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“He came across my throat and I remember I couldn’t breathe, that I was trying to get my fingernails under the wire. Then the blood shut off to my brain, and I went down on the deck like I was poleaxed. It all happened real quick. It makes you think about ho
w quick it can happen.”
“Walk me down to your boathouse.”
“I don’t know who it was, Dave. I didn’t see him, he didn’t say anything, I just remember that wire popping tight across my windpipe.” He blew out his breath. “Man, that’s a hard feeling to shake. When I was overseas and I thought about buying it, I always figured I’d see it coming somehow, that I’d control it or negotiate with it some way, maybe convince it that I had another season to run. That’s a crazy way to think, isn’t it?”
“Let’s see if we find anything down at your boathouse.”
We strolled across the lawn toward the bayou. When we were abreast of the old barn on the back of his property, he stooped down and picked up a scuffed baseball with split seams.
“Watch this, buddy,” he said.
He wet two of his fingers, took a windup, and whipped the ball like a BB into the apple basket.
“Not bad,” I said.
“I should probably get out of the oil business and start my own baseball franchise. You remember the old New Iberia Pelicans? Boy, I miss minor-league ball.” He picked up another baseball from the ground.
“The report says some kids scared the assailant off.”
He threw the ball underhanded against the barn door, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and continued walking with me toward the boathouse.
“Yeah, some USL kids ran out of gas on the bayou and paddled in to my dock. Otherwise I would have caught the bus. But they couldn’t describe the guy. They said they just saw some fellow take off through the bushes.”
We walked out onto his dock and into the boathouse. Oars and life preservers were hung from hooks on the rafters, and the whole interior rippled with the sunlight that reflected off the water at the bottom of the walls.
“Are you sure he didn’t say anything?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Did you see a ring or a watch?”
“I just saw that wire loop flick down past my nose. But I know it was one of Joey Gouza’s people.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got some stuff Joey wants. Joey’s been behind all this from the beginning. The guy with the wire was probably Jewel Fluck or Jack Gates. Or any number of mechanics Joey can hire out of Miami or Houston.”
“So you are hooked up with them?”
“Sure, I am. But I’ve had it. I don’t care if I take a fall or not. I can’t keep endangering or fucking up other people anymore. Give me a minute and we’ll go to the movies.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” he said, moving a pirogue that was upended on sawhorses. Then he knelt on one knee and lifted up a plank in the floor of the boathouse. A videocassette tightly wrapped in a clear plastic bag was stapled to the bottom of the plank. He sliced the cassette out of the bag with his pocketknife. “Come on up to the house and I’ll give you a private screening from Greaseball Productions.”
“What’s this about, Weldon?”
“Everything you want is on this tape. I’m going to give it to you.”
“Maybe you should think about calling your lawyer.”
“There’s time for that later. Come on.”
I followed him up to his house and into his living room. He turned on his television set and VCR; he plugged in the cassette and paused with the remote control in his palm.
“This is what it amounts to, Dave,” he said. “I hit two dusters in a row, I was broke, and I was about to lose my business. I borrowed everything I could at the bank, but it wasn’t enough to stay afloat. So I started talking with a couple of shylocks in New Orleans. Before I knew it I was dealing with Jack Gates and he made me an offer to do a big arms drop in Colombia.”
