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THIRTY
CISCO FLYNN WAS IN MY office the next morning. He sat in a chair in front of my desk, his hands opening and closing on his thighs.
"Out at the dock, when I told you to look at the photos? I was angry," I said, holding the duplicates of the three photographs from the buried jar.
"Just give them to me, would you?" he said.
I handed the photographs across the desk to him. He looked at them slowly, one by one, his face never changing expression. But I saw a twitch in his cheek under one eye. He lay the photos back on the desk and straightened himself in the chair.
His voice was dry when he spoke. "You're sure that's Terrebonne, the dude with the missing finger?"
"Every road we take leads to his front door," I said.
"This guy Scruggs was there, too?"
"Put it in the bank."
He stared out the window at the fronds of a palm tree swelling in the wind.
"I understand he's back in the area," Cisco said.
"Don't have the wrong kind of thoughts, partner."
"I always thought the worst people I ever met were in Hollywood. But they're right here."
"Evil doesn't have a zip code, Cisco." He picked up the photos and looked at them again. Then he set them down and propped his elbows on my desk and rested his forehead on his fingers. I thought he was going to speak, then I realized he was weeping.
AT NOON, WHEN I was on my way to lunch, Helen caught up with me in the parking lot.
"Hang on, Streak. I just got a call from some woman named Jessie Rideau. She says she was in the hotel in Morgan City the night Jack Flynn was kidnapped," she said.
"Why's she calling us now?"
We both got in my truck. I started the engine. Helen looked straight ahead, as though trying to rethink a problem she couldn't quite define.
"She says she and another woman were prostitutes who worked out of the bar downstairs. She says Harpo Scruggs made the other woman, someone named Lavern Viator, hide a lockbox for him."
"A lockbox? Where's the Viator woman?"
"She joined a cult in Texas and asked Rideau to keep the lockbox. Rideau thinks Scruggs killed her. Now he wants the box."
"Why doesn't she give it to him?"
"She's afraid he'll kill her after he gets it."
"Tell her to come in."
"She doesn't trust us either."
I parked the truck in front of the cafeteria on Main Street. The drawbridge was up on Bayou Teche and a shrimp boat was passing through the pilings.
"Let's talk about it inside," I said.
"I can't eat. Before Rideau got panicky and hung up on me, she said the killers were shooting craps in the room next to Jack Flynn. They waited till he was by himself, then dragged him down a back stairs and tied him to a post on a dock and whipped him with chains. She said that's all that was supposed to happen. Except Scruggs told the others the night was just beginning. He made the Viator woman come with them. She held Jack Flynn's head in a towel so the blood wouldn't get on the seat."
Helen pressed at her temple with two fingers.
