"He goes, 'Then sign your own paychecks, Rhino Boy.'
"Rhino Boy? How'd I ever get mixed up with these guys, Dave?"
"Lots of people ask themselves that question," I said.
THE EX-PROSTITUTE NAMED JESSIE Rideau, who claimed to have been present when Jack Flynn was kidnapped, called Helen Soileau's extension the next day. Helen had the call transferred to my office.
"Come talk to us, Ms. Rideau," I said.
"You giving out free coffee in lockup?" she said.
"We want to put Harpo Scruggs away. You help us, we help you."
"Gee, where I heard that before?" I could hear her breath flattening on the receiver, as though she were trying to blow the heat out of a burn. "You ain't gonna say nothing?"
"I'll meet you somewhere else."
"St. Peter's Cemetery in ten minutes."
"How will I recognize you?" I asked.
"I'm the one that's not dead."
I parked my truck behind the cathedral and walked over to the old cemetery, which was filled with brick-and-plaster crypts that had settled at broken angles into the earth. She sat on the seat of her paint-blistered gas-guzzler, the door open, her feet splayed on the curb, her head hanging out in the sunlight as I approached her. She had coppery hair that looked like it had been waved with an iron, and brown skin and freckles like a spray of dull pennies on her face and neck. Her shoulders were wide, her breasts like watermelons inside her blue cotton shirt, her turquoise eyes fastened on me, as though she had no means of defending herself against the world once it escaped her vision.
"Ms. Rideau?"
She didn't reply. A fire truck passed and she never took her eyes off my face.
"Give us a formal statement on Scruggs, enough to get a warrant for his arrest. That's when your problems start to end," I said.
"I need money to go out West, somewhere he cain't find me," she said.
"We don't run a flea market. If you conceal evidence in a criminal investigation, you become an accomplice after the fact. You ever do time?"
"You a real charmer."
I looked at my watch.
"Maybe I'd better go," I said.
"Harpo Scruggs gonna kill me. I had that box hid all them years for him. Now he gonna kill me over it. That's what y'all ain't hearing."
"Why does he want the lockbox now?" I asked.
"Him and me run a house toget'er. Fo' years ago I found out he killed Lavern Viator in Texas. Lavern was the other girl that was in Morgan City when they beat that man wit' chains. So I moved the box to a different place, one he ain't t'ought about."
"Let's try to be honest here, Jessie. Did you move it because you knew he was blackmailing someone with it and you thought it was valuable?"
Raindrops were falling out of the sunlight. There were blue tattoos of hearts and dice inside Jessie Rideau's forearms. She stared at the crypts in the cemetery, her eyes recessed, her face like that of a person who knows she will never have any value to anyone other than use.
"I gonna be wit' them dead people soon," she said.
"Where'd you do time?"
"A year in St. John the Baptist. Two years in St. Gabriel."
"Let us help you."
"Too late." She pulled the car door shut and started the engine. The exhaust pipe and muffler were rusted out, and smoke billowed from under the car frame.
"Why does he want the lockbox now?" I said.
She shot me the finger and gunned the car out into the street, the roar of her engine reverberating through the crypts.
THERE ARE DAYS THAT are different. They may look the same to everyone else, but on certain mornings you wake and know with absolute certainty you've been chosen as a participant in a historical script, for reasons unknown to you, and your best efforts will not change what has already been written.
On Wednesday the false dawn was bone-white, just like it had been the day Megan came back to New Iberia, the air brittle, the wood timbers in our house aching with cold. Then hailstones clattered on the tin roof and through the trees and rolled down the slope onto the dirt road. When the sun broke above the horizon the clouds in the eastern sky trembled with a glow like the reflection of a distant forest fire. When I walked down to the dock, the air was still cold, crisscrossed with the flight of robins, more than I had seen in years. I started cleaning the congealed ash from the barbecue pit, then rinsed my hands in an oaken bucket that had been filled with rainwater the night before. But Batist had cleaned a nutria in it for crab bait, and when I poured the water out it was red with blood.
At the office I called Adrien Glazier in New Orleans.
"Anything on the Scarlotti shooter?" I said.
"You figured out he's a French Canadian. You're ahead of us. What's the matter?" she said.
"Matter? He's going to kill somebody."
"If it will make you feel better, I already contacted Billy Holtzner and offered him Witness Protection. He goes, 'Where, on an ice floe at the South Pole?' and hangs up."
"Send some agents over here, Adrien."
"Holtzner's from Hollywood. He knows the rules. You get what you want when you come across. I told him the G's casting couch is nongender-specific. Try to have a few laughs with this stuff. You worry too much."
IT BEGAN TO RAIN just after sunset. The light faded in the swamp and the air was freckled with birds, then the rain beat on the dock and the tin roof of the bait shop and filled the rental boats that were chained up by the boat ramp. Batist closed out the cash register and put on his canvas coat and hat.
"Megan's daddy, the one got nailed to the barn? You know how many black men been killed and nobody ever been brought to cou't for it?" he said.
"Doesn't make it right," I said.
"Makes it the way it is," he replied.
After he had gone I turned off the outside lights so no late customers would come by, then began mopping the floor. The rain on the roof was deafening and I didn't hear the door open behind me, but I felt the cold blow across my back.
"Put your mop up. I got other work for you," the voice said.
I straightened up and looked into the seamed, rain-streaked face of Harpo Scruggs.
THIRTY-TWO
HIS FACE WAS BLOODLESS, SHRIVELED like a prune, glistening under the drenched brim of his hat. His raincoat dripped water in a circle on the floor. A blue-black.22 Ruger revolver, with ivory grips, on full cock, hung from his right hand.
"I got a magnum cylinder in it. The round will go through both sides of your skull," he said.
"What do you want, Scruggs?"
"Fix me some coffee and milk in one of them big glasses yonder." He pointed with one finger. "Put about four spoons of honey in it."
"Have you lost your mind?"
He propped the heel of his hand against the counter for support. The movement caused him to pucker his mouth and exhale his breath. It touched my face, like the raw odor from a broken drain line.
"You're listing," I said.
"Fix the coffee like I told you."
A moment later he picked up the glass with his left hand and drank from it steadily until it was almost empty. He set the glass on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His whiskers made a scraping sound against his skin.
"We're going to Opelousas. You're gonna drive. You try to hurt me, I'll kill you. Then I'll come back and kill your wife and child. A man like me don't give it no thought," he said.
"Why me, Scruggs?"
"'Cause you got an obsession over the man we stretched out on that barn wall. You gonna do right, no matter who you got to mess up. It ain't a compliment."
WE TOOK HIS PICKUP truck to the four-lane and headed north toward Lafayette and Opelousas. He didn't use the passenger seat belt but instead sat canted sideways with his right leg pushed out in front of him. His raincoat was unbuttoned and I could see the folds of a dark towel that were tied with rope across his side.
"You leaking pretty bad?" I said.