The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell Page B

me,” Lester said. “You don’t like me. We never was friends.” He raised his round brown eyes and looked Shade square in the face. “Nobody likes me and I always been knowin’ that, so cut the mean shit.”
    “If you hear anything, though.”
    “Right. But nobody I know does much over in Pan Fry, man. They catch us over there, man, they got some stick-and-ball games they play with you. Guess who’s the ball?”
    “I’m convinced,” Shade said. “You sold me. But don’t let me find out you’re lyin’.”
    It was Lester’s turn to laugh.
    “I guess you’d bust me then, huh? Send me to some terrible place.”
    Shade and Blanchette joined in on the chuckle as well, for Lester was of the self-mutated breed that was at least as happy locked up as free. Slamming steel doors were home cooking, mama’s milk and cookies, to him.
    “Uh-uh, you’d like that too much,” Shade said. “Next time we pop you we’re goin’ to pass the hat, take up a collection, and send you to vocational-technical so you can learn just enough about power tools to kill your fool self.”
    “I’ve lived through worse,” Lester said as he followed the detectives to the door.
    Once outside on the lean, hard-bricked street, Shade and Blanchette paused to decide what pointless visit to make next.
    “It’s almost four,” Blanchette said. “We’re losin’ the day. None of these twerps is goin’ to break into a councilman’s house, then get confused about what they’re there for, and decide to whack a guy for free, you know. Since they’re already there.”
    “You know that and I know that, but nobody else gives a fuck.”
    Blanchette held his trench coat open and fanned himself with the flaps. In the following silence he walked to a parked car and sat on the hood. His short legs dangled over the fender and he scrutinized the goo-coated sidewalk as if it were a mirror. He humphed from time to time and sweat ran down his face like cracks in a porcelain Buddha.
    “I just don’t like it,” Shade said. “If we don’t do what we know we should someone else is goin’ to get it.”
    “It won’t be our fault.”
    “Nothing’s our fault.”
    “Should have that on our badges, you ask me.”
    “Everything’s our fault.”
    “Oh, boy. Don’t start with that schoolboy bullshit again, Rene. Today ain’t the day for it.”
    The sun rebounded off nearby windows, and heat rose from the concrete walk, giving agony extra angles to work.
    “Sundown Phillips,” Shade said.
    Blanchette pursed his lips, then began to nod.
    “That’s true,” he said. “If anybody knows what’s happenin’ in Pan Fry, he’s it.”
    “Yeah. What say let’s be sociable and go visiting, huh?”
    “Okay, partner,” Blanchette said in a strangely soft tone. “I was wonderin’ how long we were goin’ to humor that cashmere brother of yours. I was goin’ to lose faith if it was more than another ten minutes, to tell you the truth.”
    Nodding, Shade said, “You and me both.”
    In the aspiring self-mythology of Saint Bruno, a town that liked to refer to itself as a baby Chicago, there were grapevine Roykos and street-corner Sandburgs who found odd connections between the Windy City on the Lake and the Wheezing Town on the River.
    The pecking order of the homegrown juice merchants and trigger jerkers, green-felt Caesars, and snow-shoveling cowboys was likened to a vivid Chicago of the memory. And in this urban simile, if Auguste Beaurain, a force so devious, potent, and dangerous that he’d never even been hooked for a parking ticket, was a scaled-down Capone, and Steve Roque an irritating Spike O’Donnell, then surely Sundown Phillips of Pan Fry was perfectly Bugs Moran.
    The detectives pulled into the graveled space in front of the wood-frame house that served as an office for Phillips Construction. There were two green pickup trucks and a motorcycle parked outside. A large dog with long strands of mud for hair, and a disturbingly narrow