background, vibrated and squealed on
the tracks.
"What do you
want?" I said.
"Something to
come in."
"Sorry."
"I don't like
being made everybody's fuck."
"You let that
girl drown. You're calling the wrong people for sympathy."
"She wanted some
ribs. I went inside this colored joint in St. Martinville. I come back out and
the car's gone."
I could hear him
breathing in the silence.
"I delivered
money to Buford LaRose's house," he said.
"How much?"
"How do I know?
It was locked in a satchel. It was heavy, like it was full of phone
books."
"If that's all
you're offering, you're up Shit's Creek."
"The guy gonna
be governor is taking juice from Jerry Ace, that don't make your berries
tingle?"
"We don't
monitor campaign contributions, Mingo. Call us when you're serious. Right now
I'm busy," I said. I eased the receiver down in the cradle and looked at
Helen, who was sitting with one haunch on the corner of my desk.
"You going to
leave him out there?" she said.
"It's us or City
Prison in New Orleans. I think he'll turn himself in to us, then try to get to
our witnesses."
"I hope so. Yes,
indeedy."
"What'd he say
to you?"
"Oh, he and I
will have a talk about it sometime." She opened a book that was on my
desk. "Why you reading Greek mythology?"
"That fellow
Clay Mason compared the LaRoses to Orpheus and Eurydice . . . They're
characters out of Greek legend," I said. She flipped through several pages
in the book, then looked at me again.
"Orpheus went down into the Underworld to free his dead wife.
But he couldn't pull it off. Hades got both of them."
"Interesting
stuff," she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her
short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. "Bloomberg goes
down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction,
anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this
one."
"Why would it be
otherwise?"
She leaned on the
desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard
against the cuffs of her sleeves.
"Because you've
got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose," she said.
T hat night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again
through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his
triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent's. But even though he himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the
lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action
and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a
condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the
Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and
improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and
rural shitholes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his
conception of America.
He knew how to turn
into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin
cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the
muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the
black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter's flame.
With luck he would
always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the
brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst,
like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies
thundered past it.
That's the way it
went down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the
rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in
the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle,
the tracks.
"What do you
want?" I said.
"Something to
come in."
"Sorry."
"I don't like
being made everybody's fuck."
"You let that
girl drown. You're calling the wrong people for sympathy."
"She wanted some
ribs. I went inside this colored joint in St. Martinville. I come back out and
the car's gone."
I could hear him
breathing in the silence.
"I delivered
money to Buford LaRose's house," he said.
"How much?"
"How do I know?
It was locked in a satchel. It was heavy, like it was full of phone
books."
"If that's all
you're offering, you're up Shit's Creek."
"The guy gonna
be governor is taking juice from Jerry Ace, that don't make your berries
tingle?"
"We don't
monitor campaign contributions, Mingo. Call us when you're serious. Right now
I'm busy," I said. I eased the receiver down in the cradle and looked at
Helen, who was sitting with one haunch on the corner of my desk.
"You going to
leave him out there?" she said.
"It's us or City
Prison in New Orleans. I think he'll turn himself in to us, then try to get to
our witnesses."
"I hope so. Yes,
indeedy."
"What'd he say
to you?"
"Oh, he and I
will have a talk about it sometime." She opened a book that was on my
desk. "Why you reading Greek mythology?"
"That fellow
Clay Mason compared the LaRoses to Orpheus and Eurydice . . . They're
characters out of Greek legend," I said. She flipped through several pages
in the book, then looked at me again.
"Orpheus went down into the Underworld to free his dead wife.
But he couldn't pull it off. Hades got both of them."
"Interesting
stuff," she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her
short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. "Bloomberg goes
down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction,
anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this
one."
"Why would it be
otherwise?"
She leaned on the
desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard
against the cuffs of her sleeves.
"Because you've
got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose," she said.
T hat night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again
through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his
triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent's. But even though he himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the
lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action
and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a
condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the
Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and
improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and
rural shitholes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his
conception of America.
He knew how to turn
into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin
cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the
muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the
black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter's flame.
With luck he would
always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the
brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst,
like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies
thundered past it.
That's the way it
went down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the
rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in
the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle,
Similar Books
