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Leon waited for the car to pull away, but it didn't. The driver continued to stare into Leon's face, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. A passenger in the backseat was smoking a cigarette, the ash glowing in the darkness. The passenger by the right front window held a metallic object in his lap, one that glinted dully in the light from the dashboard.
"I'm not alone. I got a man here with me," Leon said, his pulse quickening.
"What you talking 'bout, man?" the driver said.
The passenger by the right front window lifted a Zippo from his lap and lit a cigarette with it.
Leon let out his breath. "Y'all want something else?" he said.
"Yeah, you ain't give me my change," the driver said.
Three hours later Leon Hebert put his money bag in the floor safe, locked the doors, and turned off the lights. It was a beautiful night. The wind rustled in the trees overhead an
d the constellations were stenciled across the sky. An eighteen-wheeler passed on the highway, then an ambulance with its flashers on. The ambulance continued on past the hospital and turned onto the drawbridge and the state highway that fed into Loreauville Road, where the three girls had been trapped inside their burning Buick.
Why did he have to think in images like that? He didn't do it, he told himself. That kid who worked for him, Josh Comeaux, had a boner in his pants for the Parks girl and would have let her slam it in the car door if she'd wanted to. Why didn't they put that in the paper? he said to himself.
No justice, he thought.
Someone started a pickup truck in front of the barbecue place and backed out of the parking lot, then headed slowly down the asphalt strip toward Leon Hebert's store, pieces of gravel clicking under the tires.
Leon fished his car keys out of his pocket, then dropped them in the darkness. When he bent over to retrieve them, the driver of the pickup turned into the oyster-shell loop that curved past Leon's drive-by service window.
"We're closed," Leon said, the high beams of the pickup burning red circles into his eyes.
But there was no response from inside the truck.
"Who is that?" he said, trying to smile.
A figure opened the truck door and stepped out on the oyster shells. Leon raised his hand to shield his eyes and squinted into the brilliance of the headlights. "My clerk already went to the bank. There's nothing here for you," he said.
The first pistol shot hit him high up on the chest with an impact like an anvil iron, knocking him backward, the hard-packed oyster shells slamming into the back of his head. The shooter had cut the lights on the pickup and was walking toward him, stooping for just a second to pick an object off the ground. The shooter stared down at Leon, perhaps realizing a mistake had been made, that the wrong person had been shot, that Leon Hebert should not have had a fate like this imposed upon him.
The figure leaned over him, blotting out the sky. Leon tried to speak, but the only sound that issued from his body was the air wheezing through the hole in his lung.
Then his mouth was pried apart and something that was stiff and bittersweet and crusted with dirt was shoved between his teeth and forced deep into his throat. Leon's right hand tried to clasp the shoe of the figure bending over him, to somehow telegraph the plea for mercy that his lungs and throat could not make. At that moment he looked into the face of his tormentor and knew what his final moments on earth would be like. He twisted his head sideways and looked desperately out at the highway, wondering how the world of normal people and normal events could be only a heartbeat away.
No one reported the shooting until just before sunrise, when a tramp who had been sleeping in the weeds by the railway track crossed the road and tripped over the body. Helen Soileau picked me up at my house in a cruiser and handed me a thermos filled with coffee and hot milk. She hit the flasher and we rolled through town to the crime scene.
"You're the skipper now. You don't have to do this early A.M. stuff anymore," I said.
"Somebody has to keep you guys on your leash," she replied.
Her eyes looked straight ahead, her expression flat. We passed a long row of shacks, the reflection of the flasher rippling across the house fronts.
"This isn't a robbery-homicide, is it?" I said.
Cane trucks packed to the top were already on the road when we got to the crime scene, snarling traffic at the intersection by the drawbridge. The early sun was red through the trees and mist was rising off the bayou behind the hospital. Leon Hebert lay on the oysters shells a few feet from his drive-by window, a bullet wound in his chest, a second one puckered in the center of his forehead, a third through the eye. A blue daiquiri cup had been compressed into a cone and stuck in his mouth.
An ambulance and three sheriff's department vehicles were parked outside the yellow crime-scene tape that had been strung through the oak trees. The coroner had not arrived but our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, was kneeling beside the body, slipping plastic bags over the hands of the dead man. A small man in tattered clothes and tennis shoes without socks sat outside the tape his back against a tree trunk, his knees drawn up before him.
"How do you read it, Mack?" I said.
"The shooter used a revolver or he picked up his brass. I'd say the wounds were made with either a .38 or a nine-millimeter," he replied. He had ascetic features and wore a clip-on bow tie, suspenders, a crinkling white shirt, and a briar pipe in a little leather holster on his belt.
He lifted the dead man's right wrist. "It looks like there's shoe polish under his fingernails," he said. "My guess is the first round was fired from a distance and hit him in the chest. Then the shooter walked up close and put the next two in him point-blank. The victim probably looked up into the shooter's face and grabbed his shoe before he died."
"Why would he do that?" Helen asked.
