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'Why not, partner?'
We drove down the road toward the parked van. The moon was yellow, veiled with a rain ring, low over the cypress trees in the marsh. A few raindrops began hitting on the bayou's surface. In the headlights I could see the man in coveralls bent down into the van's engine, his back pocket swollen with chrome wrenches. But behind the van's shadow I also saw a parked pickup truck, its lights off.
'It looks like your friend's already found some help,' I said.
'That guy come by earlier but he don't have no cables,' Zoot said.
I left my lights and engine on, got out in the road, and unlocked the lid of the equipment box that was welded to the floor of my truck bed. I looped the jumper cables over my shoulder and walked toward the man in coveralls. His face was as pointed as an ax blade, his jaws covered with a fine silver beard that grew to a point on his chin. His smile was like a wrinkled red line inside his beard.
'Thanks for coming out, Mr. Robicheaux,' he said.
'I don't think I know you,' I said.
'You don't. The boy told me your name.'
'I see.' I glanced at his face again in the slanting rain. His eyes were as bright as a pixie's. 'Well, clamp the red cable on your positive terminal and the black on your negative and we'll get you started.' I handed him the ends of the cables and turned to pop my hood. As I did I saw Zoot step backwards toward my truck, his mouth open, his stare suddenly disjointed.
I turned back toward the man in coveralls and saw the Luger in his hand. His smile was wet, his eyes dancing with light.
'That's the way it goes,' he said. 'I wouldn't feel bad about it. It took me a half day and Son of Sambo here to work this scam.'
'What's going on, Mr. Dave?' Zoot said.
'Who you working for, podjo?' I said.
'Podjo? I dig it. I heard you were a cute motherfucker,' he said, still smiling, and moved past me to my open truck door, the Luger aimed at my chest, and switched off the ignition and headlights.
'Cut the kid loose. He's not a player,' I said.
'Nits makes lice. Stamp 'em out when you get the chance. That's what some people say.'
'I think you're standing in your own shit, buddy,' I said. 'You pop a cap on this road and you won't get back across the drawbridge.'
But even while I was talking I saw a shadow, a large one, moving from the parked pickup truck, along the side of the van, and I knew that I had not yet confronted my real adversary that night.
A scorched-black bank of thunderclouds over the marsh pulsed and flickered with veins of lightning, and in the white glow through the canopy of trees I saw Will Buchalter step out in front of the van, his Panama hat pushed back on his head, his lopsided Will Rogers grin as affectionate as that of an old friend.
He reached out with his hand to feel my face, just as a blind man might. My head jerked back from the sour smell of his palm.
'I'm sorry to do this to you, Dave, but you don't ride the beef easy,' he said, stepped close to me, his thighs widening, and clamped both his forearms on each side of my neck.
'Yeah, ride the beef„ man. Ride that motherfucker down,' the other man said, and began giggling.
Then Buchalter's forearms flexed as tight as iron and squeezed into the sides of my neck like machinery breaking bird bone. I could feel his body trembling with strain, his breath quivering like a feather against my ear, then I felt the arteries to the brain shut down, and my knees buckled as though the tendons had been severed. A wave of nausea and red-black color slid across my eyes, and I was tumbling into a dark, cool place where the rain bounced off the skin as dryly as pap
er flowers and the distant thunder over the gulf was only the harmless echo of ships' guns that had long since been muted with moss and the lazy, dull drift of sand and time.
* * *
chapter nineteen
Pain can be a bucket of gasoline-smelling water hurled into the face, the concrete floor that bites into the knees, the hemp knotted into the wrists behind the squared wood post, the wrenched muscles in the arms, the Nazi flag coming back into focus against a urine yellow cinder-block wall, then once again the gears turning dully on a hand-crank generator, gaining speed now, starting to hum now, whining louder through the metal casing as the current strikes my genitals just like an iron fist, soaring upward into the loins, mashing the kidneys, seizing an area deep in the colon like electric pliers.
I was sure the voice coming out of my mouth was not my own. It was a savage sound, ripped out of the viscera, loud as cymbals clapped on the ears, degrading, eventually weak and plaintive, the descending tremolo like that of an animal with its leg in a steel trap.
A redheaded, crew-cut, porcine man in a black Grateful Dead T-shirt, with white skin, a furrowed neck, and deep-set, lime green eyes, sat forward on a folding chair, pumping his chubby arms furiously on the handles of the generator. Then he stopped and stared at one of his palms.
'I got a blister on me hand,' he said.
