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It was almost dark when we entered the canal that led to the boat landing. The air was heated, the sky crisscrossed with birds, dense with the distant smell that rain makes in a dry sugarcane field. I ran the boat up onto the ramp and cut the engine and tilted the propeller out of the water and flung our life vests up onto the bank and lifted the ice chest up by the handles and waded through the shallows.
“You gonna tell me?” Clete said.
“What?”
“How it went in there.” His face was round and softly focused, an alcoholic shine in his eyes.
“I told her if Don Ritter ever repeats those lies about my mother, I’m going to jam that tape up his ass with a chain saw.”
“Gee, I wonder if she got your meaning,” he said, then clasped his huge hand around the back of my neck, his breath welling into my face like a layer of malt. “We’re going to find out who hurt your mother, Streak. But you’re no executioner. When those guys go down, it’s not going to be on your conscience. My old podjo had better not try to go against me on this one,” he said, his fingers tightening into my neck.
The next morning I woke before dawn to the sounds of rain and a boat engine on the bayou. I fixed a cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and ate breakfast at the kitchen table, then put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop in the grayness of the morning to help Batist open up.
“Dave, I seen a man wit’ a boat trailer by the ramp when I drove up,” Batist said. “I got out of my truck and he started to walk toward me, then he turned around and drove off. Later a boat gone on by the shop. I t’ink it was him.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
“I ain’t seen him befo’. It was like he t’ought I was somebody else. Maybe he was looking for you, huh?”
“Why’s this guy so important, Batist?”
“My eyes ain’t that good no more. But there was somet’ing shiny on his dashboard. Like chrome. Like a pistol, maybe.”
I turned on the string of lights over the dock and looked out the screen window at the rain denting the bayou and the mist blowing out of the cypress and willow trees in the swamp. Then I saw one of my rental boats that had broken loose from its chain floating sideways past the window.
“I’ll go for it,” Batist said behind me.
“I’m already wet,” I said.
I unlocked an outboard by the concrete ramp and headed downstream. When I went around the bend, I saw the loose boat tangled in an island of hyacinths close-in to a stand of flooded cypress.
But I wasn’t alone.
An outboard roared to life behind me, and the green-painted aluminum bow came out of a cut in the swamp and turned into my wake.
The man in the stern was tall, dark-haired, his skin pale, his jeans and T-shirt soaked. He wore a straw hat, with a black ribbon tied around the crown, and his face was beaded with water. He cut his engine and floated up onto the pad of hyacinths, his bow inches from the side of my boat.
He placed both of his palms on his thighs and looked at me and waited, his features flat, as though expecting a response to a question.
“That’s an interesting shotgun you have on the seat,” I said.
“A Remington twelve. It’s modified a little bit,” he replied.
“When you saw them off at the pump, they’re illegal,” I said, and grinned at him. I caught the painter on the boat that had broken loose and began tying it to the stern of my outboard.
“You know who I am?” he asked. His eyes were a dark blue, the color of ink. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face with it, then glanced upward at the grayness in the sky and the water dripping out of the canopy.
“We don’t hear a Kentucky accent around here very often,” I said.
“Somebody shot at me yesterday. Outside New Orleans.”
“Why tell me?”
“You made them think I was gonna turn them in. That’s a rotten thing to do, sir.”
“I hear you killed people for the wise guys out on the coast. You had problems a long time before you came to Louisiana, Johnny.”
His eyes narrowed at my use of his name. His mouth was effeminate and did not seem to go with his wide shoulders and heavy upper arms. He picked at his fingernails and looked at nothing, his lips pursing before he spoke again.
