Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'They're going to clip some guy that ain't supposed to be clipped. That's what these dagos were saying. That's all I know, man.'

'When you think of something else, give us a call,' I said.

He ran his hand through his grizzled hair. His palm was shiny with sweat.

'I'm sick. I got to go to a hospital,' he said.

'What's the sword on your arm mean?' I said.

He put his face in his hands. 'I ain't saying no more,' he said. 'I'm sick. I got to have some medication.'

'How many times a day do you fix, Waylon?' I said.

'I got it down to three. Look, get me into a hospital and maybe I can he'p y'all a whole lot better.'

'It doesn't work that way, partner,' I said, and slipped my business card under the flat of his arm. 'Give us a call when your memory clears up.'

A half hour later Lucinda and I took coffee and pastry from a bakery downtown and sat on a stone bench in a small green park by the capitol building. It was a blue-gold day, with a breeze off the Mississippi, and the grass in the park looked pale green in the sunlight.

'Why'd you keep asking him about a sword?' Lucinda said.

'I think it's the name or the logo of a group of neo-Nazis or Aryan supremacists of some kind.'

'The tattoo looked like a bayonet to me.'

'Maybe. But he's a speed addict, too, just like the guy who electrocuted himself in y'all's custody. Buchalter called me once during what sounded like the downside of a drug bender. Maybe like Hippo Bimstine says, we're talking about speed-fried Nazi zomboids.'

'You think Waylon Rhodes will give us anybody?'

'He'll try to, when he starts to come apart. But by that time you won't be able to trust anything he tells you.'

'I believe him about the hit. When they lie, they're not vague.'

I took a bite out of my pastry and drank from my paper cup.

'Why the silence?' she asked.

'No reason. What were you going to tell me about Nate Baxter?'

'I don't think he has designs on me, that's all.'

I nodded.

'A white supervisor trying to get into a black female officer's pants doesn't make his kind of racial remarks,' she said.

'You don't have to tell me anything about Nate Baxter, Lucinda.'

&nb

sp; 'He said Ben Motley got where he is by spitting watermelon seeds and giving whitey a lot of "yas-suhs." He said I'd never have to do that, because I'm smart and I have a nice ass. How do you like that for charm?'

'Nate's a special kind of guy.'

'I don't think so. Not for a black woman, anyway.'

'Don't underestimate him, Lucinda. He raped and sodomized a hooker in the Quarter. Then he ran her out of town before anybody from Internal Affairs could talk to her.'

She stopped eating and looked across the grass at some children running through the camellia bushes. Then she set the pastry down on a napkin in her lap and brushed the powdered sugar off her fingers.