Then the fog began to flatten on the water and break up into turning wisps and wraiths that hovered just above the waves, and the eastern sky went gray. A soft rose-colored light broke on the horizon, and I saw the quarter moon for the first time that night. Fifty yards away a round shape, like the back of an enormous seagoing turtle, floated in the swell. I swam to it, one long stroke at a time, breathing sideways, blowing water out my nose, until finally my hand struck the life jacket that was wrapped around the chest of Ray Fontenot.
I had to roll him over to get to the laces. His body was strung with kelp, his skin blistered with burns and streaked with oil, his sightless eyes poached in his head. I jerked the jacket free and put my arms through the openings and felt the tension and ball of pain go out of my lower back as I was suddenly made weightless, bobbing along in a cresting wave that swept me toward the Louisiana shore.
For a short time I fell asleep, then awoke to the sound of sea gulls, the shadows of pelicans gliding by overhead, the heavy, fecund smell that speckled trout make when they school up, the early sun like a red wafer over the long green roll of the Gulf.
Five minutes later I heard an outboard engine, and I tried to wave my arms above the waves. Then he saw me and turned his engine so that he made a wide circle and approached me with the waves at his stern. It was a bass boat, a long, aluminum, flat-bottomed boat designed for freshwater fishing, not for weather or being any distance from land. The man sitting at an angle in the stern, with the throttle of an Evinrude in his hand, wore Marine Corps utility pants, a gold and purple LSU jersey with Mike the Tiger on the front, a pale blue porkpie hat mashed down on his big head.
He cut the engine, drifted into me, then reached down and grabbed me by the back of the life jacket. His face was round and flushed red with windburn and the strain of lifting me.
"What's happening, Streak?" Cletus said.
I lay in the bottom of his boat, my skin numb and dead to the touch and wrinkled with water-soak. I could see the coastline, the tide breaking across the sandbar, and white cranes rising from a cypress swamp.
You went out after me in this? I wanted to say. But I was breathless with cold and the words wouldn't come.
"How you like civil service with the DEA?" he said above the engine's roar. "Those babies really know how to take care of you, don't they? Yes, indeedy, they do."
CHAPTER 9
Through my hospital room windows I could see the tops of oak trees, a pink two-story house with iron grillwork across the street, palm fronds on the esplanade, and, where the side street fed into St. Charles, the big green iron streetcar when it passed. My room was white, and the sunlight was bright above the oak trees outside.
My right eye was crimped partly shut by the tape that covered the stitches in my eyebrow. There were four stitches in my lip, and they felt like a large plastic insect when I moved my tongue across them. I slept through most of the morning, and at noon I ate a lunch of mashed potatoes, baked chicken, early peas, and Jell-O, and fell asleep again. Two hours later I was awakened by Minos's phone call.
"What happened out there?" he said.
I told him.
"How'd you know which hospital I was in?" I asked.
"Your buddy Clete called me. Look, I'm sorry about this, Dave. I really am. There's always risk in undercover work, but we usually do a better job of protecting our people."
"How did New Orleans Vice get in on it?"
"I don't know. I talked to this character Nate Baxter. He's a nasty sonofabitch, isn't he?"
"You got it."
"He stonewalled me, said he couldn't talk to me without clearance, said he wasn't even sure who I was."
"Did you mention my name?"
"Of course not."
"Don't tell him anything about our operation. He'll divulge it or use it in some way for his own ends. In the meantime call his superiors."
"I already have a call in. But I appreciate you telling me how to do these things."
"You sound a little irritable this afternoon."
"Your busted head and the loss of your boat weren't the only problems that developed out there."
"Wait a minute. They got Boggs, didn't they?"
"No."
"What?"
"Boggs got away. With fifty keys of pure flake."
"I can't believe it."
"Evidently he went between two sandbars and they went over the top of one. At least that's what the Coast Guard says. Our man Baxter has no comment."
"You got the shrimper, didn't you?"
"We got the shrimper. But no dope. No money, either. They dumped it all overboard." I could almost hear him swallow when he said it.
"It all went for nothing?"
"That's what a few people have been telling me today."
"What about my boat?"
"We'll see what we can do."
"Listen, Minos, it'll take me thirty thousand dollars to replace it."
"People down here are not sympathetic to my point of view right now. A half-million dollars of DEA money is at this moment bouncing along the bottom of the Gulf."
"Your friends have an interesting attitude about personal responsibility."
"Nobody here wants to spend the rest of his career in western Nebraska. But it happens. Give me a little time."
"I mean it, Minos. That's a big part of my livelihood that went down out there. I want it back."
"You made your point."
"One other thing. Boggs said something about Cardo's being history. Is there a whack out on him or something?"
"It's funny you say that. We heard rumors like that from both Houston and Miami in just the last two days."
A nurse came in to take my temperature, and I started to say good-bye to Minos.
"How close did it get out there, Dave?" he said.
"Down to the wire."
"Are you all right?"
"It's just a few stitches. They're keeping me a day or so because I got some water in my lungs. Sometimes that can cause pneumonia."
"No. I mean are you all right?"
"I'm fine." And I looked out at the sunlight on the trees and realized that I meant it.
"I think we're going to pull you out of the sting. It went out of control. It wasn't anybody's fault, it just happens. But you've done enough. I'll be back with you tonight."
After he hung up and the nurse had taken my temperature, I used the bathroom, then walked to the window and looked down the side street toward St. Charles. The streetcar rattled down the esplanade under the massive canopy of oak trees, the wood seats filled with Negroes and working-class white people. Down below, the gutters were full of pink and blue camellias from the previous night's rain, and the wet stone was streaked with color like dye washed out of paper flowers.
Ten minutes later Clete walked through the door with a pizza in a flat box, a can of Jax in one coat pocket, and a Dr Pepper in the other. His porkpie hat was tilted down on his forehead. He sat on the side of my bed and flipped open the top of the box, his intelligent green eyes smiling at me.
"Hospital food usually tastes like a cross between spit and baby pabulum," he said. "So I brought you a dynamite combo of anchovies, sausage, pepperoni, and double cheese. How do you like it, my noble mon?"
"How about some peanut brittle? It goes great with stitches in the mouth, too."
He ate a huge wedge and popped open the can of Jax, drank it half-empty, then picked up another wedge and started chewing, smiling all the time. There were flecks of pizza sauce on his mouth and shirt.
"The next time, I cover your butt from Jump Street," he said.
"All right."
"The feds don't send out my old partner on any more Lone Ranger jobs."