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I felt a tick jump in my throat. I pressed my thumb hard under my ear to clear a fluttering sound, like a wounded butterfly, out of my hearing. I saw Bootsie looking at me, saw her put down her coffee cup gently and her face grow small.
"You there, podna?" the sheriff said.
"Who did it?"
"NOPD thinks a gang of black pukes. I'll tell you up front, Dave, he went out hard."
"I need the plane," I said.
CHAPTER 24
The sun was pale, almost white, like a sliver of ice hidden behind clouds above Lake Pontchartrain, when Clete Purcel met me at the New Orleans airport and drove us back down I-10 toward the city.
"You really want to go to the meat locker, Streak?" he asked.
"You know another place to start?"
"It was just a question."
Morgues deny all the colors the mind wishes to associate with death. The surfaces are cool to the touch, made of aluminum and stainless steel, made even more sterile in appearance by the dull reflection of the fluorescent lighting overhead. The trough and the drains where an autopsy was just conducted are spotless; the water that wells across and cleanses the trough's bottom could have issued from a spring.
But somehow, in the mind, you hear sounds behind all those gleaming lockers, like fluids dripping, a tendon constricting, a lip that tightens into a sneer across the teeth.
The assistant wore a full-length white lab coat that looked like a nineteenth-century duster. He paused with his hand on the locker door. He had a cold and kept brushing at his nose with the back of his wrist.
"The guy's hands are bagged. Otherwise, he's like they found him," he said.
"This place is an igloo in here. Let's see it, all right?" Clete said.
The assistant looked at Clete oddly and then pulled out the drawer. Clete glanced down at Jerry Joe, let out his breath, then lifted his eyes to mine.
"When it's this bad, it usually means a tire iron or maybe a curb button. The uniforms found him on the pavement, so it's hard to tell right now," the assistant said. "You knew the guy?"
"Yeah, he knew the guy," Clete answered.
"I was just wondering what he was doing in that neighborhood at night, that's all," the assistant said. "If a white guy's down there at night, it's usually for cooze or rock. We on the same side here?"
Most of Jerry Joe's teeth had been broken off. One of his eyes looked like a tea-stained egg. The other was no longer an eye. I lifted his left hand. It felt like a heavy piece of old fruit inside the plastic bag.
"Both of them are broken. I don't know anything about this guy, but my bet is, he went the whole fifteen before they clicked off his switch," the attendant said.
"Thank you, sir, for your time," I said, and turned and walked outside.
I talked with the scene investigator at the District from a filling station pay phone. He had a heavy New Orleans blue-collar accent, which is far closer to the speech of Brooklyn than to the Deep South; he told me he had to go to a meeting and couldn't talk to me right now.
"When can you talk?" I asked.
"When I get out of the meeting."
"When is that?"
"Leave your number."
We pulled back into the traffic. Clete's window was down and the wind whipped the hair on his head. He kept looking across the seat at me.
"Streak, you're making me tense," he said.
"You buy kids did this?" I asked.
