Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

Clete and I walked out into the sunlight and drove back toward my house. It was the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, and the convenience stores were filled with people buying beer and ice and charcoal for barbecues.

'Why didn't the nuns look like that when I was in grade school?' Clete said. 'The ones I remember had faces like boiled hams… What are you brooding about?'

'Something you said. Why's Chuck Sitwell stonewalling us?'

'He wants to go out a mainline, stand-up con.'

'No, you said it earlier. He's scared. But if he's scared Buchalter will be back to pull his plug, why doesn't he just give him up?'

Clete looked out into the hot glare of the day from under the brim of his porkpie hat and puffed on his cigarette. His face was pink in the heat.

'You're a good guy, Streak, but you don't always think straight about yourself,' he said.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'You parked four-rounds in the guy.'

I looked at him.

'Come on, Dave, be honest,' he said. 'You only stopped popping caps when you ran out of bullets. You were trying to blow him all over that cane field. You don't think the guy knows that? What if he or Buchalter tell you what they had planned for you and Bootsie, Bootsie in particular, maybe even Alafair if she walked in on it? I'd be scared of you, too, mon.'

He glanced sideways at me, then sucked once on his cigarette and flipped it in a spray of sparks against the side of a red stop sign.

The weekend was hot and dry and uneventful. A guard remained on duty twenty-four hours at the door of Charles Arthur Sitwell's hospital room. Sitwell kept his promise; he refused to answer questions about anything.

I got up Tuesday morning at dawn, helped Batist open the bait shop, then walked up the slope through the trees to have breakfast with Bootsie before going to the office. The house was still cool from the attic and window fans that had run all night, and the grass in the backyard was thick with mockingbirds who were feeding on bread crumbs that Bootsie had thrown out the screen door.

'A deputy will be parked out front again today,' I said.

'How long do you plan to keep one here, Dave?' Bootsie said. She sat across from me, her shoulders straight, her fingers resting on the sides of her coffee cup. She had put aside her piece of toast after having eaten only half of it.

'It gives the guy something to do,' I said.

'We can't live the rest of our lives with a deputy parked out front.'

'We won't have to.'

She had just washed her face, but her eyes looked tired, still not quite separated from the sleep that came to her with certainty only at first light.

'I want to buy a gun,' she said.

'That's never been your way.'

'What kind of pistol is best for a woman? I mean size or whatever you call it.'

'A thirty-two, or maybe a thirty-eight or nine millimeter. It depends on what a person wants it for.'

'I want to do that this evening, Dave.'

'All right.'

'Will you show me how to use it?'

'Sure.' I watched her f

ace. Her eyes were flat with unspoken thoughts. 'We'll take the boat down the bayou and pop some tin cans.'

'I think we ought to teach Alafair how to shoot, too,' she said.