AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Those guys almost killed her. They might pull it off the next time."
"Maybe it's her own fault."
"That's a rough thing to say, Boots."
"She hides behind adversity and uses it to manipulate other people."
"I'll ask her not to come here again."
"Not on my account, please."
"I give up," I said, and went out into the yard.
The cane in my neighbor's field was green and dented with channels like rivers when the wind blew, and beyond his tree line I could see lightning fork without sound out of the sky. Through the kitchen window I heard Bootsie clattering dishes into the dishwasher. She slammed the washer door shut, the cups and silverware rattling in the rack. I heard the washer start to hum, then her shadow went past the window and disappeared from view and the overhead light went off and the kitchen and the yard were dark.
WE WANTED HARPO SCRUGGS. But we had nothing to charge him with. He knew it, too. He called the dock on Sunday afternoon.
"I want to meet, talk this thing out, bring it to an end," he said.
"It's not a seller's market, Scruggs."
"What you got is your dick in your hand. I can clean the barn for you. There's an old nigra runs a barbecue joint next to a motel on State Road 70 north of Morgan City. Nine o'clock," he said, and hung up.
I went outside the bait shop and hosed down a rental boat a fisherman had just returned, then went back inside without chaining it up and called Helen Soileau at her home.
"You want to do backup on a meet with Harpo Scruggs?" I said.
"Make him come in."
"We don't have enough to charge him."
"There's still the college kid, the witness who saw the two brothers executed in the Basin."
"His family says he's on a walking tour of Tibet."
"He killed Mout's dog. Vermilion Parish can charge him with endangering."
"Mout' says he never got a good look at the guy's face."
"Dave, we need to work this guy. He doesn't bring the Feds into it, he doesn't plead out. We fit his head in a steel vise."
"So take a ride with me. I want you to bring a scoped rifle."
She was silent a moment. Then she said, "Tell the old man."
THE BARBECUE PLACE WAS a rambling, tin-roofed red building, with white trim and screen porches, set back in a grove of pines. Next door was a cinder-block motel that had been painted purple and fringed with Christmas lights that never came down. Through the screen on a side porch I saw Harpo Scruggs standing at the bar, a booted foot on the rail, his tall frame bent forward, his Stetson at an angle on his freshly barbered head. He wore a long-sleeve blue shirt with pink polka dots and an Indian-stitched belt and gray western slacks that flowed like water over the crook in his knee. He tilted back a shot glass of whiskey and sipped from a glass of beer.
I stood by a plank table at the edge of the clearing so he could see me. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and opened the screen door and lit the cigarette with a Zippo as he walked toward me.
"You got anybody with you?" he asked.
"You see anyone?"
He sat down at the plank table and smoked his cigarette, his elbows on the wood. The clouds above the pines were black and maroon in the sun's afterglow. He tipped his ashes carefully over the edge of the table so they wouldn't blow back on his shirt.
"I heard about a man got throwed out a window. I think one of two men done it. Swede Boxleiter or that bucket of whale sperm got hisself kicked off the New Orleans police force," he said.
"Clete Purcel?"
