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“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Dave, something political is going on with Shondell and Bobby Earl. Like Father Julian said. Maybe it’s like Hitler going into the Rhineland in 1936. Nobody stood up to him, so he decided to take Czechoslovakia and then Poland.”
“This is New Iberia.”
“Tell Huey Long that. Do you realize you just told me that maybe you shot a little girl? That we’re sitting here talking about it? We should have already shoved a twelve-gauge up Shondell’s ass.”
“I’m with you in whatever you want to do,” I said.
“Talk to the Jewish broad. Find out what’s going on. And keep your flopper on lockdown.”
“You’re talking about Leslie Rosenberg?”
His eyes went out of focus. Or maybe he deliberately crossed them. “Duh! What did you tell her that made her quit her job with Adonis?”
“I told her she deserved a better life.”
“Then you got it on?”
“I don’t remember.”
“No clue, huh?” he said. “What was the status of your pole when you got home?”
“Will you—”
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
I waited for him to start taking me apart again. Instead he poured his beer on the grass and set the bottle on the picnic table and stared at it. “Dave, we’ve got to get to the bottom of the business at Henderson Swamp. This isn’t us. There’s got to be an explanation. I’m about to have an aneurism here.”
I walked away and got in my truck and drove home, the steel grid on the drawbridge rattling under my tires.
* * *
MONDAY AFTERNOON CARROLL LEBLANC came into my office without knocking, a clipboard in one hand. “Reptile blood,” he said.
I stood up, a fishhook in my windpipe. “You got the lab report?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The tech wasn’t real happy. Something about giving lab priority to the death of a snake.”
I sat back down and lowered my head into my hands, breathing slowly through my mouth. “Thanks, Carroll.”
“No problem. You all right?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t look like it.”
I sat up straight, dizzy, spots before my eyes. “Tell the lab I owe them one.”
“The less said about this stuff, the better.”
“I saw what I saw out there.”
“No, you didn’t. Nothing happened.”
I opened my desk drawer and took out the three slave marbles I’d found behind the shack. I rolled them on my blotter. “I don’t think finding these was a coincidence.”
“Don’t get back in your spaceship, Robo.”
