Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

The off-duty New Orleans cop who worked security at the historical museum on Jackson Square watched a lithe young man in shades and knife-creased khakis and half-topped boots and a form-fitting ribbed T-shirt with the sleeves rolled over the shoulders cross from the Café du Monde and walk through the park, past a string band playing in front of Pirates Alley, wrap his chewing gum in a piece of foil and drop it in a waste can, comb his hair and enter the museum’s doorway.

Where had the off-duty cop seen that face?

A mug shot passed around at roll call?

No, he was imagining things. The mug shot was of a guy who was wanted in a shooting off Magazine. Yeah, the hit on Zipper Clum. A white shooter, which meant it was probably a contract job, somebody the Giacanos hired to wipe out an obnoxious black pimp. Contract shooters didn’t wander around in museums under a cop’s nose. Besides, this kid looked like he just got out of high school.

“You visiting from out of town?” the cop asked.

The young man still wore his shades and was looking at a battle-rent Confederate flag that was pressed under glass.

“No, I live here. I’m an artist,” he replied. He did not turn his head when he spoke.

“You come here often?”

“About every three days.” He removed his shades and looked the cop full in the face, grinning now. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah, my feet hurt,” the cop said.

But later the cop was still bothered. He followed the young man across Jackson Square to Decatur, took down the license number of his pickup truck, and called it in.

One block away, a police cruiser fell in behind the pickup truck. Just as the uniformed cop behind the wheel was about to hit his flasher, the pickup truck turned back into the Quarter on Bienville and drove the short two-block distance to the police station at Royal and Conti.

The young man in shades parked his truck and went inside.

The cop in the cruiser kept going, shaking his head disgustedly at the cavalier misuse of his time.

Inside the police station, the young man gazed idly at Wanted posters on a corkboard, then asked the desk sergeant for directions to the battlefield at Chalmette.

The desk sergeant watched the young man walk out of the door of the station and get in his truck and drive down Conti toward the river. Then the sergeant was out the door himself, his arms waving in the air at two motorcycle cops who were coming up the walk.

“The guy in the black pickup! You can still get him!” he yelled.

Wrong.

Johnny Remeta cut across the Mississippi bridge onto the West Bank, caught Highway 90, wove five miles through residential neighborhoods and strip malls, and dumped the pickup in St. Charles Parish and boosted an Oldsmobile out of a used-car lot.

He took back roads through Chacahoula and Amelia, crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, and hot-wired an ancient Volkswagen bus at the casino on the Chettimanchi Indian Reservation.

He created a one-man grand-auto crime wave across southwestern Louisiana, driving off idling automobiles from a Jiffy Lube and a daiquiri take-out window, blowing out tires and engines, lighting up emergency dispatcher screens in six parishes.

He almost eluded the army of state police and sheriff’s deputies that was crisscrossing Highway 90, virtually colliding into one another. He swung onto a side road in St. Mary Parish, floored the souped-up stock-car racer h

e had stolen out of a mechanic’s shed, scoured a balloon of dust out of a dirt road for two miles through sugarcane fields that shielded the car from view, then swung back onto 90, a half mile beyond a police barricade, and looked down the long corridor of oaks and pines that led into New Iberia.

He shifted down, turned across a stone bridge over the bayou, arching a crick out of his neck, knotting his T-shirt in his hand, wiping the sweat off his face with it.

He’d outrun them all. He filled his lungs with air. The smoke from meat fires drifted through the oaks on people’s lawns; the evening sky glowed like a purple rose. Now, to dump this car and find a rooming house where he could watch a lot of television for a few days. Man, it was good to be alive.

That’s when the First Assembly of God church bus hit him broadside, springing his doors, and propelled him through the air like a stone, right through a canebrake into Bayou Teche.

He sat on a steel bunk in the holding cell, barefoot, his khakis and T-shirt splattered with mud, a bandage wrapped around his head. He pulled a thin strand of bamboo leaf from his hair and watched it tumble in a shaft of light to the cement floor.

The sheriff and I looked at him through the bars.

“Why didn’t you get out of New Orleans when you had the chance?” I asked.

“It’s a free country,” he replied.