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“The only reason somebody from the AB didn’t take you out is you’re not worth the trouble. But I’m going to give you a deal, one that’ll make you big shit in your little town. I get immunity on that dead cop in the Sonnier house, I don’t know anything about Eddy Raintree’s problems next to a train track, and I give you everything you want on Joey Meatballs. I’m talking about guys he’s whacked, the marshmallow Jack Gates shoved into the plane propeller, the crack they’re selling to the niggers in the projects, gun deals with spicks, you name it, I’ll give it to you. . . . Are you listening to me, man?”
“I hear you just fine.”
“Then you set it up. I want protective custody, too. Maybe in another state.”
“I think you’re overestimating your importance, Fluck. You’re not the kind of witness that prosecutors get excited about.”
“Look, I can take you to two graves down by Terrebonne Bay. Two guys that Joey made kneel down on the edge of a trench and suck on a barrel of a .22 mag before he dumped a big one down their throats.”
“It’s not a sellers’ market these days.”
“What’s with you, man? You want to see Joey Gee go down or not?”
“Where are you?”
“Are you kidding?”
“What I mean is, you’re probably not too far from a police station of some kind. Turn yourself in. It’s the only deal you’re going to get from me or probably anybody else. You executed a police officer. You get caught by the wrong guys and you’ll never make the jail, Fluck.”
“You’re getting off on this, aren’t you?”
Through the screen window I saw Bootsie wave at me from the gallery of the house.
“Nope, I’m tired of talking to you,” I said.
“I’m messing up your morning, huh?”
“No, you just made a big mistake today.”
“What mistake, what are you talking—”
“You phoned me at my house. You frightened my little girl. You did it because inside you’re a small, scared man, Fluck. That’s why you wanted Garrett to see it coming. For just a second you felt you were as big a man as he was.”
“You’re talking yourself into something real bad.”
“Call the DEA. They cut deals with snitches all the time.”
I could hear him breathing into the receiver.
“Where you from, outer space? You’re fucking with the AB. We’re everywhere, man. There ain’t anybody we can’t clip. Even if I go down, even if I’m in a max unit somewhere, I can have your whole family taken out.”
“For five grand your AB buddies will have you in a soap dish.”
I could almost hear a wet, gastric click in his throat. Then he hesitated a moment, as though he were squeezing his anger back into a small box down in his chest.
“I want you to remember everything you said to me,” he said. “Keep running the words over and over in your head. I’m gonna think up something for you, something special, something that you didn’t think could ever happen in your life. I was in Parchman, man. You don’t know how much pain a wise-ass fuck like you can go through before he dies.”
Then the line went dead. I looked at my watch. I didn’t know if there had been enough time for the dispatcher at the office to get a successful trace on the call or not. I dipped a wad of paper towels into the floating ice in the beer cooler and rubbed my face with it, then wiped my skin dry and flung the towels into the trash basket, as though I could somehow rinse and clean the voice of Jewel Fluck out of my day.
I waited ten more minutes, then called the dispatcher.
“They traced it to a pay phone on Decatur in New Orleans,” he said. “We called First District headquarters, but the guy was gone when they got there. Sorry, Dave. Who was it?”
“The guy who killed Garrett.”
“Fluck? Oh man, if we’d just been a little bit faster—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
