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I turned and walked back to the road. The grass was wet against my trouser legs and swarming with insects, the sun hot and yellow above the treeline in the marsh. The drawbridge was down now, and ambulances, firetrucks, and sheriff’s cars were careening toward me, emergency lights blazing, under the long canopy of oaks. My saliva tasted like copper pennies; my right ear was a block of wood. The .45, the receiver locked open on the empty clip, felt like a silly appendage hanging from my hand.
Paramedics, cops, and firemen were rushing past me now. I kept walking down the road, by the bayou’s edge, toward my house. Bream were feeding close into the lily pads, denting the water in circles like raindrops. The cypress roots along the far bank were gnarled and wet among the shadows and ferns, and I could see the delicate prints of egrets in the damp sand. I pulled the clip from the automatic, stuck it in my back pocket, and let the receiver slam back on the empty chamber. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my right ear, but it felt like it was full of warm water that would not drain.
The sheriff came up behind me and gently put his hand inside my arm.
“When they deal the hand, we shut down their game,” he said. “If it comes out any different, we did something wrong. You know where I learned that?”
“It sounds familiar.”
“It should.”
“We could have used Gates to get Joey Gee.”
“Yeah, so we’ll catch up with Fluck and use him. Six of one, half dozen of the other.”
I nodded silently.
“Right?” he said.
“Sure.”
“It’s just a matter of time.”
“Yeah, that’s all it is,” I agreed, and looked away into the distance, where I could almost feel the sun’s heat cooking the tin roof on the bait shop.
CHAPTER 15
I LOCKED UP THE bait shop and let no one in it for the rest of the day. I thought about the events of that morning for a long time. Things had worked out for Joey Gouza in better ways than he could have ever planned. I had been responsible for springing him on the phony assault-and-battery charges filed by Drew Sonnier; Weldon’s long-sought-after film evidence had turned out to be worthless; Eddy Raintree, a superstitious dimwit as well as pervert, who would have probably ratted out Joey Gee for an extra roll of toilet paper in his cell, had had his face blown into a bloody mist by Jewel Fluck while he was locked in my handcuffs; then Gates had gotten to Fluck, and I in turn had killed Gates, the only surviving person who could implicate Joey in the Garrett murder.
I wondered if Joey Gee got up in the morning and said a prayer of thanks that I had wandered into his life.
In the meantime one of his hired sociopaths had terrified my daughter, then he had ordered his chief button man to deliver a human head and severed finger to our family business.
I suspected that today had proved special for Joey, a day in which he took an extra pleasure in chopping up lines with his whores, sipping iced rum drinks with them by the pool, or maybe inviting them out to the clubhouse at the track for lobster-steak dinners and rolls of six-dollar pari-mutuel tickets. I suspected at this moment that Joey Gee did not have a care in the world.
After I wrote up my report at the office, I went back home
and sat in the shade on the dock by myself, staring at the sun’s hot yellow reflection on the bayou, the dragonflies that seemed to hang motionless over the cattails and lily pads. Even in the shade I was sweating heavily inside my clothes. Then I unlocked the bait shop and used the phone inside to call Clete Purcel. The heat was stifling, and the plastic bag that hung from the post in the center of the room had clouded with moisture.
When I had finished talking with Clete, the damp outline of my hand looked like it had been painted on the phone receiver.
I worked in the yard the rest of the afternoon, and when it rained at four o’clock, I sat on the gallery by myself and watched the water drip out of the pecan trees and tick in the dead leaves and ping on top of Tripod’s cage. Then at sunset I went back into the bait shop with a hat box, and five minutes later I was on my way to New Orleans.
“YOU LOOK TIRED,” Bootsie said at the breakfast table the next morning.
“Oh, I’m just a little slow this morning,” I said.
“What time did you come in last night?”
“I really didn’t notice.”
“How’s Clete?”
“About the same.”
“Dave, what are you two doing?”
I kept my eyes on Alafair, who was packing her lunch kit for a church group picnic.
