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"Give me a number. I'll call you back," I said.
"Call me back?"
"Yeah, I'm busy right now. I've already reached my quotient for jerk-off behavior today."
"I can give you Harpo Scruggs tied hand and foot on a barbecue spit," he said.
I could hear him breathing through his nose, like a cat's whisker scraping across the perforations. Then I realized the source of his fear.
"You've talked to Scruggs, haven't you?" I said. "You called him about his receiving immunity. Which means he knows you're in communication with us. You dropped the dime on yourself… Hello?"
"He's back. I saw him this morning," he said.
"You're imagining things."
"He's got an inoperable brain tumor. The guy's walking death. That's his edge."
"Better come in, Mr. Guidry."
"I don't give a deposition until he's in custody. I want the sheriffs guarantee on that."
"You won't get it."
"One day I'm going to make you suffer. I promise it." He eased the phone down into the cradle.
ON MONDAY, ADRIEN GLAZIER knocked on my office door. She was dressed in blue jeans and hiking shoes and a denim shirt, and she carried a brown cloth shoulder bag scrolled with Mexican embroidery. The ends of her ash-blond hair looked like they had been brushed until they crawled with static electricity, then had been sprayed into place.
"We can't find Willie Broussard," she said.
"Did you try his father's fish camp?"
"Why do you think I'm dressed like this?"
"Cool Breeze doesn't report in to me, Ms. Glazier."
"Can I sit down?"
Her eyes met mine and lingered for a moment, and I realized her tone and manner had changed, like heat surrendering at the end of a burning day.
"An informant tells us some people in Hong Kong have sent two guys to Louisiana to clip off a troublesome hangnail or two," she said. "I don't know if the target is Willie Broussard or Ricky Scarlotti or a couple of movie producers. Maybe it's all of the above."
"My first choice would be Scarlotti. He's the only person who has reason to give up some of their heroin connections."
"If they kill Willie Broussard, they take the squeeze off Scarlotti. Anyway, I'm telling you what we know."
I started to bring up the subject of Harpo Scruggs again and the possibility of his having worked for the government, but I let it go.
She dropped a folder on my desk. Clipped to two xeroxed Mexico City police memorandums was a grainy eight-by-ten photograph that had been taken in an open-air fruit market. The man in the photo stood at a stall, sucking a raw oyster out of its shell.
"His name is Ruben Esteban. He's one of the men we think Hong Kong has sent here."
"He looks like a dwarf."
"He is. He worked for the Argentine Junta. Supposedly he interrogated prisoners by chewing off their genitals."
"What?"
"The Triads always ruled through terror. The people they hire create living studies in torture and mutilation. Call Amnesty International in Chicago and see what they have to say about Esteban."
