It was ten a.m. Batist had gone after a boat with a fouled engine down the bayou, and the bait shop and dock were empty. The tin roof was expanding in the heat, buckling and pinging against the bolts and wood joists. I pulled a can of Dr Pepper out of the crushed ice in the cooler and sat outside in the hot shade by myself and drank it. Green dragonflies hung suspended over the cattails along the bayou's banks; a needlenose gar that had probably been wounded by a boat propeller turned in circles in the dead current, while a school of minnows fed off a red gash behind its gills; a smell like dead snakes, sour mud, and rotted hyacinth vines blew out of the marsh on the hot wind.
I didn't want to even think about the events of this morning. The scene in the restaurant was like a moment snipped out of a drunk dream, in which I was always out of control, publicly indecent or lewd in the eyes of others.
The soda can grew warm in my palm. The sky in the south had a bright sheen to it like blue silk. I hoped that it would storm that afternoon, that rain would thunder down on the marsh and bayou, roar like grapeshot on the roof of my house, pour in gullies through the dirt and dead leaves under the pecan trees in my yard.
I heard Bootsie behind me. She sat down in a canvas chair by a spool table and crossed her legs. She wore white shorts, sandals, and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. There were sweat rings under her arms, and the down on top of her thighs had been burned gold by the sun.
We met at a dance on Spanish Lake during the summer of 1957, and a short time later we lost our virginity together in my father's boathouse, while the rain fell out of the sunlight and dripped off the eaves and the willow trees into the lake and the inside of the boathouse trembled with a wet green-yellow light.
But even at that age I had already started my long commitment to sour mash straight up with a sweating Jax on the side. Bootsie and I would go separate ways, far from Bayou Teche and the provincial Cajun world in which we had grow up. I would make the journey to Vietnam as one of our new colonials and return with a junkyard in my hip and thigh and nocturnal memories that neither whiskey nor army hospital dope could kill. She would marry an oil-field pilot who would later tip a guy wire on an offshore rig and crash his helicopter right on top of the quarter-boat; then she would discover that her second husband, an accounting graduate from Tulane, was a bookkeeper for the Mafia, although his career with them became short-lived when they shotgunned him and his mistress to death in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack.
She had lupus disease that we had knocked into remission with medication, but it still lived in her blood like a sleeping parasite that waited for its moment to attack her kidneys and sever her connective tissue. She was supposed to avoid hard sunlight, but again and again I came home from work and found her working in the yard in shorts and a halter, her hot skin filmed with sweat and grains of dirt.
"Did something happen at work?" she said.
"I had some trouble at Del's."
"What?"
"I busted up one of Baby Feet Balboni's lowlifes."
"In the restaurant?"
"Yeah, that's where I did it."
"What did he do?"
"He put his hand on me." I set down my soda can and propped my forearms on my thighs. I looked out at the sun's reflection in the brown water.
"Have you been back to the office?" she said.
"Not yet. I'll probably go in later."
She was quiet a moment.
"Have you talked to the sheriff?" she asked.
"There's not really much to talk about. The guy could make a beef but he won't. They don't like to get messed up in legal action against cops."
She uncrossed her legs and brushed idly at her knee with her fingertips.
"Dave, is something else going on, something you're not telling me about?"
"The guy put his hand on my shoulder and I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I would have done it if this guy named Manelli hadn't stepped in front of me."
I saw her breasts rise and fall under her shirt. Far down the bayou Batist was towing a second boat behind his outboard and the waves were slapping the floating hyacinths against the banks. She got up from her chair and stood behind me. She worked her fingers into my shoulders. I could feel her thigh touch my back.
"New Iberia is never going to be the same place we grew up in. That's just the way things are," she said.
"It doesn't mean I have to like it."
"The Balboni family was here a long time. We survived, didn't we? They'll make their movie and go away."
"There're too many people willing to sell it down the drain."
"Sell what?"
"Whatever makes a dollar for them. Redfish and sac-a-lait to restaurants, alligators to the Japanese. They let oil companies pollute the oyster beds and cut canals through the marsh so salt water can eat up thousands of square miles of wetlands. They take it on their knees from anybody who's got a checkbook."
"Let it go, Dave."
"I think a three-day open season on people would solve a lot of our problems."
"Tell the sheriff what happened. Don't let it just hang there."
"He's worried about some guys at the Chamber of Commerce, Bootsie. He's a good guy most of the time, but these are the people he's spent most of his life around."
"I think you should talk to him."
"All right, I'm going to take a shower, then I'll call him."
"You're not going to the office?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe later."
Batist cut the engine on his boat and floated on the swell into the dock and bumped against the strips of rubber tire we had nailed to the pilings. His shirt was piled on the board seat beside him, and his black shoulders and chest were beaded with sweat. His head looked like a cannon-ball. He grinned with an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.
I was glad for the distraction.
"I was up at the fo'-corners," he said. "A man there said you mopped up the restaurant flo' with one of them dagos."
Thanks, Batist, I thought.
I SHOWERED IN WATER THAT WAS SO COLD IT LEFT ME breathless, changed clothes, and drove to the bottling works down by the Vermilion River in Lafayette. The two-story building was an old one, made of yellow brick, and surrounded by huge live-oak trees. In back was a parking lot, which was filled with delivery trucks, and a loading dock, where a dozen black men were rattling crates of soda pop out of the building's dark interior and stacking them inside the waiting trucks. Their physical strength was incredible. Some of them would pick up a half-dozen full cases at a time and lift them easily to eye level. Their muscles looked like water-streaked black stone.
I asked one of them where I could find Twinky Hebert Lemoyne.
"Mr. Twinky in yonder, in the office. Better catch him quick, though. He fixin' to go out on the route," he said.
"He goes out on the route?"
"Mr. Twinky do everyt'ing, suh."
I walked inside the warehouse to a cluttered, windowed office whose door was already open. The walls and cork boards were papered with invoices, old church calendars, unframed photographs of employees and fishermen with thick-bellied large-mouth bass draped across their hands. Lemoyne's face was pink and well-shaped, his eyebrows sandy, his gray hair still streaked in places with gold. He sat erect in his chair, his eyes behind his rimless glasses concentrated on the papers in his hands. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a loose burnt-orange tie (a seersucker coat hung on the back of the chair) and a plastic pen holder in his pocket; his brown shoes were shined; his fingernails were trimmed and clean. But he had the large shoulders and hands of a workingman, and he radiated the kind of quiet, hard-earned physical power that in some men neither age nor extra weight seems to diminish.
There was no air conditioning in his office, and he had weighted all the papers on his desk to keep them from blowing away in the breeze from the oscillating fan.
After I had introduced myself, he gazed out at the loading dock a moment, then lifted his hands from the desk blotter and put them down again as though somehow we had already reached a point in our conversation where there was nothing left to be said.
"Can I sit down?" I said.
"Go ahead. But I think you're wasting your time here."
"It's been a slow day." I smiled at him.
"Mr. Robicheaux, I don't have any idea in the world why either you or that Mexican woman is interested in me. Could you be a little bit more forthcoming?"
"Actually, until yesterday I don't believe I ever heard your name."
"What should I make of that?"
"The problem is you and a few others tried to stick a couple of thumbtacks in my boss's head." I smiled again.
"Listen, that woman came into my office yesterday and accused me of working with the Mafia."
"Why would she do that?"
"You tell me, please."
"You own half of a security service with Murphy Doucet?"
"That's right, I surely do. Can you tell me what y'all are looking for, why y'all are in my place of business?"
"When you do business with a man like Julie Balboni, you create a certain degree of curiosity about yourself."
"I don't do business with this man, and I don't know anything about him. I bought stock in this motion picture they're making. A lot of business people around here have. I've never met Julie Balboni and I don't plan to. Are we clear on this, sir?"
"My boss says you're a respected man. It looks like you have a good business, too. I'd be careful who I messed with, Mr. Lemoyne."
"I'm not interested in pursuing the subject." He fixed his glasses, squared his shoulders slightly, and picked up several sheets of paper in his hands.
I drummed my fingers on the arms of my chair. Outside I could hear truck doors slamming and gears grinding.
"I guess I didn't explain myself very well," I said.
"You don't need to," he said, and looked up at the clock on the wall.
"You're a solid businessman. There's nothing wrong with buying stock in a movie company. There's nothing wrong with providing a security service for it, either. But a lady who's not much taller than a fireplug asks you a couple of questions and you try to drop the dime on her. That doesn't seem to fit, Mr. Lemoyne."
"There're people out there committing rapes, armed robberies, selling crack to children, God only knows what else, but you and that woman have the nerve to come in here and question me because I have a vague business relationship with a movie production. You don't think that's reason to make someone angry? What's wrong with you people?"
"Are your employees union?"
"No, they're not."
"But your partner in your security service is a Teamster steward. I think you're involved in some strange contradictions, Mr. Lemoyne."
He rose from his chair and lifted a set of keys out of his desk drawer.
"I'm taking a new boy out on his route today. I have to lock up now. Do you want to stay around and talk to anybody else?" he said.
"No, I'll be on my way. Here's my business card in case you might like to contact me later."
He ignored it when I extended it to him. I placed it on his desk.
"Thank you for your time, sir," I said, and walked back out onto the loading dock, into the heated liquid air, the blinding glare of light, the chalky smell of crushed oyster shells in the unsurfaced parking lot.
When I was walking out to my pickup truck, I recognized an elderly black man who used to work in the old icehouse in New Iberia years ago. He was picking up litter out by the street with a stick that had a nail in the end of it. He had a rag tied around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, and the rotted wet undershirt he wore looked like strips of cheesecloth on his body.
"How do you like working here, Dallas?" I said.
"I like it pretty good."
"How does Mr. Twinky treat y'all?"
His eyes glanced back toward the building, then he grinned.
"He know how to make the eagle scream, you know what I mean?"
"He's tight with a dollar?"
"Mr. Twinky so tight he got to eat a whole box of Ex-Lax so he don't squeak when he walk."
"He's that bad?"
He tapped some dried leaves off the nail of his stick against the trunk of an oak tree.
"That's just my little joke," he said. "Mr. Twinky pay what he say he gonna pay, and he always pay it on time. He good to black folks, Mr. Dave. They ain't no way 'round that."
When I got back to New Iberia I didn't go to the office. Instead, I called from the house. The sheriff wasn't in.
"Where is he?" I said.
"He's probably out looking for you," the dispatcher said. "What's going on, Dave?"
"Nothing much."
"Tell that to the greaseball you bounced off the furniture this morning."
"Did he file a complaint?"
"No, but I heard the restaurant owner dug the guy's tooth out of the counter with a screwdriver. You sure know how to do it, Dave."
"Tell the sheriff I'm going to check out some stuff in New Orleans. I'll call him this evening or I'll see him in the office early in the morning."
"I got the impression it might be good if you came by this afternoon."
"Is Agent Gomez there?"
"Yeah, hang on."
A few seconds later Rosie picked up the extension.
"Dave?"
"How you doing?"
"I'm doing fine. How are you doing?"
"Everything's copacetic. I just talked with your man Twinky Lemoyne."
"Oh?"
"It looks like you put your finger in his eye."
"Why'd you go over there?"
"You never let them think they can make you flinch."
"Hang on a minute. I want to close the door." Then a moment later she scraped the receiver back up and said, "Dave, what happens around here won't affect my job or career to any appreciable degree. But maybe you ought to start thinking about covering your butt for a change."
"I had a bad night last night and I acted foolishly this morning. It's just one of those things," I said.
"That's not what I'm talking about, and I think you know it. When you chase money out of a community, people discover new depths in themselves."
"Have you gotten any feedback on the asphyxiated girl down in Vermilion Parish?"
"I just got back from the coroner's office. She's still Jane Doe."
"You think we're dealing with the same guy?"
"Bondage, humiliation of the victim, a prolonged death, probable sexual violation, it's the same creep, you'd better believe it." I could hear an edge in her voice, like a sliver of glass.
"I've got a couple of theories, too," she said. "He's left his last two victims where we could find them. Maybe he's becoming more compulsive, more desperate, less in control of his technique. Most psychopaths eventually reach a point where they're like sharks in feeding frenzy. They never satisfy the obsession."
"Or he wants to stick it in our faces?"
"You got it."
"Everything you say may be true, Rosie, but I think prostitution is connected with this stuff somewhere. You want to take a ride to New Orleans with me this afternoon?"
"A Vermilion Parish sheriff's detective is taking me out on the levee where you all found the girl last night. Do all these people spit Red Man?"
"A few of the women deputies don't."
I heard her laugh into the telephone.
"Watch out for yourself, slick," she said.
"You, too, Rosie."
Neither Bootsie nor Alafair was home. I left them a note, packed a change of clothes in a canvas bag in case I had to stay overnight, and headed for I-10 and New Orleans as the temperature climbed to one hundred degrees and the willows along the bayou drooped motionlessly in the heat as though all the juices had been baked out of their leaves.
I DROVE DOWN THE ELEVATED INTERSTATE AND CROSSED the Atchafalaya Basin and its wind-ruffled bays dotted with oil platforms and dead cypress, networks of canals and bayous, sand bogs, willow islands, stilt houses, flooded woods, and stretches of dry land where the mosquitoes swarmed in gray clouds out of the tangles of brush and intertwined trees. Then I crossed the wide, yellow sweep of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge, and forty-five minutes later I was rolling through Jefferson Parish, along the shores of Lake Pontchar-train, into New Orleans. The lake was slate green and capping, the sky almost white in the heat, and the fronds on the palm trees were lifting and rattling dryly in the hot breeze. The air smelled of salt and stagnant water and dead vegetation among the sand bogs on the west side of the highway; the asphalt looked like it could fry the palm of your hand.
But there were no rain clouds on the horizon, no hint of relief from the scorching white orb in the sky or the humidity that crawled and ran on the skin like angry insects.
I was on the New Orleans police force for fourteen years, first as a beat cop and finally as a lieutenant in Homicide. I never worked Vice, but there are few areas in New Orleans law enforcement that don't eventually lead you back into it. Without its pagan and decadent ambiance, its strip shows, hookers, burlesque spielers, taxi pimps, and brain-damaged street dopers, the city would be as attractive to most tourists as an agrarian theme park in western Nebraska.
The French Quarter has two populations, almost two sensory climates. Early in the morning black children in uniforms line up to enter the Catholic elementary school by the park; parishioners from St. Louis Cathedral have coffee au lait and beignets and read the newspaper at the outdoor tables in the Cafe du Monde; the streets are still cool, the tile roofs and pastel stucco walls of the buildings streaked with moisture, the scrolled ironwork on the balconies bursting with flowers; families have their pictures sketched by the artists who set up their easels along the piked fence in Jackson Square; in the background the breeze off the river blows through the azalea and hibiscus bushes, the magnolia blossoms that are as big as fists, and the clumps of banana trees under the equestrian statue of Andy Jackson; and as soon as you head deeper into the Quarter, under the iron, green-painted colonnades, you can smell the cold, clean odor of fresh fish laid out on ice, of boxed strawberries and plums and rattlesnake watermelons beaded with water from a spray hose.
But by late afternoon another crowd moves into the Quarter. Most of them are innocuous-college kids, service personnel, Midwestern families trying to see past the spielers into the interiors of the strip houses, blue-suited Japanese businessmen hung with cameras, rednecks from dry counties in Mississippi. But there's another kind, too-grifters, Murphy artists, dips and stalls, coke and skag dealers, stables of hookers who work the hotel trade only, and strippers who hook out of taxicabs after 2 a.m.
They have the franchise on the worm's-eye view of the world. They're usually joyless, indifferent to speculations about mortality, bored with almost all forms of experience. Almost all of them either free-base, mainline, do coke, or smoke crack. Often they straighten out the kinks with black speed.
They view ordinary people as carnival workers do rubes; they look upon their victims with contempt, sometimes with loathing. Most of them cannot think their way out of a paper bag; but the accuracy of their knowledge about various bondsmen, the hierarchy of the local mob, the law as it applies to themselves, and cops and judges on a pad, is awesome.
As the streets began to cool and turn purple with shadow, I went from one low-rent club to the next amid the din of Dixieland and rockabilly bands, black kids with clip-on taps dancing on the sidewalk for the tourists, spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests hollering at college boys, "No cover, no minimum, you studs, come on in and get your battery charged."
Jimmie Ryan's red mustache and florid, good-humored face made you think of a nineteenth-century bartender. But he was also known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you, in one way or another, with any form of illegal activity in New Orleans.
Inside the crook of both his arms his veins were laced with scar tissue, like flattened gray garden snakes.
He tilted his straw boater back on his head and drank from his beer. Above him, a topless girl in a sequined G-string danced barefoot on a runway, her hips moving like water to the music from the jukebox, her skin rippled with neon light, her mouth open in feigned ecstasy.
"How you been, Streak?" he said.
"Pretty good, Jimmie. How's the life?" I said.
"I ain't exactly in it anymore. Since I got off the super-fluid, I more or less went to reg'lar employment, you know what I mean? Being a human doorbell for geeks and dipshits has got some serious negative drawbacks, I'm talking about self-esteem here, this town's full of sick people, Streak, who needs it is what I'm trying to say."
"I see. Look, Jimmie, do you know anybody who might be trying to recruit girls out of the parishes?"
He leaned his elbows back on the bar. His soft stomach swelled out of his striped vest like a water-filled bottom-heavy balloon.
"You mean somebody putting together his own stable?" he asked.
"Maybe."
"A guy who goes out looking for the country girls, the ones who's waiting for a big sugar daddy or is about to get run out of town, anyway?"
"Possibly."
"It don't sound right."
"Why?"
"New Orleans is full of them. Why bring in more and drive the prices down?"
"Maybe this guy does more than just pimp, Jimmie. Maybe he likes to hurt them. You know a guy like that?"
"We're talking about another type guy now, somebody who operates way down on the bottom of the food chain. When I was in the business of dimeing for somebody, making various kinds of social arrangements around the city, I made it a point not to know no guys like that, in fact, maybe I'm a little bit taken aback here you think I associate with them kind of people."
"I respect your knowledge and your judgment, Jimmie. That's why I came to you instead of someone else. My problem is two dead girls in Vermilion and Iberia parishes. The same guy may have killed others."
He removed something from the back of his teeth with his little finger.
"The city ain't like it used to be," he said. "It's turning to shit."
"Okay-"
"Years ago there were certain understandings with New Orleans cops. A guy got caught doing the wrong stuff, I'm talking about sick stuff, molesting a child, robbing and beating up old people, something like that, it didn't go to the jail-house. They stomped the shit out of the guy right there, I mean they left him with his brains running out of his nose.
"Today, what'd you got? Try to take a stroll by the projects and see what happens. Look, Streak, I don't know what you're looking for, but there's one special kind of cocksucker that comes to mind here, a new kind of guy in the city, why somebody don't walk him outside, maybe punch his ticket real hard, maybe permanent, you know what I'm saying, I don't know the answer to that one, but when you go down to the bus depot, you might think about it, I mean you're from out of town, right, and there ain't nobody, I mean nobody, gonna be upset if this kind of guy maybe gets ripped from his liver to his lights."
"The bus depot?"
"You got it. There's three or four of them. One of them stands out like shit in an ice-cream factory. Nothing against colored people."
I had forgotten what a linguistic experience a conversation with Jimmie the Dime could be.
He suppressed a beer belch and stared up at the girl on the runway.
"Could Baby Feet Balboni be involved in this?" I asked.
He rolled a matchstick on his tongue, looked upward at an oblique angle to a spot on the ceiling.
"Take a walk with me, breathe the night air, this place is like the inside of an ashtray. Some nights I think somebody poured battery acid in my lungs," he said.
I walked outside with him. The sidewalks were filled with tourists and revelers drinking beer out of deep paper cups. Jimmie looked up and down the street, blew air out his nose, smoothed his mustache with one knuckle.
"You're using the names of local personalities now," he said.
"It stays with me, Jimmie. Nobody'll know where it came from."
"Anything I might know about this certain man is already public knowledge, so it probably won't do no good for me to be commenting on the issue here."
"There's no action around here that doesn't get pieced off to Julie one way or another. Why should procuring be any different?"
"Wrong. There's fifteen-year-old kids in the projects dealing rock, girls, guns, Mexican brown, crank, you name it, the Italians won't fool with it, it's too uncontrollable. You looking for a guy who kills hookers? It ain't Feet, lieutenant. The guy's got sub-zero feelings about people. I saw him wipe up a barroom in Algiers with three guys from the Giacano family who thought they could come on like wise-asses in front of their broads. He didn't even break a sweat. He even stopped stomping on one guy just so he could blow a long fart."
"Thanks for your time, Jimmie. Get in touch if you hear anything, all right?"
"What do I know? We're living in sick times. You want my opinion? Open up some prison colonies at the North Pole, where those penguins live. Get rid of the dirt bags, bring back some decency, before the whole city becomes a toilet." He rocked on the balls of his feet. His lips looked purple in the neon glow from the bar, his face an electric red, as though it were flaming from sunburn.
I gave him my business card. When I was down the block, under the marquee of a pornographic theater, and looked back at him, he was picking his teeth with it.
I HIT TWO BIKER BARS ACROSS THE RIVER IN ALGIERS, WHERE a few of the mamas hooked so their old men would have the money they needed to deal guns or dope. Why they allowed themselves to be used on that level was anybody's guess. But with some regularity they were chain-whipped, gang-raped, nailed through their hands to trees, and they usually came back for more until sometimes they were murdered and dumped in a swamp. One form of their sad, ongoing victimization probably makes about as much sense as another.
The ones who would talk to me all had the same odor, like sweaty leather, the warm female scent of unwashed hair, reefer smoke and nicotine, and engine grease rubbed into denim. But they had little knowledge or interest about anything outside of their tribal and atavistic world.
I found a mulatto pimp off Magazine who also ran a shooting gallery that specialized in black-tar heroin, which was selling at twenty-five dollars a hit and was back in fashion with adult addicts who didn't want to join the army of psychotic meltdowns produced by crack in the projects.
His name was Camel; he had one dead eye, like a colorless marble, and he wore a diamond clipped in one nostril and his hair shaved in ridges and dagger points. He peeled back the shell on a hard-boiled egg with his thumb at the sandwich counter of an old dilapidated grocery and package store with wood-bladed fans on the ceiling. His skin had the bright copper shine of a newly minted penny.
After he had listened to me for a while, he set his egg on a paper napkin and folded his long fingers reflectively.
"This is my neighborhood, place where all my friends live, and don't nobody here hurt my ladies," he said.
"I didn't say they did, Camel. I just want you to tell me if you've heard about anybody who might be recruiting out in the parishes. Maybe a guy who's seriously out of control."
"I don't get out of the neighborhood much no mo'. Age creeping up on me, I guess."
"It's been a hot day, partner. My tolerance for bullshit is way down. You're dealing Mexican skag for Julie Balboni, and you know everything that's going on in this town."
"What's that name again?"
I looked into his face for a long moment. He scraped at a bit of crust on the comer of his dead eye with his fingernail.
"You're a smart man, Camel. Tell me honestly, do you think you're going to jerk me around and I'm just going to disappear?"
He unscrewed the cap on a Tabasco bottle and began dotting drops of hot sauce on his egg.
"I heard stories about a white guy, they say a strange guy reg'lar peoples in the bidness don't like to fool with," he said.
"All right-"
"You're looking in the wrong place."
"What do you mean?"
"The guy don't live around here. He sets the girls up on the Airline Highway, in Jefferson Parish, puts one in charge, then comes back to town once in a while to check everything out."
"I see, a new kind of honor system. What are you trying to feed me, Camel?"
"You're not hearing me. The reg'lar peoples stay away from him for a reason. His chippies try to short him, they disappear. The word there is disappear, gone from the crib, blipped off the screen. Am I getting this acrost to you all right?"
"What's his name?"
"Don't know, don't want to know. Ax yourself something. Why y'all always come to a nigger to solve your problem? We ain't got nothing like that in a black neighborhood."
"We'll see you around, Camel. Thanks for your help. Say, what's the name of the black guy working the bus depot?"
"I travel by plane, my man. That's what everybody do today," he said, and licked the top of the peeled egg before he put it in his mouth.
For years the Airline had been the main highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. When I-10 was built, the Airline became a secondary road and was absorbed back into that quasi-rural slum culture that has always characterized the peckerwood South: ramshackle nightclubs with oyster-shell parking lots; roach-infested motels that feature water beds and pornographic movies and rent rooms by the day or week; truck stops with banks of rubber machines in the restrooms; all-night glaringly lit cafes where the smell of fried food permeates the counters and stools as tangibly as a film of grease.
I went to three clubs and got nowhere. Each time I walked through the door the bartender's eyes glanced up to meet me as they would somebody who had been expected all evening. As soon as I sat at the bar the girls went to the women's room or out the back door. The electronic noise of the country bands was deafening, the amplified squelch in the microphones like metal raking on a blackboard. When I tried to talk to someone, the person would nod politely in the din as though a man without vocal cords were speaking to him, then go back to his drink or stare in the opposite direction through the layers of cigarette smoke.
I gave up and walked back to my truck, which was parked between the clapboard side of a nightclub and a squat six-room motel with a small yellow lawn and a dead palm tree by the drive-in registration window. The air smelled of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks by the river, dust from the shell parking lot, liquor and beer from a trash barrel filled with empty bottles. The sky out over the Gulf trembled with dry lightning.
I didn't hear her behind me.
"Everybody on the strip knew you were coming two hours ago, cutie," she said.
I turned and squinted my eyes at her. She drank out of her beer bottle, then puffed off her cigarette. Her face was porcine, her lipstick on crooked, her dyed red hair lacquered like tangled wire on her head. She put one hand on her hip and waited for me to recognize her.
"Charlotte?"
"What a memory. Have I tubbed up on you?"
"No, not really. You're looking good."
She laughed to herself and blew her cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the dark.
Thirty years ago she had been a stripper and hooker on Bourbon Street, then the mistress of a loanshark who blew his brains out, the wife of an alcoholic ex-police sergeant who ended up in Angola for doping horses at the Fairgrounds, and the last I heard the operator of a massage parlor in Algiers.
"What are you doing out here on the Airline?" I said.
"I run the dump next door," she said, and nodded toward the motel. "Hey, I got to sit down. I really got crocked tonight." She shook a wooden chair loose from the trash pile by the side of the nightclub and sat down in it with her knees splayed and took another drink from her beer bottle. An exhaust fan from a restroom was pinging above her head. "I already heard what you're looking for, Streak. A guy bringing the chickens in from the country, right?"
"Do you know who he is?"
"They come and they go. I'm too old to keep track of it anymore."
"I'd sure like to talk to this guy, Charlotte."
"Yeah, somebody ought to run an iron hook through his balls, all right, but it's probably not going to happen."
"Why not?"
"You got the right juice, the play pen stays open."
"He's connected?"
"What do you think?"
"With the Balboni family?"
"Maybe. Maybe he's got juice with the cops or politicians. There's lots of ways to stay in business."
"But one way or another, most of them go down. Right?"
She raised her beer bottle to her mouth and drank.
"I don't think anybody is going to be talking about this guy a whole lot," she said. "You hear stories, you know what I mean? That this guy you're looking for is somebody you don't want mad at you, that he can be real hard on his chippies."
"Is it true?"
She set her empty bottle down on the shells and placed her hands loosely in her lap. For a moment the alcoholic shine left her eyes and her expression became strangely introverted, as though she were focusing on some forgotten image deep inside herself.
"When you're in the life, you hear a lot of bad stories, cutie. That's because there aren't many good ones," she said.
"The man I'm looking for may be a serial killer, Charlotte."
"That kind of guy is a john, not a pimp, Streak." She leaned on her forearms, puffing on her cigarette, staring at the hundreds of bottle caps pressed into the dirt at her feet. Her lacquered hair was wreathed in smoke. "Go on back home. You won't change anything here. Everybody out on this road signed up for it one way or another."
"Nobody signed up to be dead."
She didn't reply. She scratched a mosquito bite on her kneecap and looked at a car approaching the motel registration window.
"Who's the main man working the bus depot these days?" I said.
"That's Downtown Bobby Brown. He went up on a short-eyes once. Now he's a pro, a real piece of shit. Go back to your family, Streak, before you start to like your work."
She flipped her cigarette away backhandedly, got to her feet, straightened her dress on her elephantine hips, winked at me as though she might be leaving a burlesque stage, and walked delicately across the oyster shells toward her motel and the couple who waited impatiently for her in the heat and the dust and the snapping of an electric bug killer over the registration window.
YOU CAN FIND THE PREDATORS AT THE BUS DEPOT ALMOST ANY time during the twenty-four-hour period. But they operate best during the late hours. That's usually when the adventurers from Vidalia or De Ridder or Wiggins, Mississippi, have run out of money, energy, and hope of finding a place to sleep besides an empty building or an official shelter where they'll be reported as runaways. It's not hard to spot the adventurers, either. The corners of their mouths are downturned, their hair is limp and lies like moist string on their necks; often their hands and thin arms are flecked with home-grown tattoos; they wash under their arms with paper towels and brush their teeth in the depot restroom.
I watched him walk across the waiting room, a leather satchel slung on a strap over his shoulder, his eyes bright, a rain hat at an angle on his head, his tropical white shirt hanging outside his khakis. A gold cross was painted on the side of his satchel.
The two girls were white, both blond, dressed in shapeless jeans, tennis shoes without socks, blouses that looked salt-faded and stiff with dried perspiration. When he talked with them, his happy face made me think of a mythical goat-footed balloonman whistling far and wee to children in springtime. Then from his satchel he produced candy bars and ham sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, plums and red apples that would dwarf a child's hand.
The girls both bent into their sandwiches, then he was sitting next to them, talking without stop, the smile as wide as an ax blade, the eyes bright as an elf's, the gold cross on his satchel winking with light under his black arm.
I was tired, used up after the long day, wired with too many voices, too many people on the hustle, too many who bought and sold others or ruined themselves for money that you could make with a Fuller-brush route. There was grit in my clothes; my mouth tasted bad; I could smell my own odor. The inside of the depot reeked of cigar butts and the diesel exhaust that blew through the doors to the boarding foyer.
I took the receiver off a pay phone by the men's room and let it hang by its cord.
A minute later the ticket salesman stared down at my badge that I had slid across the counter.
"You want me to do what?" he said.
"Announce that there's a call at the pay phone for Mr. Bob Brown."
"We usually don't do that."
"Consider it an emergency."
"Yes, sir."
"Wait at least one minute before you do it. Okay, podna?"
"Yes, sir."
I bought a soft drink from a vending machine and looked casually out the glass doors while a bus marked "Miami" was being loaded underneath with luggage. The ticket salesman picked up his microphone, and Bob Brown's name echoed and resonated off the depot walls.
Downtown Bobby Brown's face became quizzical, impish, in front of the girls, then momentarily apologetic as he explained that he'd be right back, that somebody at his shelter probably needed advice about a situation.
I dropped my soda can into a trash bin and followed him to the pay phone. Downtown Bobby was streetwise, and he turned around and looked into my face. But my eyes never registered his glance, and I passed him and stopped in front of the USA Today machine.
He picked up the telephone receiver, leaning on one arm against the wall, and said, "This is Bobby. What's happenin'?"
"The end of your career," I said, and clenched the back of his neck, driving his face into the restroom door. Then I pushed him through the door and flung him inside the room. Blood drained from his nose over his lip; his eyes were wide, yellow-white-like a peeled egg-with shock.
A man at the urinal stood dumbfounded with his fly opened. I held up my badge in front of him.
"This room's in use," I said.
He zipped his trousers and went quickly out the door. I shot the bolt into the jamb.
"What you want? Why you comin' down on me for? You cain't run a shake on somebody, run somebody's face into a do' just because you-"
I pulled my.45 out of the back of my belt and aimed it into the center of his face.
He lifted his hands in front of him, as though he were holding back an invisible presence, and shook his head from side to side, his eyes averted, his mouth twisted like a broken plum.
"Don't do that, man," he said. "I ain't no threat to you. Look, I ain't got a gun. You want to bust me, do it. Come on, I swear it, they ain't no need for that piece, I ain't no trouble."
He was breathing heavily now. Sweat glistened like oil on his temples. He blotted drops of blood off his nose with the backs of his fingers.
I walked closer to him, staring into his eyes, and cocked the hammer. He backed away from me into a stall, his breath rife with a smell like sardines.
"I want the name of the guy you're delivering the girls to," I said.
"Nobody. I ain't bringing nobody to nobody."
I fitted the opening in the barrel to the point of his chin.
"Oh, God," he said, and fell backward onto the commode. The seat was up, and his butt plummeted deep into the bowl.
"You know the guy I'm talking about. He's just like you. He hunts on the game reserve," I said.
His chest was bent forward toward his knees. He looked like a round clothespin that had been screwed into a hole.
"Don't do this to me, man," he said. "I just had an operation. Take me in. I'll he'p y'all out any way I can. I got a good record wit' y'all."
"You've been up the road for child molesting, Bobby. Even cons don't like a short-eyes. Did you have to stay in lockdown with the snitches?"
"It was a statutory. I went down for nonconsent. Check it out, man. No shit, don't point that at me no more. I still got stitches inside my groin. They're gonna tear loose."
"Who's the guy, Bobby?"
He shut his eyes and put his hand over his mouth.
"Just give me his name, and it all ends right here," I said.
He opened his eyes and looked up at me.
"I messed my pants," he said.
"This guy hurts people. Give me his name, Bobby."
"There's a white guy sells dirty pictures or something. He carries a gun. Nobody fucks wit' him. Is that the guy you're talking about?"
"You tell me."
"That's all I know. Look, I don't have nothin' to do wit' dangerous people. I don't hurt nobody. Why you doin' this to me, man?"
I stepped back from him and eased down the hammer on the.45. He put the heels of his hands on the rim of the commode and pushed himself slowly to his feet. Toilet water dripped off the seat of his khakis. I wadded up a handful of paper towels, soaked them under a faucet, and handed them to him.
"Wipe your face," I said.
He kept sniffing, as though he had a cold.
"I cain't go back out there."
"That's right."
"I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man."
"You're never coming back here, Bobby. You're going to treat this bus depot like it's the center of a nuclear test zone."
"I got a crib… a place… two blocks from here, man. What you-"
"Do you know who-is?" I used the name of a notorious right-wing racist beat cop from the Irish Channel.
His hand stopped mopping at his nose with the towels.
"I got no beef wit' that peckerwood," he said.
"He broke a pimp's trachea with his baton once. That's right, Bobby. The guy strangled to death in his own spit."
"What you talkin' 'bout, man? I ain't said nothing 'bout -I know what you're doin', man, you're-"
"If I catch you in the depot again, if I hear you're scamming runaways and young girls again, I'm going to tell -you've been working his neighborhood, maybe hanging around school grounds in the Channel."
"Who the fuck are you, man? Why you makin' me miserable? I ain't done nothing to you."
I unlocked the bolt on the door.
"Did you ever read the passage in the Bible about what happens to people who corrupt children?" I said.
He looked at me with a stupefied expression on his face.
"Start thinking about millstones or get into another line of work," I said.
I had seventeen dollars in my billfold. I gave twelve to the two runaway girls and the address of an AA street priest who ran a shelter and wouldn't report them.