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One week later a sealed oil drum floated to the surface in Biscayne Bay. The drum was wrapped with chains and sash weights and should have remained buried forever in the silt bottom of the bay. But the people who had shot Johnny through the head and sawed off his legs and stuffed them with his torso inside the drum, pausing to jab an ice pick into his abdomen to break the stomach lining, had botched the job, allowing Johnny’s last meal on earth to form into gas and float his body parts back into the tropical sunrise.
Frankie Dogs never forgave himself for sleeping in the day Johnny died.
He left Miami on the Sunset Limited, broke and depressed, and found his old friend Joe Zeroski waiting for him on the platform in New Orleans. Joe moved him into his house and gave him a job collecting the vig for the Giacano family’s Shylocks. Frankie found a stained form of redemption in devoting his life to Joe and Joe’s sad, drug-addicted, profligate daughter, Linda.
But it was all going south again. If you were a button man, the only edge you had was the edge. You got high on it and wore your indifference like an unshaved man in a tailored suit. Your enemies looked into your eyes and knew that even if they blew out your lights you’d smoke them on the way down. But some guys out of Houston tried to cowboy Joe by the St. Thomas Project. Joe fired his .45 through the back window of his car and hit a kid on a bicycle.
Bad luck for everybody. But that’s all it was, bad luck. It don’t mean you’re some kind of degenerate, Frankie told himself.
In Frankie’s opinion everything about this New Iberia gig was wrong. Frankie’s motto was: When in doubt, take ’em all out. For openers he told Joe to pop that black kid, Tee Bobby Whatever. Throw a pimp off a roof and make his friends watch. And tell Zerelda to stop complicating things by rolling down her panties at every opportunity. First she’s pumping it with that animal Purcel, then she’s messing around with a door-to-door salesman packs his own lunch into restaurants. It was disgusting.
Frankie shot nine-ball in a back-of-town bar in Lafayette, where the beer was cold, the fried-oyster po’boys good, the green-felt table level, the pockets leather, the competition first-class. It was like the saloons on Magazine he and Joe had shot pool in when they were kids.
Lightning flickered on the banana trees outside the back window and he heard a few drops of rain ping against the tin roof like scattered birdshot. A man with silver hair came in and sat at the bar in front. He had a Roman nose and a broad forehead that caught the light. Frankie had to look at him twice to make sure it wasn’t Johnny back from the grave. Frankie speared the cue ball into the rack and ran the string all the way to the nine ball. When he looked at the bar again, the man with silver hair was gone.
Besides the bartender, the only other person in the building was a guy playing a pinball machine in a side room, back in the shadows, a guy with his slacks tucked into red and green hand-tooled cowboy boots that came almost to the knee, his face obscured by a peaked cowboy hat.
Frankie had not heard the front door open or close, had felt no puff of wind or balloon of rain-scented air come into the room. Where had the man with silver hair gone?
“Bring me another beer,” Frank
ie called to the bartender.
“You got a beer.”
“It’s flat. Bring me an oyster po’boy, too,” Frankie said.
Ten minutes later Frankie glanced out the side window. The man with silver hair was standing by a black Caddy, the wind blowing his raincoat. Lightning pulsed across the heavens and the reflection illuminated the parking lot. The man by the Caddy seemed to smile at him.
Frankie told himself he was coming down with something. His stomach was roiling; his bowels were on fire. He went into the rest room and entered the wooden stall and latched the stall door behind him. When he dropped his pants and sat down heavily on the toilet seat, he looked through a clear spot on the painted window glass and saw the silver-haired man enter the back of the tavern.
The door to the rest room opened and Frankie felt the cool rush of air from the outside and heard the rain ticking on the banana trees. Then, for a reason he could not explain, he knew he was going to die.
He had left his gun in his coat on the back of a chair by the pool table. But strangely he felt no fear. In fact, he even wondered if this wasn’t the moment that he had always sought, the one that came to you like an old friend showing up unexpectedly at a train station.
“That you, Johnny? What’s going on?” Frankie said.
His eyes dropped to a pair of green and red cowboy boots, just before four splintered swatches exploded out of the door into Frankie’s face.
An hour later Helen Soileau and I joined a Lafayette Homicide detective and three uniformed cops at the back of the tavern where Frankie Dogs died and waited for the paramedics to load his elephantine weight onto a gurney that was spread with an unzippered black body bag. The Homicide detective, whose name was Lloyd Dronet, wore a rain-spotted tan suit and a tie with a palm tree and tropical sunset printed on it. He had picked up four nine-millimeter shell casings on the end of a pencil and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. A fifth shell casing lay inside the stall, glued to the floor by Frankie Dogs’s blood.
“So this fits with what the bartender told us. Four quick pops, then a pause and another pop. The last round was close-up. The muzzle flash burned the hair above the ear,” Dronet said.
“Meaning?” Helen said.
“The shooter was a pro. This guy Dogs was mobbed up, right? Another greaseball whacked him out,” Dronet said.
The man with silver hair sat at the bar, waiting for us to interview him. He was a local liquor distributor and was watching a baseball game on the television mounted up on the wall.
“Both the bartender and the liquor salesman say the only other person in the building was the guy in cowboy boots. You know any cowboys in the Mob?” I said.
“Greaseballs don’t go to western stores?” Dronet said.
“You’ve got a point,” I said.
We talked to the liquor distributor. He kept looking at his watch and jiggling his car keys in his coat pocket.
“You got somewhere to go?” Helen asked.
