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He twisted his head around at a sound inside the railroad car.
“There’s fucking lions or tigers in there, man,” he said.
“It’s part of a circus. They’re in cages. They can’t hurt you.”
“What if they back up the fucking train while you’re taking a walk?”
“You dealt the play, Eddy. Live with it. Keep that belt tight and don’t move your leg around.”
“Hey, man, come here. Cuff me to that light over there.”
“It’s too far to move you.”
“What the fuck’s with you? You enjoy people’s pain or something?”
“I’ll be back, Eddy.”
“All right, man, I’ll trade. Jewel smoked the cop in the basement. But I didn’t have any part in it. We were just there to creep the joint. You saw me, I didn’t have a piece.”
“That’s not much of a trade.”
He waited a moment, then he said, “There’s a whack out. On Sonnier and the broad, both.”
“Which broad?”
“His sister.” He wet his lips. “I can’t swear it, but I think the whack’s out on you, too. You’re a hair in the wrong guy’s nose.”
“Which guy?”
“That’s all you get, motherfucker. I cut a deal, it’s in custody, with a lawyer and the prosecutor there.”
“I think you’re a gasbag, Eddy, but I don’t want to see you die of fright.” I uncuffed one wrist, then locked both of his arms behind him. “Lie quietly. I’m going to ask a couple of those gandy walkers to help me put you in the truck.”
“Hey, man, those animals smell my blood. Hey, man, come back here!”
He lay on his side in the gravel and weeds, his face sallow and slick with sweat in the humid air. His manacled arms were ropy with muscle, as though he were being hung from a great height, as though his tattoos were about to pop from his skin. A breeze blew across the levee, and I could smell the moist odor of animal dung and almost taste Eddy Raintree’s fear of his own kind.
I walked three hundred yards to the head of the train, showed my badge to the engineer, and told him to radio to Baton Rouge for an ambulance. Then I asked two black gandy walkers to help me with Eddy Raintree. They wore dirt-streaked undershirts, and their black skin was beaded with sweat in the red light of the track flares. They looked at their crew foreman, who was white.
“Go ahead, boys,” he said.
They walked behind me, back toward where Eddy Raintree lay on his side in the weeds and gravel. I heard the deep-throated sound of a tiger or lion in the wind. I turned to say something light to the black men, when one of them pointed into the distance.
“You got somebody coming yonder on a motorcycle,” he said.
I saw the headlight and the starlit silhouette of the bike and a small rider bounce down the side of the levee and come hard along the line of train cars. I could already see Eddy Raintree trying to rise to one knee, as he realized that he might still have another frolic in the funhouse.
It was very quick after that.
I pulled the .45 from my belt and broke into a run. The motorcycle passed Eddy Raintree, skidded in the gravel, and circled back in the direction it had come from, the headlight beam bouncing off the sides of the train. At first I thought the small rider was trying to swing Eddy up behind him, the way a rodeo pickup man scoops up a thrown cowboy. Then I saw a rigid object about two feet long in his hand, saw him extend it out beside him, and in my naïveté I thought it might be bolt cutters, that Raintree would lift up his manacled wrists, and the small rider would snap him free and I would be left breathless and exhausted while they disappeared over the levee into the darkness.
But I was close enough now to see that it was a shotgun, with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump. Eddy Raintree had made it to one knee and was frozen in the headlight’s radiance, like an armless man trying to genuflect in church, when the shotgun roared upward three inches from his chin.
Then the small rider opened up his bike, one boot skipping along the rocks for balance, and wove the bike up the levee in a shower of dirt and divots of grass and buttercups. My chest was heaving, my arm shaking, when I let off two rounds at his toylike silhouette just before he hit it full-bore, his head bent low, and disappeared in a long roll of diminishing thunder between the levee and the willow islands.
Eddy Raintree’s buttocks were collapsed on his heels. His head was turned away from me, as though he were trying to hide his facial expression or a secret that he wished to take with him to another place. The animals in the circus car crashed wildly about in their wire cages. I touched Eddy Raintree lightly on the shoulder, and his head rotated downward with gravity on the severed tendons in his neck.
One of the gandy walkers vomited.
