The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

SMILEY DID NOT like enclosure, in part because of the closets he’d been locked in at the orphanage. Nor did he like the smell of wet towels and washcloths and sheets and pillowcases soiled with BO and people’s coupling. But any port in a storm, even though it was a smelly one. In each hand he held a custom-made .22 Magnum semi-auto. His heart was dilated with adrenaline, his wee-wee swelling, an odor as heavy as the ocean rising into his nostrils, like birth, like Creation itself.

This would be his finest hour.

• • •

FOR WHATEVER REASON, caution or anger at the man in the mask or simply a desire to do things differently than the others, the blond woman did not accept the inspection of the elevator and walked toward it. The man in the mask paused, his hand on the room’s doorknob. Inside the elevator was a laundry cart filled to the top with dirty linen and towels. The blond woman stared at it for a long moment, perhaps noting the bulge in the canvas on one side.

The hands of a man whose body resembled an overgrown white caterpillar rose from the piled linen, each hand gripping a blue-black semi-auto. The first round hit the blond woman in the center of the forehead. She went straight down on her knees, jarring the wig off her head and revealing the face of Jaime O’Banion.

Smiley sprang from the laundry cart into the hallway, casually firing a second shot into O’Banion’s mouth.

The man in the mask went out the fire exit. Smiley shot the dark-skinned woman and the man who looked like a prizefighter before they had any idea what was happening to them. Then he opened the fire exit and looked down the stairs. He heard an outside door open and then slam shut. He went back to O’Banion’s body. He couldn’t believe it: O’Banion was alive, his face twitching like a bowl of tapioca. At least his nerve endings were alive. Maybe he could receive messages.

“You still in there, Jaime?” Smiley said. “Better grab your cock. Queer-bait is back in town.”

Smiley fired five rounds into O’Banion’s face, zip-zip-zip-zip-zip, just like that. Smiley straightened up, a stitch in his side. Owie, he thought. He bent his body back and forth like a bowling pin rocking.

He didn’t gather up his brass; nor did he try to destroy the security camera. He limped back into the elevator, straightening his back, trying to get the stitch out of his side. He closed the doors and rode down to the first floor and walked over to the restaurant, his tool bag on his arm, wincing with each step. He ordered toast and coffee from a nice waitress who had a globe and anchor tattooed on the inside of her forearm. She didn’t write down the order.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

Her eyes drifted away. “You’re leaking.”

Smiley put a hand under his jacket, feeling for the place the stitch had been. He looked at his palm, then bit his lip, thinking. He wadded up a handkerchief and pressed it inside his shirt. “Could I have a fried pie to go? With a scoop of ice cream in one of those cold bags?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

A PLAINCLOTHES DETECTIVE BANGED on Clete’s door with the flat of his fist. A uniformed deputy sheriff stood behind him. Clete opened the door in his skivvies. He looked at the paramedics bagging up the bodies on the floor. “Help you?”

“Yeah,” the detective said. He stared at Clete, recognition swimming into his eyes. “Are you Clete Purcel?”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? What the fuck are you doing here?”

The detective was big and wore a gray suit and spit-shined needle-nosed cowboy boots, a gold badge on his belt.

“I was sleeping,” Clete said. “Until you beat on the door.”

“What are you doing here, in this part of Louisiana?”

“Passing through to New Iberia. I’m a PI. I’m on a case.”

The detective raised his hand for the paramedics to stop their work. He unzipped two bags, already on the gurneys. “Step out here.”

“I’m not dressed.”

“Nobody is interested in your dick. You know any of these people?”

Clete stepped into the hallway. His gaze moved across the faces of the three gunshot victims, lingering for less than a second on the face of Jaime O’Banion.

“No, I don’t know any of these people,” he said.

“You’re a liar,” the detective said.

“I used to be a homicide cop at NOPD,” Clete said. “A dog-fuck on your own turf is no fun. But that’s your grief, not mine. So how about eighty-sixing the insults?”

“Get your clothes on.”