You actually think Dixie can help you?” Clete said.

“He has to.”

“Good luck. He told me once his life’s goal is to live to a hundred and get lynched for rape. He’s an all-right guy, but I think he has a wet cork for a brain.”

“He said Mapes and Vidrine killed a couple of guys and buried them back in a woods. Can you connect that to anything?”

His big face looked vague. “No, not really,” he said.

I saw his girl, Darlene, look directly into her plate, her head turned down, as though she wanted to hide her expression. But I noticed the color of her eyes darken in the corners.

“I’m sorry for the way I talk,” I said. “I think Clete and I were cops too long. Sometimes we don’t think about what we say in front of other people.” I tried to smile at her.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“I appreciate you having me for lunch. It’s very good.”

“Thank you.”

“I came out here fishing with a friend of mine years ago,” I said. “Montana’s a beautiful place to live, isn’t it?”

“Some of it is. When you have a job. It’s a hard place to find work in,” she said.

“Everything’s down here,” Clete said. “Oil, farming, cattle, mining. Even lumber. It’s cheaper to grow trees down south. These dumb bastards voted for Reagan, then got their butts reamed.”

“Then why is your buddy up here? And these lease people?”

His green eyes moved over my face, then he grinned.

“You never could resist mashing on a guy’s oysters,” he said. “He’s not my buddy. I work for him. I get along with him. It’s a professional relationship.”

“All right, what’s he doing here?”

“It’s a free country. Maybe he likes the trout.”

“I met a DEA man who had some other theories.”