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"Your skin's hot," she said.
"It happens when I'm with a certain lady," I said, and tried to smile.
"No, your muscles are tight as iron. What is it, Dave?"
"I just have a couple of things on my mind right now."
"There's a big buy going down, isn't there?"
"Why do you think that?"
"I always know. I hear people talking on the phone, a lot of money gets transferred around. Dave, are you still a cop?"
"No questions tonight, Boots."
"They'll catch on to you eventually. What you don't understand is that the narcs who get inside the organization are like them. You're not. It's a matter of time before they'll see that."
"Let's not talk about it anymore."
"All right, if that's what you want. But at some point you'll have to confide in me. If not now, later. You know that, Dave."
I touched her lips with my fingers.
"It's going to rain," I said. "Remember when we used to go to my father's boathouse in the rain?"
She laid her cheek against my bare shoulder and rested her hand lightly on my arm. I finished undressing, and she pulled her slip up over her thighs and sat on top of me. I felt myself go deep inside her, felt her heat and wetness spread across my loins. Her face became round and pale in concentration. She made love with the confidence and knowledge of an older woman, and when she came she pressed my palm hard against her breast as though she were forcing me to share the whirrings of her heart.
It was dark outside, and the rain was slanting against the French windows. An oak tree raked wetly against the side of the house. She lay inside my arm, with her hand on my stomach, and I could smell the rose-scented shampoo in her hair and taste the thin film of perspiration on her forehead.
Then, as though determined to pass on all my anxieties and fears to someone else, as though I had to hurt her again as I had many years before, I asked her the question that had bothered me since I'd first gone to her house on Camp Street.
"Why don't you get out from under them?"
"I told you why."
"You said you didn't know your husband was in the mob when you married him. I never knew one of them who wasn't obvious, Boots."
"I wasn't very careful, I guess."
"Bootsie, you had to know."
"He was good-looking and well-mannered. He said he had a degree from Tulane. He smiled all the time. He was fun to be around, Dave."
"All those game-room machines you distribute are made by a Mafia front in Chicago. You're into it big-time, old pal."
Her hand left my stomach, and she sat up on the side of the bed and looked out at the wet treetops. Then she walked barefoot in her bra and half-slip to a cabinet above a small desk, her hips creasing softly. I could see the dark outline of her sex through her slip.
"I'm going to have a glass of cream sherry," she said. "You don't mind, do you? It helps me to sleep sometimes. I always have trouble sleeping when it thunders. It's a silly way to be."
She kept her face turned toward the French windows, but I could see the wet shine on her cheeks.
* * *
CHAPTER 8
It was black and raining hard when I guided the jugboat from the dock down the canal toward open water. The boat was built to float high up in the water, but the tide was out, the canal was shallow, and yellow mud and tangles of dead hyacinths boiled up under the propeller. The long expanses of saw grass on each side of us were bent in the rain.
Ray Fontenot and Lionel Comeaux both wore yellow raincoats with hoods and sat hunched forward in their chairs by my small butane stove, which held a pot of coffee. The weather had turned cold, and their faces were morose and irritable. When we hit open water I pushed the throttle forward and felt the engine surge and the bow lift into the waves. The coastline became gray and indistinct and then dropped behind us altogether. In the distance I could see a gas flare burning on an offshore oil well.
