Dixie City Jam

chapter eleven

They had drawn the blinds on the windows now, and the small man with crossed eyes was drinking from a bottle of milk at the breakfast table and spitting pistachio shells into a paper bag. After he had locked my wrists behind me with the handcuffs he'd found on my dresser he bound Bootsie's forearms to her chair with electrician's tape, then crisscrossed it through her breasts and wrapped it around the back of the chair. The man named Buchalter watched with a small.25 caliber Beretta in the palm of his hand, a torn smile like that of Will Rogers at the corner of his mouth.

'You remember me?' he said.

'No.'

'You saw me in the helicopter. Out on the gulf,' he said.

'This is of no value to you, or your cause, or whatever it is you're after,' I said. 'You've got the wrong people.'

He pulled up a chair and sat between me and Bootsie. He pushed his hat back on his head. A strand of fine blond hair fell in his eyes.

'Are you mad at me? Because of what I did to Mrs. Robicheaux?' he said.

I stared at his face, his unblinking, inquisitive eyes, and didn't answer. I could feel the handcuffs biting into my wrists, cutting off the blood, swelling the veins.

'We don't know why you've come here. You have nothing to gain by being here. Don't you understand that?' Bootsie said.

'I wouldn't say that. There're always possibilities in every situation. That's what I like to believe, anyway,' he said, and reached out, touched my cheek with his hand, and let his glance rove lazily over my face.

I saw tears well in Bootsie's eyes.

'Try to hear this, Buchalter,' I said. 'I'm a police officer. I work with people who'll square this one way or another. No matter what happens here tonight, they'll find you and blow up your shit, I guarantee it.'

He made shushing noises with his lips, and again his hand reached up and touched my face and brushed gingerly around the corners of my mouth. I could feel the grain of his skin against mine and smell an odor on it like hair oil and the inside of a leather glove.

'You take your hands off him, you degenerate, you vile animal-' Bootsie said. Her eyes were hot and receded, her face as gray as cardboard.

Buchalter nodded to the small man with crossed eyes. He spat a pistachio shell into the paper sack, then walked behind Bootsie's chair and wound the electrician's tape across her mouth, wrapping it around and around the thick swirls of her hair at the back of her head, tightening it across her mouth each time he made a revolution. She leaned forward and gagged on her tongue.

I could feel my heart thundering against my rib cage, hear the blood roaring in my ears like wind in a seashell.

'I don't know where the sub is,' I said. 'I'd tell you if I did. I don't even known why you guys want it. Why would I keep the information from you?'

'Because you work for Jews, my friend,' he said. 'Because I think you lie.'

'It's got air trapped in the hull. It floats right above the gulf's floor. It probably drifts in a pattern with the Gulf Stream,' I said. 'Hire some salvage people who understand those things. New Orleans and Miami are full of them.'

'But evidently you've found it twice. That means you know something other people don't.'

'There may be more than one sub down there,' I said. 'The Navy nailed three or four of them during nineteen forty-two. Maybe I saw two different subs.'

He took a nautical chart from his pocket, unfolded it, and spread it flat on the table in front of me. It showed the Louisiana coast, all its bays and soundings, and the northern gradations of the gulf. He stood behind my chair and fitted his huge hands over my shoulders, inserted his thumbs in the back of my neck.

'Our business can end here tonight in a couple of ways,' he said. 'I believe you understand me.'

'After you know where the sub is, you'll just go away?'

'Why not?' he said. His fingers tightened on my shoulder tendons.

'Because you're in over your head.'

He lowered his mouth to my ear. 'It isn't a time to be clever, Dave,' he said. 'You want me to make you trace the drift pattern with your nose?'

I tried to lean forward, away from the steady beat of his breath on my skin. Then he cupped one hand under my chin, the other on the back of my neck, like a man about to do a trick shot with a basketball.

'Would you like me to snap it?' he said. 'I can turn your body into a slug's from the neck down. I'm not exaggerating, Dave. I've done it twice before. Ask Chuck there.'

Think, think, think.

I tried to avoid swallowing, tried to keep my voice empty of fear. I closed and opened my eyes, and blinked the sweat out of them. Bootsie's hair had fallen in her face; the black tape that cut across her mouth was slick with saliva, and her eyes were red and liquid with terror at what she was about to witness.

'There're two things that aren't going to happen here tonight, Buchalter,' I said. 'I'm not going to give you information I don't have, and nobody here is going to kiss your butt. You're a piece of shit. Nothing you can do here will ever change that fact.'

He was quiet a moment. I felt his fingers move, but they were uncertain now, the pressure against my chin and neck temporarily in abeyance.

'You want to say that again?' he asked.

'Guys like you are cruel because you got fucked up in toilet training. That's how it works. Go to a psychologist and check it out. It's better than living with skid marks in your underwear.'

The man with crossed eyes started to laugh, then looked at Buchalter's face.

Buchalter was breathing heavily now. His hands were moist with perspiration, poised on my chin and neck. But the indecision, the physical pause, was still there, the means of resolving the insult not quite yet in place.

Then the man with crossed eyes turned in his chair and stared at the side window, whose blinds were drawn. He raised one hand in the air.

'Will, there's somebody outside,' he said.

Buchalter's hands slid away from me. He took the Beretta from his pocket while the man called Chuck peeked out the side of the blinds.

'It's a delivery guy,' he said.

'What do you mean "a delivery guy"?' Buchalter said.

'A fucking delivery guy. With a clipboard and a flashlight. He's coming to the back door.'

'Let him give you what he's got, then get rid of him.'

'Me?'

'Yes, you.'

The man called Chuck went out on the back porch, beyond my angle of vision. Buchalter rested one hand on my shoulder and placed the barrel of the Beretta behind my ear.

'UPS. I got a box for Dave Robicheaux. I guess your doorbell's broke,' a voice said out in the darkness.

I saw Bootsie's eyes fasten on mine.

'Put it on the gallery,' Chuck said.

'It's COD.'

'How much?'

'Eight fifty.'

'Wait a minute.'

The man named Chuck came back into the kitchen, his face filled with consternation.

'I ain't got any money, Will,' he said.

'Here,' Buchalter said, and handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

'What if I got to sign for it?'

'Just scribble on the board. Now, get out there and do it.'

Chuck went back out on the porch. I could see his shadow moving about under the bug-crusted light.

'All right, thanks a lot,' I heard him say. 'Just set it on the gallery. I'll carry it in later.'

'I'll bring it around. It's no trouble.'

'No, man. You don't need to do that.'

'It's going to rain. We're responsible for water damage.'

Chuck came back into the kitchen, the skin around one eye twitching with anxiety.

'Calm down,' Buchalter said. 'Go out front and help the man. Just keep him away from the back.'

'I'm cool, I'm cool.'

'I can see that, all right.'

'I don't need you on my case, Will. This one gets fucked up, I'm going down on a habitual.'

'It's better you not talk anymore, Chuck.'

'You don't get it. I been down four times. I don't need this kind of shit in my life. Now there's this fucking weird guy for UPS. I'm telling you, I don't need this kind of shit, man. I ain't up for it.'

'You're under a strain, Chuck. Wait a minute, what do you mean "weird guy"?'

'He looks like an ape with a UPS cap on its head. Wearing fucking Budweiser shorts. You don't call that weird?'

Buchalter's hand pinched at his mouth. I could feel the heat from his body, smell the mixture of sweat and deodorant secreting under his arms.

'Go out the front door, Chuck,' he said. 'You talk to the man out front. You keep him there. That's your assignment. You understand me?'

'Why me? I don't like this, Will. You want to 'front the guy, you 'front the fucking guy.' Then the skin of Chuck's face drew tight against the bone, stretching his eyebrows like penciled grease marks.

'The sonofabitch is coming around the side again,' he said.

'I'll handle it. You keep these two quiet,' Buchalter said.

'You wouldn't listen to me, man. Now it's turning to shit. I can feel it.'

'Shut up, Chuck. If it goes sour, you make sure Mr. and Mrs. Robicheaux catch the bus,' Buchalter said. 'If he doesn't work for us, he doesn't work for the Jews, either.'

'You want to clip a cop? With our prints all over the place? Are you out of your goddamn mind?'

Buchalter raised his ringers for the cross-eyed man to be silent, then dropped the Beretta into his pants pocket and walked out onto the back porch, with a smile at the corner of his mouth that looked like an elongated keyhole.

Chuck picked up his crossbow and leveled it at my throat. His hands looked round and white and small against the bow's dark metal surfaces. He breathed loudly through his nose and shook a fly out of his face. Large, solitary drops of rain began hitting in the trees outside.

I heard Buchalter open the screen door out on the porch.

'Okay? Is that everything now?' he said.

'I need you to sign.'

'All right.'

'You got a pen? Mine must have fallen off my clipboard.'

'No, I don't. And I'm rather busy right now.'

'Maybe it's in my pocket-'

'Now listen, my friend-'

'Hands on your head, down on your knees, motherfucker! Do it! Now! Don't think about it!'

I heard the weight of two large bodies crash against the wood slats and rake across the tangle of garden tools on the porch; then Buchalter and Clete Purcel fell into the kitchen, and Clete's blue-black.38 revolver skittered across the linoleum.

Buchalter got to his feet first, his flat buttocks pinched together, the change jangling in his slacks, his triangular back rigid with muscle, and drove his right fist into the center of Clete's face. Clete's head snapped sideways with the force of the blow, blood whipping from his nose across his cheek. But he grabbed Buchalter around the legs, locked his wrists behind Buchalter's thighs, and smashed him against the doorjamb.

'Chuck!' Buchalter yelled out, as he tried to get his hand into his pants pocket.

But Chuck had taken his crossbow and gone through the hallway and out the front door like a shot.

Buchalter began swinging both his fists into the top of Clete's head. He wore a large Mexican ring on his right hand, one with a raised, knurled design on it, and each time he swung his right fist down, he twisted the ring with the blow, and I could see gashes bursting like tiny purple flowers in Clete's scalp.

But Clete Purcel was not one who gave up or went down easily. With rivulets of blood draining out of his hair into his eyes, he reached behind him, grasped a three-pronged dirt tiller by the wood handle, and jerked the sharpened tines upward into Buchalter's scrotum.

Buchalter's face went white, his mouth opening wide with a roar that seemed to rise like a rupturing bubble from the bottom of his viscera, as though bone and linkage were being sawed apart inside him. He stumbled sideways, lifting his knees into Clete's face, and crashed through the screen door into the backyard. Then I heard his feet running into the darkness.

Clete pulled himself up by the doorknob and walked like a drunk man into the kitchen, soaked a dish towel under the faucet, and pressed it to the top of his head. He kept widening his eyes and breathing hard through his mouth. His knees were barked, and one sock was pulled down over his ankle.

'Pick up your piece,' I said.

He wiped at his nose and eyes with the towel, then leaned over heavily, holding the towel to his scalp, and closed his hand around his.38.

'The handcuff key is on the dresser in the bedroom,' I said.

He went into the bedroom, came back with the key, and began unlocking the handcuffs. I could feel water dripping out of his hair onto my neck. The handcuffs clattered to the floor. My hands were purple, bloated with lack of circulation, the skin dead to the touch. I opened my pocketknife, cut through the electrician's tape at the back of Bootsie's head, eased it out of her mouth, then began sawing loose the tape on her arms.

'Oh God, Dave,' she said. Her breath came in gasps, as though she had been held underwater for a long time and her lungs were aching for air. 'Oh Lord, God. Oh God, he was going-'

'It's over,' I said.

'He was going to cripple you. He was going to deliberately cripple you,' she said, then squeezed her eyes shut against the tears that coursed down her cheeks. I held her face against my chest and kissed the top of her head. I could smell the heat in her hair.

'Your phone's dead. They must have cut it outside,' Clete said.

'Give me your piece,' I said.

'Where's yours?'

'In the glove compartment of the truck.'

'Man, I can't see straight. That guy's got fists like chunks of concrete.'

'Take Boots down to the bait shop and call the sheriff's office from there,' I said.

'Where are you going, Dave?' Bootsie said, her eyes clearing with a new sense of alarm.

'They probably parked their car farther up the road,' I said.

'No,' she said. 'Let somebody else handle it this time.'

'He's a fanatic and a psychopath, Boots. If we don't nail him now, he'll be back.'

I looked away from the expression on her face. I started out the door with the revolver in my hand.

'Hey, Dave-' Clete said.

He followed me onto the back porch.

'Forget the rules on this one,' he said. 'You get the chance, close this cocksucker's file.'

'Tell the sheriff to call the bridge tender and have him raise the drawbridge,' I said.

'Listen to me-' he began, his face stretching with impatience. Then he stopped and lowered his voice. 'This kind of guy sits in a jail cell and thinks for a long time about things to do to people. Don't live with regret later, Streak. Buchalter is as bad as they get.' He pointed a finger at my face, then wiped a smear of blood off his nose on his wrist.

The moon had risen in the east from behind a bank of black clouds, and a steady, warm rain was dancing on the duck pond at the foot of my property and clicking on the tall stalks of sugarcane in my neighbor's field. When I had returned from New Orleans I hadn't seen any vehicles parked on the dirt road by the bayou, and I guessed that Buchalter and the man with crossed eyes had driven past my house, parked on the far side of it, and cut back through a pecan orchard by the four corners, over a wooded knoll, and through my neighbor's cane field.

Beyond the duck pond, right by the remnant of my collapsed barn, I saw two fresh sets of footprints glistening in the mud, leading through the barbed-wire fence into the field. I lifted up the top strand of barbed wire and stepped into the cane. It grew so thick that the earth was still dry inside the rows. The sound of the rain on the leaves was like marbles striking dry sheets of newspaper. I saw a bolt of lightning splinter the sky and pop in the woods, and when the thunder echoed off the trees, my neighbor's cattle began lowing in terror at the bottom of the coulee.

There was no wind inside the cane, and the air was heated and alive with insects. Ahead, I could see a winding pattern, like a faint serpentine tunnel, through the rows where somebody had either wedged the stalks sideways or cracked them at the base with his shoe. I knelt in the row and listened. At first I heard only the sound of the rain clicking on the leaves overhead, then there was a voice, one man calling out to another, just as lightning burst in a white tree all over the southern horizon and thunder rumbled across the fields.

They must have gotten all the way to the wooded knoll, almost to the pecan orchard and the four corners down the bayou road, I thought. I stepped back outside the sugarcane and began running toward the far side of the field, toward the elevated grove of oak trees whose leaves were flickering with a silver light in the wind off the marsh.

Long ago Clete Purcel had made his separate peace with the system of rules that govern the justifiable taking of human life. I never questioned the validity of Clete's moral vision, no more than I would have questioned his loyalty and courage and his selfless devotion to me during the worst periods in my life. In truth, I often envied the clarity of line that he used to distinguish between right and wrong. I had also harbored fears since I first became a street patrolman in New Orleans that I would one day wrongly exercise the power of life and death over an individual, through accident or perhaps fearful impetuosity or maybe even by self-righteous design.

But Buchalter was not an ordinary player. Most of the psychological mutants with whom a police officer comes in contact daily are bumbling, ineffectual losers who sneak through life on side streets and who often seek out authority and self-validation through their adversarial relationship with police and parole officers, since in normal society they possess about the same worth as discarded banana peels.

Psychopaths like Ted Bundy and Gary Gilmore have a way of committing their crimes in states which practice capital punishment. Then they turn their trials and executions into televised theater of world-class proportions.

The Will Buchalters have no such plan for themselves. They don't leave paperwork behind; they stay out of the computer. When they do get nailed, they make bond and terrify witnesses into perjuring themselves; they convince psychologists that they have multiple personalities that cannot be simultaneously put on trial; their fall partners either do their time or are murdered in custody. No one is ever sure of how many people they actually kill.

Will Buchalter belonged to that special group of people who live in our nightmares.

I could still smell his odor; it was like animal musk, like lotions that were at war with his glands, like someone who has just had sex. I could still feel the grain and oil of his skin on mine.

I pressed my hand tighter around the butt of the.38. The hand-worn walnut grips felt smooth and hard against my palm.

As I neared the end of the cane field I heard a strand of fence wire twang against a post, heard someone curse, as though he were in pain or had fallen to the ground. I swung wide of the field to broaden my angle of vision; then I saw two silhouettes against the veiled moon-one man on his buttocks, holding his ankle, the other man bent over him, trying to lift him up, and I remembered the old fence that my neighbor had crushed flat with his tractor so his livestock could drink at the coulee.

They saw me, too. Before I could squat into a shooting position and yell at them to put their hands on their heads, a small-caliber pistol popped in the darkness, then popped again, just like a firecracker. I ran for the lee of the sugarcane, out of their line of vision, and squatted close into the stalks away from the moon's glow, which streaked the rain with a light like quicksilver.

I heard someone burrow into the cane, thrash through several rows, then stop.

Were there one or two men inside the field now? I couldn't tell. There was no sound except the rain hitting on the leaves over my head.

I worked my way down a furrow, deeper into the cane. I could smell something dead in the trapped air, a coon or possum, an odor like that of a rat that has crawled inside a wall and died. My eyes stung with salt, and the dirt cut into my knuckles and knees like pieces of flint. I saw a wood rabbit bolt across the rows, stop and look at me, his ears flattened on his head, then begin running again in a zigzag pattern. He crashed loudly through the edge of the cane and was gone.

Not twenty feet from me a man rose from his knees in the midst of the cane, his body almost totally obscured by the thickly spaced stalks and long festoons of leaves around him. He tried to ease quietly through the rows to the far side of the field, which opened onto a flat space and the wooded knoll and the pecan orchard.

I pulled my shirt up and wiped my face on it, then aimed as best I could at the man's slowly moving silhouette. I cocked the hammer on the.38 and brought the sight just below an imaginary line that traversed his shoulder blades.

Now! I thought.

'Throw your weapon away! Down on your face with your hands out in front of you!' I yelled.

But he wanted another season to run.

He tore through the sugarcane, flailing his arms at the stalks, stumbling across the rows. I was crouched on one knee when I began shooting. I believe the first shot went high, because I heard a distant sound in a tree, like a rock skipping off of bark and falling through limbs. And he kept plowing forward through the cane, trying to hack an opening with his left hand, shielding a weapon with his right.

But the second shot went home. I know it did; I heard the impact, like a cleated shoe connecting with a football, heard the wind go out of his lungs as he was driven forward through the cane.

But he was still standing, with a metallic object in his right hand, its flat surfaces blue with moonlight, and he was turning on one foot toward me, just as a scarecrow might if it had been spun in a violent-wind.

Clete had loaded only five rounds in the cylinder and had set the hammer on an empty chamber. I let off all three remaining rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. Sparks and fine splinters of lead flew from the sides of the cylinder into the darkness.

His left arm flipped sideways, as if jerked by a wire, his stomach buckled, then his chin snapped back on his shoulder as if he had been struck by an invisible club.

The hammer snapped dryly on the empty sixth chamber. Then something happened that I didn't understand. As he crumpled sideways to the earth, breaking the stalks of cane down around him, he yelled out in pain for the first time.

I walked across the rows to where he lay on his back, his crossed eyes opening and closing with shock. He kept trying to expel a bloody clot from his mouth with the tip of his tongue. My last round had hit him in the chin and exited just above the jawbone. His left arm was twisted in the sleeve like a piece of discarded rope. He had taken another round in the side, with no exit wound that I could see, and blood was leaking out of his shirt into the dirt. Then I saw his right hand quivering uncontrollably above the feathered shaft of the aluminum arrow that had discharged from his crossbow when he fell. The flanged point had sliced down into the thigh and emerged gleaming and red through the kneecap.

I knelt beside him, loosened his belt, and brushed the dirt out of his eyes with my fingers.

'Where's Buchalter?' I said.

He swallowed with a clicking sound and tried to speak, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. I turned his head with my hands so his mouth could drain.

'Where did Buchalter go, Chuck?' I said. 'Don't try to protect this guy. He deserted you.'

'I don't know,' he said. His voice was weak and devoid of all defense. 'Get the arrow out.'

'I can't do it. You might hemorrhage. I'm going to call an ambulance.'

His crossed eyes tried to focus on mine. They were luminous and black with pain and fear. His tongue came out of his mouth and went back in again.

'What is it?' I said.

'I need a priest. I ain't gonna make it.'

'We'll get you one.'

'You gotta listen, man…'

'Say it.'

'I didn't have nothing against y'all. I done it for the money.'

'For the money?' I said as much to myself as to him.

'Tell your old lady I'm sorry. It wasn't personal. Oh God, I ain't gonna make it.'

'Give me Buchalter, Chuck.'

But his eyes had already focused inward on a vision whose intensity and dimension probably only he could appreciate. In the distance I heard someone start a high-powered automobile engine and roar southward, away from the drawbridge, down the bayou road in the rain.