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“I don’t mind,” Joe said.
“You got bidness wit’ the man people call Legion, huh?” Baby Huey said.
“What do you mean the man they ‘call’ Legion?”
“He ain’t got a first name. He ain’t got a last name. Just ‘Legion.’ That’s all black people ever call him.”
“He’s hard on women?” Joe said.
“If they the right color,” Baby Huey said, and put the one-hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.
. . .
They drove in Joe Zeroski’s car
up on a levee that looked out on a wide bay fringed with flooded cypresses. A storm was kicking up out on the Gulf, and the wind was blowing hard from the south, wrinkling the bay, puffing leaves out of the adjacent woods. Joe turned off on a dirt track, dropping down into persimmon and pecan trees, palmettos, and landlocked pools that had the greasy shine of an oil slick. Baby Huey pointed to a shack in a clearing, a lantern burning whitely on a table inside. In back were a privy and a collapsed smokehouse and Legion Guidry’s truck, parked next to an oak that was nailed with the scraped hides of raccoons. One of the truck’s rear tires was flat on the rim.
Joe cut the engine. Through the trees they could hear Tee Bobby’s band belting out Clifton Chenier’s “Hey, Tite Fille.” They stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the darkness, the mosquitoes that boiled out of the trees, the wind that smelled of humus and beached fish.
“You stay where you are,” Joe said, and pitched a cell phone to Baby Huey. “It goes south in there, you push the redial button and say ‘Joe needs a hose crew.’ Then you tell them where we’re at and you take my car down the road and wait for whoever comes.”
“That’s Legion in there, Mr. Joe,” Baby Huey said.
“I think you’re a nice kid. I think you were sincere what you said about my daughter. But take the collard greens out of your mouth and tell me what you’re trying to say. That’s why you people are always gonna be cleaning toilets. You can’t say what’s on your mind.”
Baby Huey shook his head. “Legion ain’t no ordinary white man. He ain’t no ordinary man of any kind.”
Joe Zeroski opened the screen door of the shack and walked inside without knocking. While he and Baby Huey had talked outside, the tall, black-haired man in khaki clothes who sat at the table with a six-pack of beer and a bottle of bourbon in front of him had shown no curiosity about the headlights or the presence of others in his yard.
He knocked back a jigger of whiskey, took a sip of beer from a salted can, and picked up a burning cigarette from an inverted jar top. He drew in the smoke, the cigarette paper crackling in the silence.
“You busted up two of my men. But I’m letting that slide for now, ’cause maybe they were rude or maybe you didn’t know who they were. But somebody beat my daughter to death and I’m gonna rip his ass. I hear you got a bad record with women,” Joe said.
“Robicheaux send you?” Legion asked.
“Robicheaux?”
“You one of them dagos been staying in town, ain’t you? Working for Dave Robicheaux.”
“Are you nuts?” Joe said.
Then Joe heard a sound in a side room, behind a blanket that was hung with sliding hooks on a doorway. Joe pulled back the blanket and looked down at a black girl, probably not over eighteen, sitting on the side of a bed in shorts and a T-shirt razored off below her breasts, snorting a line off a broken mirror through a rolled five-dollar bill.
Joe took her by the arm and walked her barefoot and stoned to the front door.
“Go home. Or back to the nightclub. Or wherever you come from. But stay away from this man. Where’s your father, anyway?” he said, and closed the door behind her. Then he turned around, his back feeling momentarily exposed, vulnerable.
Legion’s face wore no expression, the skin white as a fish’s belly, creased with vertical lines. He inhaled off his cigarette, the ash glowing red, crackling against the dryness of the paper.
“You just made a mistake,” he said.
“Oh, yeah, how’s that?” Joe asked.
“I paid forty dollars for her dope. So now you owe the debt.”
“You’re an ignorant and stupid man, but I’m gonna try to explain something to you as simply as I can. My daughter was Linda Zeroski. A degenerate piece of shit tied her to a chair not far from here and smashed every bone in her face with his fists.”
Joe removed a .38 revolver with a two-inch barrel from the back of his belt. He flipped out the cylinder and dumped all six shells from the chambers into his palm.
