I picked up the receiver.
“You still there, partner?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Turn on your flashlight.”
“What an excellent idea.”
I went out the front door and down the slope through the trees. He had moved out on the dirt road now and I could see him more clearly. He was well over six feet, with arms that seemed too thin for the sleeves of his raincoat, wide shoulders, a face as grooved and webbed with lines as dried putty. His left coat pocket sagged with the weight of the cellular phone and his left hand now held the flashlight. His lips were purple in the beam of the flashlight, like the skin of a plum. His eyes watched me with the squinted focus of someone staring through smoke.
“Put your right hand behind your neck,” I said.
“That’s not dignified.”
“Neither are jerk-off games involving the death of a brave soldier.”
“Your friend could still be alive.”
He raised his right hand, hooked it above his lapel, and let it rest there. I watched him and didn’t answer.
“Sonny Marsallus is a traitor,” he said.
“I think it’s time we look at your identification.”
“You don’t listen well.”
“You made a mistake coming here tonight.”
“I don’t think so. You have a distinguished war record. Marsallus doesn’t. He’s for sale.”
“I want you to turn around, walk back to the dock, and place your hands on the rail... Just do it, partner. It’s not up for debate.”
But he didn’t move. I could feel sweat running down my sides like ants, but the face of the man named Jack, who wore a hat and coat, was as dry as parchment. His eyes remained riveted on mine, like brown agate with threads of gold in them.
Then I heard a sound out in the shadows.
“Hey, Jack, what’s shakin’?” a voice said.
Jack twisted his head sideways and stared out into the darkness.
“It’s Sonny,” the voice said. “Hey, Dave, watch out for ole Jack there. He carries a sawed-down twelve-gauge on a bungee rope in his right armpit. Peel back your raincoat, Jack, and let Dave have a peek.”
But that was not in Jack’s plan. He dropped the flashlight to the ground and bolted past me up the road. Then I saw Sonny move out from under the overhang of a live oak, a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter gripped at an upward angle with both hands.
“Get out of the way, Dave!” he shouted.
“Are you crazy? Put that down!”
But Sonny swung wide of me and aimed with both arms stretched straight out in front of him. Then he began firing, crack, crack, crack, crack, fire leaping out of the barrel, the empty brass cartridges clinking on the road.
He picked up the flashlight the man named Jack had dropped and shined it down the road.
“Look at the ground, Dave, right by that hole in the bushes,” he said. “I think Jack just sprung a leak.” Then he called out into the darkness, “Hey, Jack, how’s it feel?”
“Give me the gun, Sonny.”
“Sorry, Streak... I’m sorry to do this to you, too... No, no, don’t move. I’m just going to take your piece. Now, let’s walk over here to the dock and hook up.”
“You’re going across the line, Sonny.”
“There’s just one line that counts, Dave, the one between the good guys and the shit bags He worked a pair of open handcuffs from the back pocket of his blue jeans. “Put your hands on each side of the rail. You worried about procedure? That guy I just punched a drain hole in, dig this, you heard the Falangist joke down in Taco Tico country about the Flying Nun? This isn’t a shuck, either. Some of the junta fucks in Argentina wanted a couple of nuns, human rights types, turned into object lessons. The guy who threw them out of a Huey at a thousand feet was our man Jack.
“See you around, Streak. I’ll make sure you get your piece back.”
Then he disappeared through the broken bushes where the wounded man had fled. I raked the chain on the cuffs against the dock railing while mosquitoes droned around my head and my eyes stung with sweat and humiliation at my own failure and ineptitude.
Chapter 10
After I had gone down to the office Sunday morning and made my report, a mail clerk at the post office called the dispatcher and said that during the night someone had dropped an army-issue .45 automatic through a post office mail slot. The .45 had been wrapped in a paper bag with my name written on the outside.
It was hot and bright at noon, with a breeze blowing out of the south, and Clete Purcel walked with me along the dirt road to the spot where Sonny and the man named Jack had entered the brush and run down the bayou’s bank toward the four corners. The blood on the leaves was coated with dust from the road.
“It looks like Sonny really cored a hole in the guy. He didn’t show up at a hospital?”
“Not yet.”
We walked through the brush and down to the bank. The deep imprints in the mud left by Sonny and the man named Jack were now crisscrossed with the shoe prints of the deputies who had followed Jack’s blood trail to a break in the cattails where the bow of a flat-bottomed boat had been dragged onto the sand.
Clete squatted down heavily, slipped a piece of cardboard under one knee, and looked back up the bank toward the dock. He wore a pair of baggy, elastic-wasted shorts with dancing zebras printed on them. He took off his porkpie hat and twirled it on his index finger.
“Did you ever see the sawed-down twelve?” he asked.
“No.”
“You think he was carrying one?”
“I don’t know, Clete.”
“But you know a guy like that was carrying a piece of some kind? Right?”
We looked at each other.
“So the question is, why didn’t he try to pop Sonny with it? He could have waited for him in the dark and parked one in his brisket,” he said.
“Because he dropped it,” I said. Then I said, “And why didn’t anyone find it last night?”
He was spinning his hat on his finger now. His eyes were green and full of light.
“Because it fell in the water,” he said, and lumbered to his feet.
It didn’t take long. Seventy feet back down the bank, where the water eddied around a sunken and rotted pirogue that was green and fuzzy with moss, we saw the barrel of the twelve-gauge glinting wetly among the reeds and the wake from a passing boat. The barrel was sawed off at the pump and impacted with sand. The stock had been shaved and shaped with a wood rasp and honed into a pistol grip. A two-foot length of bungee cord, the kind you use to strap down luggage, was looped and screwed into the butt.
Clete shook the sand out of the barrel and jacked open the breech. Yellow water gushed out of the mechanism with the unfired shell. Then he jacked four more rounds out on the ground. I picked them up and they felt heavy and wet and filmed with grit in my palm.
“Our man doesn’t use a sportsman’s plug,” Clete said. He looked at the shells in my hand. “Are those pumpkin balls?”
“Yeah, you don’t see them anymore.”
“He probably loads his own rounds. This guy’s got the smell of a mechanic, Streak.” He peeled a stick of gum with one hand and put it in his mouth, his eyes thoughtful. “I hate to say this, but maybe dick-brain saved your life.”
Down by the dock a teenage kid was holding up a stringer of perch for a friend to see. He wore a bright-chrome-plated watchband on his wrist.
“You don’t think this guy’s a button man, he’s mobbed-up?” Clete asked.
“I was thinking about Sonny... the handcuffs... the way he took me down.”