“Are you crazy?” Jenny said.
“He said to call him if I needed anything,” Ray said. “Well, I need something.”
“He’s a killer,” Jenny said. “If Tony or Vinnie or even Carlos himself really wants you dead, Charlie is the guy who’s going to get the order.”
Ray shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Jenny didn’t believe Ray was thinking at all. “He’s with them, you’re not.”
“I talked to him a couple days ago. He’s all right.”
She got up and walked into the kitchen, carrying her plate and glass. She left his sitting on the table. “You’re not calling him from my phone.”
Ray stood up. He looked at his drowned cell phone sitting on the small bar that separated the kitchen from the dining nook. “I’ll use a pay phone.” Leaving his dishes behind, he walked toward the door.
Jenny looked at him. “Ray, don’t call him. Let’s just go, let’s leave right now.” She set her dishes down on the countertop. “I’ve got a credit card. Let’s get in the car and go.”
With his hand on the doorknob, Ray turned and looked at her. “Are you going to be here when I get back?”
She was scared, scared of the Messinas, scared for Ray, and scared of what Tony would do to her if he found out she had lied to him. From personal experience she knew how brutal he could be. But more than anything else, now that she had found Ray again, Jenny was scared of losing him.
He stared at her, waiting for her answer.
She nodded. “I’ll be here.”
Ray stepped out and pulled the door closed behind him.
Jenny started to cry.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“You look like shit,” Charlie “The Rabbit” Liuzza said.
Ray said, “I feel like shit.”
They sat at a back table inside Hobnobber’s, a businessman’s happy-hour bar across Canal Street from the French Quarter. A place Ray hoped mob guys didn’t go.
The Rabbit said that after Ray called him, he had made a few phone calls to guys he trusted, guys who worked for Old Man Carlos directly. “You got yourself in quite a jam.”
Ray knew he was in a jam. He just didn’t know why. “What’s it about?”
“According to what Tony’s saying, Vinnie put a hit out on you.”
“What?”
“He thinks you set up the robbery and got his son killed.”
“That’s bullshit!”
Charlie held up his hand. “Keep your voice down.”
Ray nodded. Speaking more calmly, he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Guy with a tattoo on his hand sticks a gun in my face. That’s the first I knew about it.”
“I believe you. I know you’re a stand-up guy, but what I found out, you got even worse problems than that.”
Confused, Ray said, “Worse than Vinnie and Tony trying to kill me?”
Charlie nodded. “Yep.”
The guy knew how to build suspense, Ray thought. “How much worse can it get?”
“The Old Man is involved.”
Ray felt his stomach doing flip-flops. Jenny had been right. If the Old Man wanted him dead, who better to send than the Rabbit?
His thoughts must have been plastered all over his face because Charlie said, “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’m not here to whack you.”
Ray’s throat was so tight he could barely speak. “Why not?”
“I took my wife shopping at one of those outlet malls in Mississippi. We stopped at a casino on the coast. She likes the slots. I played a little blackjack and walked away with fourteen hundred of the casino’s money. I been gone for two days. Haven’t heard from anybody. Last I knew, you were doing Vinnie a solid, trying to find the crew who robbed us.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But if he tells me something different”-Charlie jerked his finger back and forth between them-“next time we see each other, it’ll be different.”
Ray nodded as Eric Clapton’s version of “I Shot the Sheriff” started playing on the jukebox. The song reminded him of prison. “That song was big on my wing,” Ray said. “Guys with boom boxes used to play it all the time.”
Charlie, shaking his head, said, “Fucking boom boxes in prison, next thing you know they’re gonna open up whorehouses in the yard.”
Ray was listening to the familiar lyrics of the song, wondering the same thing he always wondered when he heard it. He took a sip of Jameson, then said, “You ever wonder who shot the deputy?”
“Huh?”
Ray pointed up toward the ceiling, like he was pointing to the notes as they drifted across the bar. “That song is Clapton’s version of the old Bob Marley tune ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ What I want to know is, who shot the deputy?”
Charlie cocked his head, listening to the words. “What are you talking about?”
“The guy in the song, he says, ‘I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy.’ If that’s true, then who shot the fucking deputy?”
The jukebox played, I shot the sheriff, but I swear it was in self-defense. Freedom came my way one day, and I started out of town. ..
Charlie nodded. “Nobody shot the deputy. I think the guy’s saying he shot the sheriff, and he could have shot the deputy, too, but he didn’t.”
“No,” Ray said, thinking about the arguments he had gotten into at Terre Haute over the same thing. “If you listen to the words, the deputy is definitely dead. The guy says, ‘They want to bring me in guilty, for the killing of a deputy.’ So somebody killed the deputy. It just wasn’t him.”
“Him who?”
“The guy in the song.”
“Eric Clapton?”
“No, he’s just singing the song. I’m talking about the guy in the song, the one whose story it is.”
“So he didn’t kill the deputy, so what?” Charlie asked, looking confused.
“If he admitted to killing the sheriff, why not just admit to killing the deputy, too? I think it was the sheriff who killed him.”
Skeptical, Charlie said, “The sheriff killed his own deputy?”
Ray nodded.
“Why?”
Ray shrugged. “The guy mentions planting seeds. The song was written by Bob Marley. There’s a definite marijuana connection. Guy was probably paying off the sheriff, and the deputy caught them both. Something like that.”
Charlie kicked back his drink, then said, “You’ve given this a lot of thought, huh?”
“Not much else to do inside, except think.”
“You know, this ain’t the first time you’ve been in a jam with us.”
“You talking about when I got arrested?”
“No, after that.”
“What?”
Charlie, master of suspense that he was, stopped talking and signaled the waitress for a fresh round of drinks. He waited until she delivered them before going on. “It was after you got transferred out of Orleans Parish, and they took you down to the Saint Bernard Parish jail. I was at a meeting where the boss was kicking around the idea of having you clipped on the inside.”
Ray’s heart started racing. “When you say the boss, you’re talking about…”
Charlie nodded. “The Big Boss.” He took a sip of scotch, then went on, “He was afraid of you cutting a deal with the feds, but we didn’t have anybody in Saint Bernard. Getting someone in there to do it, it was very complicated. I told him my advice was to hold off, see what you did.” Charlie shrugged. “Turns out you did the right thing.”
There was something Ray had to know. “Why did you stand up for me? You didn’t even know me?”
Charlie took a deep breath and gulped down some more scotch. “What are you, about forty?”
“Forty-one.”
“My son would be about your age now. Good-looking kid, but stubborn, head hard as a rock. His birth was so rough on Jean, my wife, doctor said she wouldn’t be able to have any more, and he was right.
“Probably because of that we spoiled the boy some. I grew up in Gertown. Back then it was half Italian, half Irish, and for a kid coming up, you really only had two choices, be a cop or be a crook. Most of the Irish kids became cops, most of us became crooks. Where did you go to school?”