"Tell him that. The guy's got a hard-on about our man here. It's like talking to a vacant lot."
Fontenot got up from his chair and made his way along the deck, holding on to the rail. His yellow raincoat glistened in the turning fog. I heard the clank of the chain and the X-shaped welded pieces of railroad track that I used for an anchor as he pitched them off the bow. The jugboat swung with the incoming tide toward the coast and straightened against the anchor rope. The cabin cruiser idled past us, then turned in a circle and came up astern. It was a Larson, built for speed and comfort, its paint as white and flawless as enamel.
"I want you to know something before all this goes down," Lionel said.
I started to turn my head toward him. He nudged the automatic against my ear.
"No, keep your eyes straight ahead," he said. "I want you to know it's not personal. I don't like ex-cops, I don't think they should have ever let you in on a buy, but that's got nothing to do with this. We've been somebody's fuck too long, it's time we got what's ours. You just came along at a real bad time."
I heard the engine of the cabin cruiser die; then somebody threw a knotted rope from the bow onto the roof of the jugboat's pilot-house.
"That other thing," he said, "that other thing I didn't have anything to do with."
From the direction of his voice I could tell that he was now looking toward the stern.
"What other thing?" I said.
Then his voice came back toward the side of my face: "Are you kidding, man? You were taking the guy up to Angola to fry. What do you think a guy like that feels about you? I'm sorry for you, man, but I got nothing to do with it."
I didn't care about the pistol behind my ear now. I turned woodenly in the pilot's seat and looked up at the bobbing, moored bow of the cabin cruiser. As Tee Beau had said, Jimmie Lee Boggs had cut his hair short and dyed it black, but every other detail about him was as though he had walked out of a familiar dream: the mannequinlike head, the pallid skin, the lips that looked like they were rouged, the spearmint-green eyes with a strange light in them.
He wore rubber-soled canvas shoes, dungarees, a heavy blue wool shirt with wide gray suspenders, and when he stepped from the cabin cruiser onto the back rail of the jugboat and grabbed Ray Fontenot's hand, his forearm corded with muscle and his stomach looked as flat and hard as boiler plate.
He put one hand on the edge of the pilothouse's roof and leaned over me. Salt spray dripped from his face, and I could smell snuff on his breath.
"Been thinking of me?" he asked.
"I thought maybe you couldn't find us," Fontenot said. "It's thick out there."
"Lionel told me on the radio y'all would be coming past an oil platform," Boggs said. "I just lay south of the rig and listened for your engine. This thing sounds like a garbage truck."
Then Boggs looked down at me again. I still sat in the pilot's seat. His wrists looked as thick as sticks of firewood.
"This guy give you any trouble?" he said.
"Not really," Fontenot said. He had removed his raincoat and was putting on a life jacket.
"You guys get the stuff on board. I'll take care of it here," Boggs said. He took the nine-millimeter from Lionel's hand.
Fontenot cleared his throat. "We wonder if you… if we really need to do that, Jimmie Lee," he said.
"You got a problem with it?" Boggs said.
"The man isn't likely to call the law," Fontenot said.
"You got that right," Boggs said.
"I don't see the percentage," Fontenot said. "Right now we're simply transferring some product. Why complicate it?"
"I ain't telling you what to think, Jimmie Lee," Lionel said, "but the guy's not going to do anything. He's a fired cop, a drunk. He tries to make any trouble later, you can have him hit for five hundred bucks."
"I don't pay to clip a guy. Besides, you did a guy with a piano wire, Lionel. Why you giving me this bullshit?"
"I got out of it, too. I don't want to go that route anymore," Lionel said. "Look, he's an amateur. You let the amateurs slide, Jimmie Lee. You whack out an amateur, their families make a lot of trouble."
Lionel blew out his breath. The fog was white and so thick you could lose your hand in it as it rolled off the water and across the deck.
"I don't want to have to lose my piece. I just bought it," he said.
"Get the coke on board and bring me the shotgun. It's clipped under the forward hatch," Boggs said.
"You guys got to deal with Tony," I said to Lionel and Fontenot.
"Good try, prick, but Tony's history. He just don't know it yet," Boggs said.
"Sorry, Mr. Robicheaux," Fontenot said. Then he looked at Lionel and said, "See no evil."
The two of them started up the deck toward the forward gear box, where the two crates of cocaine were stowed. I was sweating heavily inside my clothes, and my breath was coming irregularly in my chest. The jugboat dipped in the ground swell, and the barrel of the automatic touched the side of my head like a kiss.
"I'll say it once, and you guys can believe it or not," I said. The front glass of the pilothouse was pushed ajar, and they could hear me out on the deck. "I'm still a cop. I'm undercover for the DEA. We're on Coast Guard radar right now."
I saw Lionel and Fontenot stop and turn around. The fog drifted across their bodies like strips of torn cotton. They started back toward the pilothouse.
"It's all a sting," I said. "Minos Dautrieve's been running it from the start. You know who Minos Dautrieve is, right?"
Boggs's fingers laced in my hair; then he slammed my head forward on the instrument panel. I felt the skin split above my right eye, and the blood and the salt water leaked down across my eyelid.
"Hold on, listen to him," Fontenot said.
"You guys rattle too easy," Boggs said.
"Dautrieve's a narc out of Lafayette," Lionel said.
"So he knows that," Boggs said.
"Clete Purcel is DEA undercover, too," I said. "You clip me, he'll even the score. Ask anybody in New Orleans. Check out what he did to Julio Segura."
Boggs held the automatic by the barrel and raked it across my mouth as though he were wielding a hammer. My bottom lip burst against my teeth, and a socket of pain raced deep into my throat and up into my nose. I leaned forward on the wheel with my mouth open, as though my jaws had become unhinged, while a long string of blood and saliva dripped between my legs.
"This deal's going sour," Lionel said.
"There's nothing wrong with the deal. Stop acting like a cunt," Boggs said.
"I ain't going back to Angola," Lionel said. "I ain't going down for snuffing a cop, either."
"This guy's shark food. Count on it. He don't have to be the only one to go over the gunwale, either. You getting my drift?" Boggs said.
"You got nothing to lose, Jimmie Lee. We do," Lionel said.
"You got a lot to lose, man. It's important you understand that," Boggs said. He had shifted the barrel of the automatic so that it now hovered between me and Lionel.
"We just wanted to hear a little more of what Mr. Robicheaux had to say," Fontenot said.
"I'll show you what he's going to say," Boggs said, and he knotted my shirt in his fist at the back of my neck, pulled me erect, and pushed the barrel of the automatic hard into my spine. "He's gonna say 'please,' and he's gonna say, 'I'll pay you money,' and he's gonna say, 'Mr. Boggs, I'll do anything you want if you don't hurt me.'"
He pushed me ahead of him on the deck, his clenched hand trembling with energy, then stomped on my leg just above the calf, as though he were breaking a slat, and knocked me to my knees. He let the automatic swing loosely over the back of my neck. In the reflection of the running lights the blood from my mouth looked purple on the backs of my hands. My ears were filled with sound: the waves bursting against the bow and hissing back along the hull, Jimmie Lee Boggs's heated breathing, a buoy clanging somewhere beyond the oil platform, a thick, obscene noise like wet cellophane crackling when I tried to swallow.