DR10 - Sunset Limited (34 page)

Bedcheck Charlie could cross rice paddies without denting the
water, cut crawl paths through concertina wire, or tunnel under
claymores if he had to. He had beaten the French with resolve and a
shovel rather than a gun. But there was no question about what he could
do with a bolt-action rifle stripped off a dead German or Sudanese
Legionnaire. He waited for the flare of a Zippo held to a cigarette or
the tiny blue flame from a heat tab flattening on the bottom of a C-rat
can, then he squeezed off from three hundred yards out and left a wound
shaped like a keyhole in a man's face.

But I doubt if Ricky Scarlotti ever gave much thought to
Vietnamese sappers. Certainly his mind was focused on other concerns
Saturday morning when he sat outside the riding club where he played
polo sometimes, sipping from a glass of burgundy, dipping bread in
olive oil and eating it, punching his new girlfriend, Angela, in the
ribs whenever he made a point. Things were going to work out. He'd
gotten that hillbilly, Harpo Scruggs, back on the job. Scruggs would
clip that snitch in New Iberia, the boon, what was his name, the one
ripping off the Mob's own VCRs and selling them back to them, Broussard
was his name, clip him once and for all and take the weight off Ricky
so he could tell that female FBI agent to shove her Triad bullshit up
her nose with chopsticks.

In fact, he and Angela and the two bodyguards had tickets for
the early flight to Miami Sunday morning. Tomorrow he'd be sitting on
the beach behind the Doral Hotel, with a tropical drink in his hand,
maybe go out to the trotters or the dog track later, hey, take a
deep-sea charter and catch a marlin and get it mounted. Then call up
some guys in Hallandale who he'd pay for each minute they had that fat
shit Purcel begging on videotape. Ricky licked his lips when he thought
about it.

A sno'ball truck drove down the winding two-lane road through
the park that bordered the riding club. Ricky took off his pilot's
glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, then put them back on again.
What's a sno'ball truck doing in the park when no kids are around? he
thought. The sno'ball truck pulled into the oak trees and the driver
got out and watched the ducks on the pond, then disappeared around the
far side of the truck.

"Go see what that guy's doing," Ricky said to one of his
bodyguards.

"He's lying in the shade, taking a nap," the bodyguard replied.

"Tell him this ain't Wino Row, go take his naps somewhere
else," Ricky said.

The bodyguard walked across the road, into the trees, and
spoke to the man on the ground. The man sat up and yawned, looked in
Ricky's direction while the bodyguard talked, then started his truck
and drove away.

"Who was he?" Ricky asked the bodyguard.

"A guy sells sno'balls."

"Who
was
he?"

"He didn't give me his fucking name, Ricky. You want I should
go after him?"

"Forget it. We're out of drinks here. Get the waiter back."

An hour later Ricky's eyes were red with alcohol, his skin
glazed with sweat from riding his horse hard in the sun. An ancient
green milk truck, with magnetized letters on the side, drove down the
two-lane road through the park, exited on the boulevard, then made a
second pass through the park and stopped in the trees by the duck pond.

Benny Grogan, the other bodyguard, got up from Ricky's table.
He wore a straw hat with a multicolored band on his platinum hair.

"Where you going?" Ricky said.

"To check the guy out."

"He's a knife grinder. I seen that truck all over the
neighborhood," Ricky said.

"I thought you didn't want nobody hanging around, Ricky,"
Benny said.

"He's a midget. How's he reach the pedals? Bring the car
around. Angela, you up for a shower?" Ricky said.

The milk truck was parked deep in the shade of the live oaks.
The rear doors opened, flapping back on their hinges, and revealed a
prone man in a yellow T-shirt and dark blue jeans. His long body was
stretched out behind a sandbag, the sling of the scoped rifle twisted
around his left forearm, the right side of his face notched into the
rifle's stock.

When he squeezed off, the rifle recoiled hard against his
shoulder and a flash leaped off the muzzle, like an electrical short,
but there was no report.

The bullet tore through the center of Ricky's throat. A purple
stream of burgundy flowed from both corners of his mouth, then he began
to make coughing sounds, like a man who can neither swallow nor expel a
chicken bone, while blood spigoted from his wound and spiderwebbed his
chest and white polo pants. His eyes stared impotently into his new
girlfriend's face. She pushed herself away from the table, her hands
held out in front of her, her knees close together, like someone who
did not want to be splashed by a passing car.

The shooter slammed the back doors of the milk truck and the
driver drove the truck through the trees and over the curb onto the
boulevard. Benny Grogan ran down the street after it, his .38 held in
the air, automobiles veering to each side of him, their horns blaring.

IT WAS MONDAY WHEN Adrien Glazier gave
me all the details of
Scarlotti's death over the phone.

"NOPD found the truck out by Lake Pontchartrain. It was
clean," she said.

"You got anything on the shooter?"

"Nothing. It looks like we've lost our biggest potential
witness against the boys from Hong Kong," she said.

"I'm afraid people in New Orleans won't mourn that fact," I
said.

"You can't tell. Greaseball wakes are quite an event. Anyway,
we'll be there."

"Tell the band to play 'My Funny Valentine,'" I said.

THAT EVENING I DROVE DOWN to Clete's
cottage outside
Jeanerette. He was washing his car in the side yard, rubbing a soapy
sponge over the hood.

"I think I'm going to get it restored, drive it around like a
classic instead of a junk heap," he said. He wore a pair of rubber
boots and oversized swimming trunks, and the hair on his stomach was
wet and plastered to his skin.

"Megan thinks the guys who did Ricky Scar might try to hurt
Holtzner by going through his daughter. She thinks you shouldn't let
her drive your car around," I said.

"When those guys want to pop somebody, they don't do it with
car bombs. It's one on one, like Ricky Scar got it."

"Have you ever listened to me once in your life about
anything?"

"On the perfecta that time at Hialeah. I lost three hundred
bucks."

"Archer Terrebonne killed Cisco Flynn's father. I told Cisco
that."

"Yeah, I know. He says he doesn't believe you." Clete moved
the sponge slowly back and forth on the car hood, his thoughts sealed
behind his face, the water from the garden hose sluicing down on his
legs.

"What's bothering you?" I asked.

"Terrebonne's a major investor in Cisco's film. If Cisco walks
out, his career's a skid mark on the bowl. I just thought he might have
more guts. I bet a lot of wrong horses."

He threw the bucket of soapy water into a drainage ditch. The
sun looked like a smoldering fire through the pine trees.

"You want to tell me what's really bothering you?" I said.

"I thought Megan and me might put it back together. That's why
I scrambled Ricky Scar's eggs, to look like big shit, that simple, mon.
Megan's life is international, I mean, all this local stuff is an
asterisk in her career." He blew his breath out. "I got to stop
drinking. I've got a buzz like a bad neon sign in my head."

"Let's put a line in the water," I said.

"Dave, those pictures Harpo Scruggs buried in the ground? That
dude's got backup material somewhere. Something that can put a thumb in
Terrebonne's eye."

"Yeah, but I can't find Scruggs. The guy's a master at going
in and out of the woodwork," I said.

"Remember what that retired Texas Ranger in El Paso told you?
About looking for him in cathouses and at pigeon shoots and dogfights?"

His skin was pink in the fading light, the hair on his
shoulders ruffling in the breeze.

"Dogfights? No, it was something else," I said.

THE COCKFIGHTS WERE HELD in St. Landry
Parish, in a huge,
rambling wood-frame nightclub, painted bright yellow and set back
against a stand of green hardwoods. The shell parking lot could
accommodate hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks, and the patrons
(blue-collar people, college students, lawyers, professional gamblers)
who came to watch the birds blind and kill each other with metal spurs
and slashers did so with glad, seemingly innocent hearts.

The pit was railed, enclosed with chicken wire, the dirt
hard-packed and sprinkled with sawdust. The rail, which afforded the
best view, was always occupied by the gamblers, who passed thousands of
dollars in wagers from hand to hand, with neither elation nor
resentment, as though the matter of exchanging currency were impersonal
and separate from the blood sport taking place below.

It was all legal. In Louisiana fighting cocks are classified
as fowl and hence are not protected by the laws that govern the
treatment of most animals. In the glow of the scrolled neon on the
lacquered yellow pine walls, under the layers of floating cigarette
smoke, in the roar of noise that raided windows, you could smell the
raw odor of blood and feces and testosterone and dried sweat and
exhaled alcohol that I suspect was very close to the mix of odors that
rose on a hot day from the Roman arena.

Clete and I sat at the end of the bar. The bartender, who was
a Korean War veteran named Harold who wore black slacks and a
short-sleeve white shirt and combed his few strands of black hair
across his pate, served Clete a vodka collins and me a Dr Pepper in a
glass filled with cracked ice. Harold leaned down toward me and put a
napkin under my glass.

"Maybe he's just late. He's always been in by seven-thirty,"
he said.

"Don't worry about it, Harold," I said.

"We gonna have a public situation here?" he said.

"Not a chance," Clete said.

We didn't have long to wait. Harpo Scruggs came in the side
door from the parking lot and walked to the rail around the cockpit. He
wore navy blue western-cut pants with his cowboy boots and hat, and a
silver shirt that tucked into his Indian-bead belt as tightly as tin.
He made a bet with a well-known cockfighter from Lafayette, a man who
when younger was both a pimp and a famous barroom dancer.

The cocks rose into the air, their slashers tearing feathers
and blood from each other's bodies, while the crowd's roar lifted to
the ceiling. A few minutes later one of the cocks was dead and Scruggs
gently pulled a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills from between the fingers
of the ex-pimp he had made his wager with.

"I think I'm experiencing Delayed Stress Syndrome. There was a
place just like this in Saigon. The bar girls were VC whores," Clete
said.

"Has he made us?" I asked.

"I think so. He doesn't rattle easy, does he? Oh-oh, here he
comes."

Scruggs put one hand on the bar, his foot on the brass rail,
not three feet from us.

"Has that worm talked to you yet?" he said to Harold.

"He's waiting right here for you," Harold said, and lifted a
brown bottle of mescal from under the bar and set it before Scruggs,
with a shot glass and a saucer of chicken wings and a bottle of Tabasco.

Scruggs took a twenty-dollar bill from a hand-tooled wallet
and inserted it under the saucer, then poured into the glass and drank
from it. His eyes never looked directly as us but registered our
presence in the same flat, lidless fashion an iguana's might.

"You got a lot of brass," I said to him.

"Not really. Since I don't think your bunch could drink piss
out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel," he replied.
He unscrewed the cork in the mescal bottle with a squeak and tipped
another shot into his glass.

"Some out-of-town hitters popped Ricky Scar. That means you're
out of the contract on Willie Broussard and you get to keep the front
money," I said.

"I'm an old man. I'm buying quarter horses to take back to
Deming. Why don't y'all leave me be?" he said.

"You use vinegar?" Clete said.

This time Scruggs looked directly at him. "Say again."

"You must have got it on your clothes. When you scrubbed the
gunpowder residue off after you smoked Alex Guidry. Those .357s leave
powder residue like you dipped your hand in pig shit," Clete said.

Scruggs laughed to himself and lit a cigarette and smoked it,
his back straight, his eyes focused on his reflection in the bar
mirror. A man came up to him, made a bet, and walked away.

"We found the photos you buried in the jar. We want the rest
of it," I said.

"I got no need to trade. Not now."

"We'll make the case on you eventually. I hear you've got a
carrot growing in your brain. How'd you like to spend your last days in
the jail ward at Charity?" I said.

He emptied the mescal bottle and shook the worm out of the
bottom into the neck. It was thick, whitish green, its skin hard and
leathery. He gathered it into his lips and sucked it into his mouth.
"Is it true the nurse's aides at Charity give blow jobs for five
dollars?" he asked.

Clete and I walked out into the parking lot. The air was cool
and smelled of the fields and rain, and across the road the sugarcane
was bending in the wind. I nodded to Helen Soileau and a St. Landry
Parish plainclothes who sat in an unmarked car.

An hour later Helen called me at the bait shop, where I was
helping Batist clean up while Clete ate a piece of pie at the counter.
Scruggs had rented a house in the little town of Broussard.

"Why's he still hanging around here?" I asked Clete.

"A greedy piece of shit like that? He's going to put a soda
straw in Archer Terrebonne's jugular."