The pile of shit shifted until only a tip remained. Then the tip disappeared into blackness.
That it was heading toward him told Phelan enough. Most snakes light out for the hills; cottonmouths come at you.
Phelan strode to the shelves and hauled Ricky down, shined the light till it hit the bamboo couch, and dumped the boy on it. “Keep your feet off the floor.”
He scanned with the flashlight. Where the fuck was it?
Shag. Spilt ashtray. More shag.
Then the beam caught a section of sinuous black. He moved the light. There it was. Pouring toward him, triangular head outthrust.
Phelan fired.
The black snake convulsed but kept coming, tongue darting.
He fired again. Still the black form writhed in the orange grass. He blew its head off with the third round.
Phelan stepped wide of the quivering snake; wasn’t dead enough yet to keep the head from biting. Ears ringing, he tossed the flashlight, looped the boy’s arm around his neck, dragged him out of that room.
He saw the blue thumb-sized bruises on the boy’s shoulders, a streak of blood on the back of his thigh, as he draped him in his own jacket and a blanket from his trunk. “It’s the hospital, Ricky, ’less you got a full inhaler at home.”
“Home,” the kid panted, then turned the black tunnel of his eyes onto Phelan. “Book.”
“What book?”
But the kid folded, struggling for air.
Phelan laid on the horn when they gunned into the Toups’s driveway. In two seconds, Caroleen Toups busted out of the house, face lit up like stadium lights.
Phelan smoked in the Toups’s pine-paneled living room that opened onto a pine-paneled kitchen. Except for the mention of a book, he had hold of the thing: Deeterman slipped Ricky cash and dope, Ricky steered him boys. Too stupid to know the son of a bitch would turn on him. How many ran in a loop through Phelan’s brain. How many you bring him, Ricky?
After a while, wearing jeans and breathing, Ricky Toups stumbled out into the living room, trailed by his bewildered mother, her hands clasped at chest level. “There’s a book,” he said. “Told him I didn’t have it. He didn’t care, said he’d be back for me.”
“What kinda book?”
“Like a diary. You gotta help Georgia.” He hit his inhaler, and his jaw jittered sideways like his head was trying to screw off.
“She’s got the book. Her idea to take it?”
Ricky’s bluish chapped lips parted, like he was going to deny this point, but that was back when he had all the answers, before today. “She said we could get big money from him. That’s where he went. To her house.”
Phelan leapt up. “Call her.”
Ricky mumbled into a phone on the kitchen wall then hung his head listening. The receiver fell to his side. “It’s okay. He came to her house but she’d already took it to your office.”
Phelan’s stomach lurched.
Ricky slid down the wall, hunkered. Georgia’d told Deeterman he could go get the book where she’d left it, wrapped up outside this private eye’s office. The guy wouldn’t be there; he was out looking for Ricky. She’d talked fast, peeking through a latched screen door with Phelan’s card taped to the outside of it.
4:55. Phelan burned up I-10’s fast lane, swerving around truckers balling for New Orleans, cursing himself for wasting three rounds on a cottonmouth he could have outrun.
He took the stairs soft. Worked the doorknob soundlessly, hoping Deeterman was somewhere ahead of the truckers on I-10, not sitting in Delpha’s chair watching the knob turn. Phelan eased into the still office, .38 out.
Delpha Wade’s chair snugged to her desk. On top of it, the sheet with info on Client #2, typed on her release form. The door to his office stood ajar. Pressed against the jamb, Phelan pushed, swinging it open.
He stepped into a curtain of bourbon fume and quiet in the air, waves of it, wave on wave, quiet.
Until glass crunched under his shoe.
The client chair drifted around. Delpha said, “I put it away in your bottom drawer. Under the whiskey bottle.”
Phelan slid the gun on his desk next to a wad of brown paper, sank down to her.
Her right hand hung behind the chair arm but her left lay on a small, worn ledger in the middle of a shiny darkness on her skirt. Different-sized spots stained her white blouse, spray and spatter, one red channel.
“’Fore I could get that box for him, he pushed me out of the way and grabbed it. He coulda left. I thought he would. But he had to do one of those things they do. Those extras.” Her head lowered, shook once. “They just cain’t resist.”
He’d seen the legs on the floor by now, the rest of the body blocked from view by the big metal desk, and he needed to get Louie here, get an ambulance first, but he couldn’t pick up the phone, couldn’t get that motion going because he was listening to her, hearing it in the waves of quiet that rolled over him, quiet riding on waves of quiet, waves widening out from a center—the bayou, singing with insects and frogs, the surge-and-retreat, keening whir of it, the stir in muddy water, and her voice low as that chorus, he heard how she was still holding the bottle when the man licked the knife and cut her, and after he licked it again, she broke the bottle on the edge of the desk and shoved it up through his throat. Then she took the book and she sat down.
“You gonna find some boys.”
“Delpha,” Phelan whispered. The half of her face he could see wore a sheen of sweat. He laced his fingers through the brown hair, soothed it back.
Not a cloud in the gray-blue eyes that met his. The horizon inside them was clear.
A NICE PLACE TO VISIT
by Jeffery Deaver
When you’re a natural-born grifter, an operator, a player, you get this sixth sense for sniffing out opportunities, and that’s what Ricky Kelleher was doing now, watching two guys in the front of the smoky bar, near a greasy window that still had a five-year-old bullet hole in it.
Whatever was going down, neither of them looked real happy.
Ricky kept watching. He’d seen one guy here in Hanny’s a couple of times. He was wearing a suit and tie—it really made him stand out in this dive, the sore thumb thing. The other one, leather jacket and tight jeans, razor-cut bridge-and-tunnel hair, was some kind of Gambino wannabe, Ricky pegged him. Or Sopranos, more likely—yeah, he was the sort of prick who’d hock his wife for a big-screen TV. He was way pissed off, shaking his head at everything Mr. Suit was telling him. At one point he slammed his fist on the bar so hard glasses bounced. But nobody noticed. That was the kind of place Hanny’s was.
Ricky was in the rear, at the short L of the bar, his regular throne. The bartender, a dusty old guy, maybe black, maybe white, you couldn’t tell, kept an uneasy eye on the guys arguing. “It’s cool,” Ricky reassured him. “I’m on it.”
Mr. Suit had a briefcase open. A bunch of papers were inside. Most of the business in this pungent, dark Hell’s Kitchen bar involved trading bags of chopped-up plants and cases of Johnny Walker that’d fallen off the truck; the transactions were conducted in either the men’s room or the alley out back. This was something different. Skinny, five-foot-four Ricky couldn’t tip to exactly what was going down, but that magic sense, his player’s eye, told him to pay attention.