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"Fuck 'em."
"I've got to live around there."
"Hey, give me a break. Do I take care of you or not?" His small mouth made that strange butterfly shape.
"I'm just telling you about my situation."
"All right, for God's sakes. We'll take a drive. You're worse than my wife."
A few minutes later we were in the Lincoln, driving across the twenty-four-mile causeway that spans Lake Pontchartrain, with Jess and the other bodyguards behind us in the Cadillac. The sun was high in the hard, blue sky, and the waves were green and capping in the wind. Tony drove with his arm on the window, a Marine Corps utility cap pulled down snugly to the level of his sunglasses. His gray and black ringlets whipped on his neck. He looked out at a long barge whose deck was loaded with industrial metal drums of some kind.
"We used to fish and swim in the lake when I was a kid," he said. "Now the lake's so polluted it's against the law to get in the water."
"New Orleans has changed a lot."
"All for the bad, all for the bad," he said.
"Can you tell me where we're going now?"
"A place I bet you've never seen. Maybe I'll show you my plane, too."
"Can we talk now?"
"You can talk, I'll listen," he said, and smiled at me from behind his glasses.
"These guys want to give me another fifty or sixty thou if I can buy into some quick action."
"So?"
"Can I get in on the score?"
"Dave, the score you're talking about is all going right into the projects. It involves a lot of colored dealers and some guys out in Metairie I don't like to mess with too much."
"You don't do business with the projects?"
"It's hot right now. Everybody's pissed because these kids are killing each other all over town and scaring off the tourists. Another thing, I never deliberately sold product to kids. I know they get hold of it, but I didn't sell it to them. Big fucking deal. But if you want me to connect you, I can do it."
"I'd appreciate it, Tony. I figure this is my last score, though. I'm not cut out for it."
"Like I am?" he said. His face was flat and expressionless when he looked at me.
"I didn't mean anything by that."
"Yeah, nobody does. I tell you what, Dave, go into Copeland's up on St. Charles some Wednesday night. Wednesday is yuppie night in New Orleans. These are people who wouldn't spit on an Italian who grew up in a funeral home. But they got crystal bowls full offtake on their coffee tables. They carry it in their compacts, they chop up lines when they ball each other. In my opinion a lot of them are degenerates. But what the fuck do I know? These are people with law degrees and M.B.A.s. I went to a fucking juco in Miami. You know why? Because it had the best mortuary school in the United States. Except I studied English and journalism. I was on the fucking college newspaper, man. Just before I joined the crotch."
"I'm not judging you, Tony."
"The fuck you're not," he said.
I didn't try to answer him again. He drove for almost a mile without speaking, his tan face as flat as a shingle, the wind puffing his flannel shirt, the sunlight clicking on his dark glasses. Then I saw him take a breath through his nose.
"I'm sorry," he said. "When you try to get off crank, it puts boards in your head."
"It's all right."
"Let's stop up here and buy some crabs. If I don't feed those guys behind us, they'll eat the leather out of the seats. You're not pissed?"
"No, of course not."
