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“You were a rumdum in the First District. You used to hang in Joe Burton’s piano bar on Canal,” Sonny Bilotti interjected himself, compressing his words flatly, his head motionless against the pillows.
“That’s me, partner,” I said. “The word is you shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. You’ve got to be stand-up to ’front the A.B., Sonny. Don’t let a sack of shit like Legion Guidry get away with what he did. File against him and we’ll bust his wheels.”
Bilotti’s head shifted slightly on the pillow so that he could look directly at me. His eyes possessed the luminosity of obsidian, but they were also marked by an uncertain glimmer, a conclusion or perhaps a new knowledge about himself that would plague him the rest of his days.
“You scared of this guy, Sonny?” I said.
His eyes went to Zerelda.
“You’re done here,” she said to me.
“If that’s the way you want it,” I said, and walked outside.
She followed me to the front door of the hospital, then out into the parking lot under the trees. The air was warm, golden, smelling of smoke from Saturday-afternoon leaf fires.
“I did some checking on you. You were in this same hospital. Somebody made you count your bones. Maybe with a blackjack. I have a feeling it was Legion Guidry,” she said.
“So?” I replied, my eyes focused across the street on the bayou.
“You didn’t bring charges against him. You’re trying to use Sonny to get even. Because you’re too gutless to do it head-on,” she said.
I turned from her and walked to my truck. But she wasn’t finished with me yet. She stepped between me and the door.
“Guidry did something to you that makes you feel ashamed, didn’t he?” she said.
“I’d appreciate your moving out of the way.”
“I bet you would. Here’s another flash. You got a beef with Legion Guidry, take it to Perry LaSalle. He got Guidry his job at the casino. Then ask yourself why Perry has influence at the casino.”
“Is there any particular reason I’ve earned your anger?” I asked.
“Yeah, Sonny Bilotti is my cousin and you’re an asshole,” she replied.
CHAPTER 20
I awoke early Sunday morning and drove 241 miles to Houston, then got lost in a rainstorm somewhere around Hermann Park and Rice University. When I finally found the Texas Medical Center and the hospital where the sheriff’s wife had just undergone a double mastectomy the previous week, the rain had flooded the streets and was thundering on the tops of cars that had pulled to the curb because their drivers could not see through the windshields. I parked in an elevated garage, then splashed across a street and entered the hospital soaking wet. She was asleep. So was the sheriff, his body curled up on two chairs he had pushed together, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I walked back to the nurses’ station. No one was there except for a physician in scrubs. He was a tall, graying man, and he was writing on a clipboard. I asked him if he knew how the sheriff’s wife was doing.
“You a friend of the family?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“She’s a sweetheart,” he said, and let his eyes slip off mine so I could read no meaning in them.
“Is the flower shop open downstairs?” I asked.
“I believe it is,” he said.
On the way out of the hospital I paid for a mixed bouquet and had it sent up to the sheriff’s wife. I signed the card “Your friends in the department” and drove back to New Iberia.
The next morning, Monday, the sheriff and I were both back at work. I knocked on his office door and went inside. “Got a minute?” I said.
He sat behind his desk in a pinstripe suit and turquoise western shirt, his eyes tired, trying not to yawn. “You sound like you have a cold,” he said.
“Just some sniffles.”
“You get caught in the rain?”
“Not really.”
