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“I’ll meet you guys at the bayou,” I said.
“What’s wrong, Dave? Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m all right. Get hold of the bridge tender and seal the whole area off. Don’t let this guy get out of town.”
I put the receiver back in the cradle and stared numbly at the severed head inside the plastic bag. The eyes were rolled, the tongue lolled out of the mouth, the nose was mashed against the folds of plastic, and the blond hair was matted with congealed blood; but even in death the face looked like it belonged to a toy man. And to preclude the possibility that I could ever mistake Jewel Fluck for someone else, one of his fingers had been inserted in the thick, purple residue at the bottom of the bag.
I ran to the house, through the front door and into the bedroom, and grabbed the .45 out of the dresser drawer. Bootsie sat up in bed and clicked on the table lamp.
“What is it?” she said.
“Jack Gates was in the shop. I’m going after him. Don’t go in the shop, Boots. Call Batist and tell him not to come to work right now.”
“What is it? What did he—”
“We might have to dust for prints. Let’s just keep people out of there for a while.”
I saw her eyes trying to read my expression.
“Everything’s all right,” I said. “Just don’t go out of the house, Boots, till we get this guy in custody.”
Then I was out the front door and in the truck, banging over the chuckholes in the dirt road that led to the drawbridge over the bayou, the .45 bouncing on the seat beside me, the early red sun edging the marsh with fire.
I could hear sirens in the distance now. I rounded a corner in second, where the bayou made a wide bend, and through the oak trees which lined the road I could see the drawbridge extended high in the air, a quarter of a mile away.
Jack, I think you’re about to be hung out to dry, I thought, and this time Joey the Neck is going down with you. Welcome to Iberia Parish, podjo.
Vanity, vanity, vanity. Jack Gates w
as an old-time Mafia soldier and thriving button man in a state whose system of capital punishment involved as much charity as you would expect in the deep-frying of pork rinds. Jack was not one you would simply drive into a bottleneck and cork inside the glass and put on display like a light bug.
I heard his car before I saw it: the transmission wound up full-bore, the engine roaring through a defective muffler like a garbage truck, gravel exploding like grapeshot under the fenders. Then the Trans Am skidded around the corner in a cloud of yellow dust, low on the springs, streaked and ugly with dried mud, ripping a green gash out of a canebrake.
I looked full into his face through his windshield—into his regret that he didn’t take me out when he had the chance, his rage at the cosmic conspiracy that had made him the long-suffering soldier of an ulcer-ridden paranoid like Joey Gee.
I pulled the truck diagonally across the road, leaped from the seat, and aimed the .45 across the hood, straight at Jack Gates’s face. He stomped on the brakes, and the Trans Am bucked sideways in a chuckhole and fishtailed against the trunk of an oak tree, pinwheeling a hubcap down the center of the road. He stared at me momentarily through the open passenger’s window, a blue revolver balanced in one hand on top of the steering wheel, his metal-capped teeth glinting in the sun’s hot early light, the engine throttling open and subsiding and then throttling open again under the hood.
“Give it up, Jack,” I said. “Gouza’s a psychotic sack of shit. Let him take his own fall for a change.”
The rooster tail of dust from behind the car drifted across his window, and in the second it took for me to lose eye contact with him, he aimed the revolver quickly out the window and popped off two rounds. The first one was low and kicked up dirt three feet in front of the truck, but the second one whanged off the hood and showered leaves out of the tree behind me.
Then he dropped the transmission into reverse and floored the Trans Am back down the road, the tires burning into the dirt, spinning with circles of black smoke. He veered from side to side, clipping bark out of the tree trunks, bursting a taillight, ripping loose his bumper. But evidently he had an eye for detail and had remembered passing a collapsed wire gate and a faint trace of a side road that led through a sugarcane field, because he slammed on his brakes, slid in a half circle, then roared over the downed gate—cedar posts, barbed wire, and all.
I ran up the incline by the far side of the road, through a stand of pine trees, splashed across a coulee, and came out on the edge of the field just as the Trans Am spun around the corner, rippled back a fender on a parked tractor, and mowed through the short cane toward a flat-topped levee that led back to the main parish road.
He hadn’t expected to see me on foot in the field. He started to cut the steering wheel toward me, to drive me back into the trees or the coulee, then he changed his mind, spinning the wheel in the opposite direction with one hand and firing blindly out the window with the other. In the instant that the Trans Am flashed by me, his face looked white and round and small through the window, like a spectator’s in a theater, as though he had suddenly become aware that he was witnessing his own dénouement.
I went to one knee in the wet grass and began firing. I tried to keep the sights below the level of his window jamb to allow for the elevation caused by the recoil, but in reality it was unnecessary. The eight hollow-point rounds, which flattened to the size of quarters with impact, destroyed his automobile. They pocked silvery holes in the doors, spiderwebbed the windows, blew divots of upholstery into the air, exploded a tire off the rim, gashed a geyser of steam out of the radiator, and whipped a single streak of blood across the front windshield.
His foot must have locked down on the accelerator, because the Trans Am was almost airborne when it roared along the lip of an irrigation ditch and sliced through the fence surrounding a Gulf States Power Company substation. The front end crashed right into the transformers, and the tiers of transmission wires and ceramic insulators crumpled in a crackling net on the car’s roof.
But he was still alive. He let the revolver drop outside the window, then started to push open the door with the palms of his hands like a man trying to extricate himself from the rubble of a collapsed building.
“Don’t get out, Jack! Don’t touch the ground!”
He sat back down on the seat, his face bloodless and exhausted, then the sole of one shoe came to rest on the damp earth.
The voltage contorted his face as if he were having an epileptic seizure. His body stiffened, shook, and jerked; spittle flew from his mouth; electricity seemed to leap and dance off his capped teeth. Then his car horn and radio began blaring simultaneously, and a scorched odor, like hair and feces burning in an incinerator, rose from his clothes and head in dirty strings of smoke.
