Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"What happened to you, partner?" I said.

"The woman done it," he answered.

"The woman?"

"I mean, she was dressed like a woman. She come at me. I ain't wanted to do it, but I hit her with my baton. It didn't even slow her up. That's when she grabbed me. Down here. She twisted real hard. She kept saying, 'Tell me where LaRose at or I tear it out.'" He swallowed and widened his eyes.

"We'll get the paramedics. You're going to be all right," I said. I heard Helen go back out the door.

"I ain't never had nothing like this happen," he said. His face flinched when he tried to change the position of his legs. "It was when I seen her socks. That's what started it, see. I wouldn't have paid her no mind."

"Her socks?" I said.

"The catering guys went in the kitchen with all the food. I thought it was one of them stinking up the place. Then I looked at the woman's feet 'cause she was tracking the rug. She had on brogans and socks with blood on them. I axed her to show me some ID. She say it's in the van, then y'all called me on the radio."

"Where'd this person go?" I said.

"I don't know. Back outside, maybe. She was kicking around in these cartons, looking for something. I think she dropped it when I hit her. It was metal-looking. Maybe a knife."

Helen came back through the door.

"Check this. It was out in the lot," she said, and held up a fright wig by one ropy blond strand.

"You did fine," I said to the security guard. "Maybe you saved the governor's life tonight."

"Yeah? I done that?"

"You bet," I said. Then I saw a piece of black electrician's tape and a glint of metal under a flattened carton. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the carton and inserted my ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a revolver whose broken wood grips were taped to the steel frame.

"It looks like a thirty-two," Helen said.

"It sure does."

"What, that means something?" she asked.

"I've seen it before. In a shoebox full of military decorations at Sabelle Crown's bar," I said.

An hour later, a half mile away, somebody reported a grate pried off a storm drain. A Lafayette city cop used his flashlight and crawled down through a huge slime-encrusted pipe that led under the streets to a bluff above the Vermilion River. The bottom of the pipe was trenched with the heavy imprints of a man's brogans or work boots. The prints angled off the end of the pipe through the brush and meandered along the mudbank, below the bluff and an apartment building where people watched the late news behind their sliding glass doors, oblivious to the passage of a man who could have stepped out of a cave at the dawn of time.

He found a powerboat locked with a chain to a dock, tore the chain and the steel bolt out of the post, then discovered a hundred yards downstream he had no gas. He climbed up the bank with a can, flung the dress in the brush, and followed a coulee to a lighted boulevard, climbed through a corrugated pipe, and walked into a filling station, wearing only his trousers and brogans, his hairy, mud-streaked torso glowing with an odor that made the attendant blanch.

Aaron opened his calloused palm on a bone-handle pocketknife.

"How much you give me for this?" he asked.

"I don't need one," the attendant replied, and tried to smile. He was young, his black hair combed straight back; he wore a tie that attached to the collar of his white shirt with a cardboard hook.

"I'll take six dollars for it. You can sell it for ten."

"No, sir, I really don't need no knife."

"I just want five dollars gas and a bag of them pork rinds. That's an honest deal."

The attendant's eyes searched the empty pavilion outside. The rain was slanting across the fluorescent lights above the gas pumps.

"You're trying to make me steal from the man I work for," he said.

"I ain't got a shirt on my back. I ain't got food to eat. I come in out of the rain and ask for hep and you call me a thief. I won't take that shit."