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"Who's this 'they' you're talking about?"
"The feds, us, your own kind. It'll happen one day when you never expect it. Just like when Eddie Keats set one of your hookers on fire. She was probably thinking about a vacation in the Islands when he knocked on her door with a smile on his face."
"I've had cops give me that shuck before. It always comes from the same kind of guys. They got no case, no evidence, no witness, so they make a lot of noise that's supposed to scare everybody. But you know what their real problem is? They wear J. C. Higgins suits, they drive shit machines, they live in little boxes out by an airport. Then they see a guy that's got all the things they want and can't have because most of them are so dumb they'd fuck up a wet dream, so they get a big hard-on for this guy and talk a lot of trash about somebody cooling out his action. So I'll tell you what I tell these other guys. I'll be around to drink a beer and piss it on your grave."
He took a stick of gum out of his pocket, peeled off the foil, dropped it on the ground, and fed the gum into his mouth while he looked me in the eyes.
"You through with me?" he asked.
"Yep."
"By the way, I got drunk last night, so don't buy yourself any boxing trophies yet."
"I gave up keeping score a long time ago. It comes with maturity."
"Yeah? Tell yourself that the next time you look at your bank account. I owe you one for cutting me loose. Buy yourself something nice and send me the bill. I'll see you around."
"Don't misunderstand the gesture. If I find out you're connected to my wife's death, God help you, Bubba."
He chewed his gum, looked off at the swimming pool as though he were preparing to answer, but instead walked away through the oak trees, the soles of his loafers loud on the crisp, dead leaves. Then he stopped and turned around.
"Hey, Dave, when I straighten out a problem, the person gets to see this face. You give that some thought."
He walked on farther, then turned again, his spiked hair and tan face mottled with sun and shadow.
"Hey, you remember when we used to play ball here and yell at each other, 'I got your Dreamsicle hanging'?" he said, grinning, and grabbed his phallus through his slacks. "Those were the days, podna."
I bought a small bag of crushed ice, took it back to the office with me, and let it melt in a cleanplastic bucket. Every fifteen minutes I soaked a towel in the cold water and kept it pressed to my face while I counted to sixty. It wasn't the most pleasant way to spend the afternoon, but it beat waking up the next day with a face that looked like a lopsided plum.
Then, just before quitting time, I sat at my desk in my small office, while the late sun beat down on the sugarcane filds across the road, and looked once again at the file the New Orleans police department had sent us on Victor Romero. In his front and side mug shots his black curls hung down on his forehead and ears. As in all police station photography, the black-and-white contrast was severe. His hair glistened as though it were oiled; his skin was the color of bone; his unshaved cheeks and chin looked touched with soot.
His criminal career wasn't a distinguished one. He had four misdemeanor arrests, including one for contributing to prostitution; he had done one hundred eighty days in the parish jail for possession of burglar tools; he had an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear on a DWI charge. But contrary to popular belief, a rap sheet often tells little about a suspect. It records only the crimes he was charged with, not the hundreds he may have committed. It also offers no explanation of what goes on in the mind of a man like Victor Romero.
His eyes had no expression in the photographs. He could have been waiting for a bus when the camera lens clicked. Was this the man who had murdered Annie with a shotgun, who had fired point-blank at her with buckshot while she creamed and tried to hide her face behind her arms? Was he made up of the same corpuscle, sinew, and marrow as I? Or was his brain taken hot from a furnace, his parts hammered together in a shower of sparks on a devil's anvil?
Next morning the call came in from the St. Martin Parish's Sheriff's office. A black man, fishing in his pirogue by the Henderson levee, had looked down into the water and seen a submerged automobile. A police diver had just gone down on it. The automobile was a maroon Toyota and the driver was still in it. The parish coroner and a tow truck were on their way from St. Martinville.
I called Minos at the DEA in Lafayette and told him to meet me there.
"This impresses me," he said. "It's professional, it's cooperative. Who said you guys were rural bumblers?"
"Put the cork in it, Minos."
Twenty minutes later, Cecil and I were at the levee on the edge of the Atchafalaya swamp. It was already hot, the sun shimmered on the vast expanse of water, and the islands of willow trees looked still and green in the heat. Late-morning fishermen were trying for bluegill and goggle-eye in the pilings of the oil platforms that dotted the bays or in the shade of the long concrete causeway that spanned the entire marsh. Turkey buzzards floated high on the updrafts against the white sky. I could smell dead fish in the lily pads and cattails that grew along the shore. Farther out from the bank, the black heads of water moccasins stuck out of the water like motionless twigs.
The ground had been wet when the car went off the crown of the levee. The tire tracks ran down at an angle through the grass and buttercups, cut deeply through a slough, and disappeared in the slit beyond a deep-water dropoff. The tow-truck driver, a sweating, barrel-chested man in Levi's with no shirt, fed the hook and cable off the truck to the police driver, who stood in the shallows in a bright yellow bikini with a mask and snorkel strapped to his face. Under the rippling sunlight on the water, I could see the dim outline of the Toyota.
Minos parked his car and walked down the levee just as the tow-truck driver engaged his winch and the cable clanged taut against the Toyota's frame.
"What do you figure happened?" Minos said.
"You got me."
"You think you parked one in him, after all?"
"Who knows? Even if I did, why would he drive out here?"
"Maybe he went away to die. Even a piece of shit like this guy probably knows that's one thing you got to do by yourself."
