Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

Outside, the wind lifted the moss in the trees and I drifted off to sleep.

It was around 3 A.M. when I heard her stir in bed. I opened my eyes and looked up into her face, which hung over the side of the mattress.

“Why are you sleeping down there?” she whispered.

“I felt like it.”

“You thought something was going to happen to me?”

“Of course not.”

She made a solitary clicking sound with her tongue, then got out of bed and went out to the hall closet and came back and popped a sheet open and spread it across me.

“You are so crazy sometimes,” she said, and got back in bed, folding Tripod in the crook of her arm. She leaned over the side of the bed again and said, “Dave?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

I placed my arm across my eyes so she wouldn’t see the water welling up in them.

The next morning was Sunday and Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass together. After we returned home I went down to the dock and helped Batist in the bait shop. It was unusually cool, a fine day for going after bream and goggle-eye perch with popping bugs, and we had rented most of our boats. It showered just after lunch, and a number of fishermen came in and drank beer and ate links and chicken at our spool tables under the awning. But regardless of the balmy weather and the cheerful mood out on the dock, I knew it wouldn’t be long before Johnny Remeta came back into our lives.

The call came at mid-afternoon.

“I figure we’re square,” he said.

“You got it,” I said.

He was silent a moment. I picked up an empty Coke can and looked at the label on it, trying to slow my thoughts and avoid the anger that was always my undoing.

“When you came after me in the library? How far were you willing to go?” he said.

“That would have been up to you, Johnny.”

“Gives me a bad feeling, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s the way it is, I guess.”

Again he was silent. Then he said. “Those things you said to me on the phone that night? My father talked to me like that.”

“I can’t give you the help you need, partner. But no matter how you cut it, you have to stay away from us. I’m saying this with all respect.”

“It’s over when I get the people who shot at me.”

“That’s between you and others. We’re not involved.”

“You thought maybe I had an improper attitude toward Alafair?”

Hearing him use her name made my breath come hard in my throat.

“I’m off the clock. I’m also off the phone. Have a good life, Johnny,” I said, and gently replaced the receiver in the cradle.

I stared at the phone like it was a live snake, waiting for him to call back. I rang up a sale, served a customer an order of boudin on a paper plate, and scrubbed down the counter with a wet rag, the tension in my ears crackling with a sound like crushed cellophane.

When the phone did ring, it was Bootsie, asking me to bring a quart of milk from the cooler up to the house.

Johnny Remeta may have been temporarily out of the way, but Connie Deshotel’s possible involvement with Axel Jennings was not.