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"Tell Robin Dave Robicheaux's here. I'll wait in the bar."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Tell her Dave from New Orleans. The last name's hard to pronounce sometimes."
"Sir, I think you'd better see her outside of working hours."
"Say, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm going away?"
I ordered a drink at the bar, and five minutes later I saw her come through the door. She wore a short black dress with a white lace apron over it, and her figure and the way she walked, as though she were still on a burlesque runway, made every man at the bar glance sideways at her. She was smiling at me, but there was a perplexed light in her eyes, too.
"Wow, you come a long way to check up on a girl," she said.
"How you doing, kiddo?"
"Not bad. It's turned out to be a pretty good gig. Hey, don't get up."
"How long till you're off?"
"Three hours. Come on and sit in the booth with me. You're listing pretty heavy to port."
"A drunk front came through New Iberia this morning."
"Well, walk over here with mommy and let's order something to eat."
"I ate on the plane."
"Yeah, I can tell," she said.
We sat in a tan leather booth against the back wall of the bar. She blew out little puffs of air with her lips.
"Dave, what are you doing?" she said.
"What?"
"Like, this." She flicked her fingernail against my highball glass.
"Sometimes I clean out my head."
"You bust up with your old lady or something?"
"I'm going to get another Beam. You want a cup of coffee or a Coke?"
"Do I want coffee? God, that's great, Dave. Look, after the dinner rush I can get off early. Take the key to my apartment and I'll meet you there in about an hour. It's right around the corner."
"You got any hooch?"
"Some beer is all. I've been doing good, Dave. No little white pills, no glug-glug before I go to work. I can't believe how good I feel in the mornings."
"Pick me up at Sloppy Joe's."
"What do you want to go there for? It's full of college dopes who think Ernest Hemingway wrote on the bathroom walls or something."
"See you in an hour, kiddo. You're a sweet girl."
"Yeah, the guys at Smiling Jack's used to tell me that all the time. While they were trying to cop a feel under the table. I think you got hit in the head by lightning this morning."
When she came for me later at Sloppy Joe's, I was by myself at a table in the back, the breeze from a floor fan rising up my trouser leg, fluttering the wet sleeve of my seersucker coat that hung over the side of the table. The big sliding doors on two sides of the building were rolled wide open, and the neon light shone purple on the sidewalk. On the corner, two cops were rousting a drunk. They weren't cutting him any slack, either. He was going to the bag.
