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"A Mexican?"
"Yeah, that's right."
"She talks like a Mexican?"
"Yeah. What's a Mexican supposed to talk like?"
"That's not the one I'm looking for, then."
"Enjoy your 7 Up," he said, and walked away from me.
I waited a half hour. The biker went out and I heard him kick-start his motorcycle and peel down the dirt street in a roar of diminishing thunder. Then the college boys left and the bar was almost deserted. The bartender brought me another 7 Up. I reached for my billfold.
"It's on the house," he said.
"It's my birthday?" I said.
"You're a cop."
"I'm a cop?"
"It don't matter to me. I like having cops in. It keeps the riffraff out."
"Why do you think I'm a cop, partner?"
"Because I just went out back for a breath of air and Lou Girard was taking a leak on our banana trees. Tell Lou thanks a lot for me."
So I gave it up and walked back outside into the humid night, the drift of dust off the dirt road, and the heat lightning that flickered silently over the Gulf.
"I'm afraid it's a dud," I said to Lou thr
ough his car window. "I'm sorry to get you out for nothing."
"Forget it. You want to get something to eat?"
"No, I'd better head home."
"This hooker, Amber, her full name is Amber Martinez. I heard she was getting out of the life. But I can pick her up for you."
"No, I think somebody was just jerking me around."
"Let me know if I can do anything, then."
"All right. Thanks again. Goodnight, Lou."
"Goodnight, Dave."
I watched him drive around the side of the building and out onto the dirt street. Raindrops began to ping on the top of my truck.
But maybe I was leaving too early, I thought. If the bartender had made Lou Girard, maybe the woman had, too.
I went back inside. All the bar stools were empty. The bartender was rinsing beer mugs in a tin sink. He looked up at me.
"She still ain't here. I don't know what else to tell you, buddy," he said.
I put a quarter in the jukebox and played an old Clifton Chenier record, Hey 'Tite Fille, then I walked out onto the front steps. The rain was slanting across the neon glow of the Dixie beer sign and pattering in the ditches and on the shell parking lot. Across the street were two small frame houses, and next to them was a vacant lot with a vegetable garden and three dark oaks in it and an old white Buick parked in front. Then somebody turned on a light inside the house next to the lot, and I saw the silhouette of somebody in the passenger seat of the Buick. I saw the silhouette as clearly as if it had been snipped out of tin, and then I saw the light glint on a chrome or nickel-plated surface as brightly as a heliograph.
The shots were muffled in the rain—pop, pop, like Chinese firecrackers under a tin can—but I saw the sparks fly out from the pistol barrel through the interior darkness of the Buick. The shooter had fired at an odd angle, across the seat and through the back window, but I didn't wait to wonder why he had chosen an awkward position to take a shot at me.
