Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“I thought maybe you’d gone back to New Mexico, Micah,” I said.

He had a long-neck bottle of beer and a shot glass in front of him, and he sipped from the shot, then drank a small amount of beer afterward, like a man who loves a vice so dearly he fears his appetite for it will one day force him to give it up.

“The heavyweight champion of the Shrimp Festival,” he said.

I sat down next to him and took a peanut out of a plastic bowl on the bar and cracked the shell and put the nut in my mouth.

“You ever see a guy by the name of Johnny Remeta in here?” I asked.

“What would you give to find out?”

“Not much.”

He lifted the shot glass again and tipped it into his mouth.

“I might buy half of a carnival. What do you think of that?” he said.

“Maybe you can give me a job. I got bumped from the department after I punched out Jim Gable.”

He watched an overweight, topless girl in heels and a sequined G-string walk out on a tiny stage behind the bar.

“Miss Cora give you a severance package?” I said.

“The smart man squeezes the man who milks the cow. That don’t mean anything to you. But maybe one day it will,” he said.

“Really?” I said.

“You’re an ignorant man.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, and slapped him on the back and caused him to spill his drink on his wrist.

I went outside and walked down to the old docks and pilings on the waterfront. It was dark now, and rain was falling on the river and I could see the nightglow of New Orleans on the far bank and, to the south, green trees flattening in the wind and the brown swirl of the current as it flowed around a wide bend toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Somewhere down on that southern horizon my father’s rig had blown out and he had hooked his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and bailed off the top of the derrick into the darkness. His bones and hard hat and steel-toed boots were still out there, shifting in the tidal currents, and I truly believed that in one way or another his brave spirit was out there as well.

The cops who had murdered my mother had rolled her body into a bayou, as contemptuous of her in death as they were of her in life. But eventually her body must have drifted southward into the salt water, and now I wanted to believe she and Big Al were together under the long, green roll of the Gulf, all their inadequacies washed away, their souls just beginning the journey they could not take together on earth.

The rain was blowing hard in the streets when I walked back to my truck, and the neon above the bars looked like blue and red smoke in the mist. I heard men fighting in a poolroom and I thought of Big Aldous Robicheaux and Mae Guillory and the innocence of a world in which inarticulate people could not tell one another adequately of either their pain or the yearnings of their hearts.

29

That night I dreamed of roses. I saw the sheriff trimming them in his garden and I saw them tattooed on Maggie Glick’s breasts. I saw them painted in miniature on the vase Johnny Remeta had given Alafair. I also saw the rose with green leaves that was tattooed on the neck of Letty Labiche.

But just as I woke and was momentarily between all the bright corridors of sleep and the grayness of the dawn, the flowers disappeared from the dream and I saw a collection of Civil War photographs on a library table, the pages flipping in the wind that blew through the open window.

I wanted to dismiss the dream and its confused images, but it lingered with me through the day. And maybe because the change of the season was at hand, I could almost hear a clock ticking for a sexually abused woman waiting to die in St. Gabriel Prison.

On Monday morning I was out at the firing range with Helen Soileau. I watched her empty her nine-millimeter at a paper target, her ear protectors clamped on her head. When the breech locked open, she pulled off her ear protectors and slipped a fresh magazine into the butt of her automatic and replaced it in her holster and began picking up her brass.

“You’re dead-on this morning,” I said.

“I’m glad somebody is.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re off-planet. I have to say everything twice to you before you hear me,” she said, chewing gum.

“Where’d you see Passion Labiche?”