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“I hope I didn’t wake you up,” a mewing voice said.
“Smiley?”
“I’m glad you called me that. Because that’s what all my friends call me.”
“I saw what you did to those guys in Morgan City. You’re a piece of work.”
“I watched you.”
“Say again?”
“I watched you through binoculars. You and the pretty lady you work with. I can read lips. Y’all were very nice to the lady who sells herself.”
I felt dizzy. I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Let me explain something to you. You’re a hired assassin. I’m a sheriff’s detective. People like me put people like you in institutions. Sometimes we send them to the injection table. People like you don’t call up people like me to pass the time of day.”
“You don’t have to get smart-alecky about it.”
“Those two guys were hitters out of Florida, right?”
“Now they’re not anything.”
“Why’d you kill them?”
“They did mean things to me.” I could hear his breath increasing. “One of them used a stick.”
“That makes you a target now, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
“You fry two mobbed-up guys and you’re not a target?”
“The bad people who come after me are the target. They need to be protected from me, Detective Robicheaux.”
“You’re one in a million, Smiley.” I looked at my watch. Trying to trace his call was a waste of time. He used an ingenious relay system and seemed to know an enormous amount about technology. The same with ordnance and ballistics. “Why’d you call?”
“Tell Mr. Purcel I’m sorry about the detective lady who died at the casino in New Or-yuns.”
“She didn’t ‘die.’ She was killed.”
“By somebody else’s bullet. It was not from my gun.”
“You started a gun battle in a public place. Other people paid the price.”
“You’re talking bad to me. You stop it.”
“That’s because you’re starting to make me mad, Smiley.”
“My tummy hurts. You’re upsetting me”
“I don’t mean to. An evil man broke up my family when I was a kid. I went to Vietnam and got even. Understand what I’m saying?”
“You killed people?”
I felt my throat closing. “To be honest, I don’t feel like talking about it.”
“They were soldiers?” he said.
“Most of them. Maybe—”
