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"You're not hearing me. The reg'lar peoples stay away from him for a reason. His chippies try to short him, they disappear. The word there is disappear, gone from the crib, blipped off the screen. Am I getting this acrost to you all right?"
"What's his name?"
"Don't know, don't want to know. Ax yourself something. Why y'all always come to a nigger to solve your problem? We ain't got nothing like that in a black neighborhood."
"We'll see you around, Camel. Thanks for your help. Say, what's the name of the black guy working the bus depot?"
"I travel by plane, my man. That's what everybody do today," he said, and licked the top of the peeled egg before he put it in his mouth.
For years the Airline had been the main highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. When I-10 was built, the Airline became a secondary road and was absorbed back into that quasi-rural slum culture that has always characterized the peckerwood South: ramshackle nightclubs with oyster-shell parking lots; roach-infested motels that feature water beds and pornographic movies and rent rooms by the day or week; truck stops with banks of rubber machines in the restrooms; all-night glaringly lit cafes where the smell of fried food permeates the counters and stools as tangibly as a film of grease.
I went to three clubs and got nowhere. Each time I walked through the door the bartender's eyes glanced up to meet me as they would somebody who had been expected all evening. As soon as I sat at the bar the girls went to the women's room or out the back door. The electronic noise of the country bands was deafening, the amplified squelch in the microphones like metal raking on a blackboard. When I tried to talk to someone, the person would nod politely in the din as though a man without vocal cords were speaking to him, then go back to his drink or stare in the opposite direction through the layers of cigarette smoke.
I gave up and walked back to my truck, which was parked between the clapboard side of a nightclub and a squat six-room motel with a small yellow lawn and a dead palm tree by the drive-in registration window. The air smelled of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks by the river, dust from the shell parking lot, liquor and beer from a trash barrel filled with empty bottles. The sky out over the Gulf trembled with dry lightning.
I didn't hear her behind me.
"Everybody on the strip knew you were coming two hours ago, cutie," she said.
I turned and squinted my eyes at her. She drank out of her beer bottle, then puffed off her cigarette. Her face was porcine, her lipstick on crooked, her dyed red hair lacquered like tangled wire on her head. She put one hand on her hip and waited for me to recognize her.
"Charlotte?"
"What a memory. Have I tubbed up on you?"
"No, not really. You're looking good."
She laughed to herself and blew her cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the dark.
Thirty years ago she had been a stripper and hooker on Bourbon Street, then the mistress of a loanshark who blew his brains out, the wife of an alcoholic ex-police sergeant who ended up in Angola for doping horses at the Fairgrounds, and the last I heard the operator of a massage parlor in Algiers.
"What are you doing out here on the Airline?" I said.
"I run the dump next door," she said, and nodded toward the motel. "Hey, I got to sit down. I really got crocked tonight." She shook a wooden chair loose from the trash pile by the side of the nightclub and sat down in it with her knees splayed and took another drink from her beer bottle. An exhaust fan from a restroom was pinging above her head. "I already heard what you're looking for, Streak. A guy bringing the chickens in from the country, right?"
"Do you know who he is?"
"They come and they go. I'm too old to keep track of it anymore."
"I'd sure like to talk to this guy, Charlotte."
"Yeah, somebody ought to run an iron hook through his balls, all right, but it's probably not going to happen."
"Why not?"
"You got the right juice, the play pen stays open."
"He's connected?"
"What do you think?"
"With the Balboni family?"
"Maybe. Maybe he's got juice with the cops or politicians. There's lots of ways to stay in business."
"But one way or another, most of them go down. Right?"
She raised her beer bottle to her mouth and drank.
