What’s the point?
I didn’t know myself.
The thunder finally stopped and the rain roared on the tin roof and drenched the dock and spool tables and blew through the screens in a fine mist. I waited for it to slack off, then I locked up the bait shop and ran up the slope with a raincoat over my head and told Bootsie of the change in our circumstances.
That evening, which was unseasonably cool and marked by strange lights in the sky, Helen Soileau came out to the house and sat with me on the front steps, her thick forearms propped on her thighs like a ballplayer in a dugout, and told me the story about Sonny’s phone call within earshot of waves bursting against a coastline.
The two shooters were pros, probably ex-military men, not the much-inflated contract wiseguys who undid their victims through treachery and had to press the muzzle into the hairline to ensure they didn’t miss. They had him triangulated from forty yards out, with either AR-15’s or .223 carbines. Had the target been anyone else, he would have been hurled backward, matted with shards of glass, and made to dance on invisible wires inside the phone booth. But one of the shooters probably blew it, shifted his sling to box the side of Sonny’s face more tightly in his sights, to lock cartilage and jawbone and the almost feminine mouth, which made soundless words the shooter hated without even hearing them, lock them all into a narrow iron rectangle that would splinter into torn watermelon with the slightest pull of the shooter’s finger.
But the inverted boat hull he was aiming across dented and made a thunking sound when he shifted the sling, and suddenly Sonny was on rock ‘n’ roll, his heart bursting with adrenaline, springing from the booth, his shoulders hunched, zigzagging through the boatyard, his hips swiveling like a football quarterback evading ladders, his skin twitching as though someone had touched a hot match to it.
A witness down by the collapsed pier said Sonny seemed painted with magic. He raced between cinder-block tool shops and dry-docked shrimp boats that were eaten with rot, while the shooters tried to lock down on him again and whanged rounds off a welding truck, blew glass out of a watchman’s hut, dissected the yawning door of a junked Coca-Cola machine, and stitched a row of bleeding holes across a corrugated tin paint shed.
Sonny bolted down the sandy slope to the riverbank and poured it on. But for some unexplainable reason he ran for the beach, the wheeling of gulls and other winged creatures, rather than back up the river to higher ground, and the sand became wetter and wetter under his feet, until his shoes sank up to the ankles in porridge.
Then they nailed him.
One shooter, a thick-bodied, truncated man, with knots of muscle through his back and skin-tight cutoffs rolled into his genitals, came over the riverbank in a breath-wheezing run, his rifle at port arms, and fired and fired until the breech locked open and shell casings littered the sand like broken gold teeth.
Sonny’s Hawaiian shirt jumped and puffed as though carrion birds were pecking at it. His gait broke, his torso twisted momentarily, and he became a man ingesting a chunk of angle iron. But a long time ago, perhaps back in the Iberville welfare project, Sonny had learned the fate of those who go down in front of their adversaries’ booted feet. He seemed to right himself, his face concentrating with a fragile inner balance, forcing a composed and single thought in front of his eyes; then he stumbled toward the surf and the crumpled pier that rang with the cries of frightened birds.
He waded through the breakers, his destroyed shirt billowing out into the tide like wings. The shooters fired twice more, wide and high, the rounds toppling and skipping across the water. But Sonny had become his own denouement. He struggled forward into the undertow, staining the world of fish and crabs and eels and stingrays with his blood, then simply stepped off into the depths, his red hair floating briefly beneath a wave like a windblown flower.
“You handling this, Dave?” Helen said.
“Sure.”
“He always lived on the edge. It was his way.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. My voice seemed outside of my skin, my words spoken by someone else. After a while I said, “Who pulled the body out?”
“They didn’t find it.” I could feel her eyes moving on the side of my face. “Forget it, Dave. He didn’t make it. The Fed I talked to said the blood spore looked like dogs had been chewing on him.”
I felt my teeth scrape against one another. “What was he doing in Mississippi?”
“The beach is full of casinos and grease balls Maybe he was tying another knot on his string. The Fed I talked to got pretty vague when I asked him the same thing.”
I bounced my forehead on my thumbs, looked at the sky that was metallic and burned-looking and flickering with lights. Helen stood up with her car keys in her hand.
“He pissed you off, he dragged his shit into your life, but you took his fall, anyway. Don’t you dare put this on your conscience,” she said. She aimed her index finger at me.
She walked toward her car, then stopped and turned.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
“Sure.”
Her eyes fixed on mine, then her breasts rose and she walked through the wet leaves and pools of water to the drive, her shoulders squared with a moral certitude that I could only envy.
I woke at four in the morning and sat on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t remember the details of the dream I’d just had, but in the center of my mind was an ugly and inescapable thought, like an angry man walking toward you in a darkened, wood-floored hallway.
We’d had him in custody. Then Johnny Giacano had put out the word he didn’t want Sonny bailed out.
Question: What was the best way to make sure I heard what Johnny wanted?
Answer: Feed the information to Clete Purcel.
Had Johnny sucked me in?
I didn’t know.
I couldn’t accept Sonny’s death. People like Sonny didn’t die. They stayed high on their own re bop heard Charlie Parker’s riffs in the friction of the spheres, thrived without sunlight in the neon glaze of Canal and St. Charles, fashioned sonnets out of street language, and proved to the rest of us that you could live with the full-tilt boogie in your heart and glide above the murderous fastenings of triviality.
They didn’t find a body, I told myself. The sea always gives back its dead, and they didn’t find Sonny’s body.
You’re dead when they unzip the bag, pry your dog tag out of your teeth, and drain your fluids through a grate in the bottom of a stainless steel trough. That’s dead.
I lay back on the pillow with my forearm across my eyes and fell asleep. I dreamed I saw Sonny rise like Triton from the sea, his body covered with fish scales, a wreathed horn in his hand, already transforming into a creature of air and spun light.
The next afternoon Batist answered the phone in the bait shop, then handed me the receiver. The weather was hot and muggy, and I pressed a sweating can of Dr. Pepper against my cheek and sat on a counter stool with the phone against my ear.
“Robicheaux?” the voice said.
There was no mistaking the thick, whiskey-and-cigarette-seared rasp, the words that rose like ash inside a chimney.
“Yes,” I said, and swallowed something stale and bitter in my throat.
“You must have run your thumb up somebody’s hole. You got eighty-sixed out of your own department?”