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"I sliced the cord in half."
"That's a great way to deal with the problem, Streak."
A half hour later the phone rang. It was Buford LaRose. I walked with the phone into the back of the shop.
"Meet me at the Patio restaurant in Loreauville," he said.
"No, thanks," I said.
"Goddamn it, Dave, I want to get this mess behind us."
"Good. Resign your office."
"Crown's a killing machine," he said.
"If he is, you helped make him that way."
"You don't know, do you?"
"What?"
"About the guy who was just fished out of Henderson Swamp."
"That's St. Martin Parish. It's not my business. Good-bye, Buford." I hung up the phone.
"That was dickhead?" Clete said.
"Yep."
"What did he want?"
I told him.
"You're just going to let it slide down the bowl?"
"That about sums it up."
"Mistake. Stay in their faces, Streak. Don't let them blindside you. I'll back your play, mon."
He turned toward me on the counter stool, his scarred face as flat and round as a pie tin, his eyes a deep green under his combed, sandy hair.
"Listen to me for once," he said. "That was Mookie Zerrang you saw in the pirogue. You want the button man out of your life, you got to find his juice."
The bayou seemed to dance with yellow light in the rain. I wiped down the counter, carried out the trash, stocked the cooler in back, then finally quit a foolish dialogue inside myself and dialed Buford's answering service in Lafayette so I wouldn't have to call him at home.
"This is Dave Robicheaux. Tell Mr. LaRose I'll be in my office at eight Monday morning."
He was in at ten, with Ciro Tauzin from the state police at his side. The St. Martin Parish sheriff's report on a body recovered from Henderson Swamp lay on my desk.
"You starting to get a better picture of Aaron Crown now?" Buford said.
"Not really," I said.
"Not really? The victim's stomach was slit open and filled with rocks. What kind of human being would do something like that?" Buford said.
"I have a better question, Buford. What was a New Orleans gum-ball, a hit man for the Giacano family, doing at Henderson Swamp?" I said.
"He celled with Crown," Buford said.
