In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (28 page)

      "It's on the house," he said.

      "It's my birthday?" I said.

      "You're a cop."

      "I'm a cop?"

      "It don't matter to me. I like having cops in. It keeps the riffraff out."

      "Why do you think I'm a cop, partner?"

      "Because I just went out back for a breath of air and Lou Girard was taking a leak on our banana trees. Tell Lou thanks a lot for me."

      So I gave it up and walked back outside into the humid night, the drift of dust off the dirt road, and the heat lightning that flickered silently over the Gulf.

      "I'm afraid it's a dud," I said to Lou through his car window. "I'm sorry to get you out for nothing."

      "Forget it. You want to get something to eat?"

      "No, I'd better head home."

      "This hooker, Amber, her full name is Amber Martinez. I heard she was getting out of the life. But I can pick her up for you."

      "No, I think somebody was just jerking me around."

      "Let me know if I can do anything, then."

      "All right. Thanks again. Goodnight, Lou."

      "Goodnight, Dave."

      I watched him drive around the side of the building and out onto the dirt street. Raindrops began to ping on the top of my truck.

      But maybe I was leaving too early, I thought. If the bartender had made Lou Girard, maybe the woman had, too.

      I went back inside. All the bar stools were empty. The bartender was rinsing beer mugs in a tin sink. He looked up at me.

      "She still ain't here. I don't know what else to tell you, buddy," he said.

      I put a quarter in the jukebox and played an old Clifton Chenier record,
Hey 'Tite Fille,
then I walked out onto the front steps. The rain was slanting across the neon glow of the Dixie beer sign and pattering in the ditches and on the shell parking lot. Across the street were two small frame houses, and next to them was a vacant lot with a vegetable garden and three dark oaks in it and an old white Buick parked in front. Then somebody turned on a light inside the house next to the lot, and I saw the silhouette of somebody in the passenger seat of the Buick. I saw the silhouette as clearly as if it had been snipped out of tin, and then I saw the light glint on a chrome or nickel-plated surface as brightly as a heliograph.

      The shots were muffled in the rain—
pop, pop,
like Chinese firecrackers under a tin can—but I saw the sparks fly out from the pistol barrel through the interior darkness of the Buick. The shooter had fired at an odd angle, across the seat and through the back window, but I didn't wait to wonder why he had chosen an awkward position to take a shot at me.

      I pulled the .45 from under my shirt, dropped to my knees behind the bumper of a pickup truck, and began firing with both hands extended in front of me. I let off all eight rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. The roar was deafening, like someone had slapped both his palms violently against my eardrums. The hollow-points exploded the glass out of the Buick's windows, cored holes like a cold chisel through the doors,
whanged
off the steering wheel and dashboard, and blew the horn button like a tiddly-wink onto the hood.

      The slide locked open on the empty magazine, and the last spent casing tinkled on the flattened beer cans at my feet. I stood erect, still in the lee of the pickup truck, slipped the empty magazine out of the .45's butt, inserted a fresh one, and eased a round into the chamber. The street was quiet except for the pattering of the rain in the ditches. Then I heard a siren in the distance and the bar door opening behind me.

      "What the fuck's going on?" the bartender said, his whole body framed in the light. "You fucking crazy or something?"

      "Get back inside," I said.

      "We never had trouble here. Where the fuck are you from? People lose licenses because of bullshit like this."

      "Do you want to get shot?"

      He slammed the door shut, locked it, and pulled the blinds.

      I started across the street just as an electrical short in the Buick caused the horn to begin blowing non-stop. I kept the .45 pointed with both hands at the Buick's windows and moved in a circle around the front of the car. No one was visible above the level of the windows nor was there any movement inside. The hollow-points had cut exit holes the size of half-dollars in the passenger door.

      A Lafayette city police car came hard around the corner, its emergency lights whirling in the rain. The police car stopped twenty yards from the Buick and both front doors sprang open. I could see the cop in the passenger's seat pulling his pump shotgun out of its vertical mount on the dashboard. I got my badge holder out of my back pocket and held it high over my head.

      "Lay your weapon on the ground and step back from the car," the driver said, aiming his revolver at me between the door and the jamb.

      I held my right arm at a ninety-degree angle, the barrel pointing into the sky.

      "I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said. "I'm complying with your request."

      I crouched in the beam of their headlights, laid my .45 by the front tire of the Buick, and raised back up again.

      "Step away from it," the driver said.

      "You got it," I said, and almost lost my balance in the rain ditch.

      "Walk this way. Now," the driver said.

      People were standing on their front porches and the rain was coming down harder in big drops that stung my eyes. I kept my badge turned outward toward the two Lafayette city cops.

      "I've identified myself. Now how about jacking it down a couple of notches?" I said.

      The cop with the shotgun pulled my badge holder out of my hand and looked at it. Then he flexed the tension out of his shoulders, made a snuffing sound in his nose, and handed me back my badge.

      "What the hell's going on?" he said.

      "Somebody took two shots at me. In that Buick. I think maybe he's still inside."

      They both looked at each other.

      "You're saying the guy's still in there?" the driver said.

      "I didn't see him go anywhere."

      "Fuck, why didn't you say so?"

      I didn't get a chance to answer. Just then, Lou Girard pulled abreast of the police car and got out in the rain.

      "Damn, Dave, I thought you'd gone home. What happened?"

      "Somebody opened up on me," I said.

      "You know this guy?" the cop with the shotgun said.

      "Hell, yes, I do. Put your guns away. What's wrong with you guys?" Lou said.

      "Lou, the shooter fired at me twice," I said. "I put eight rounds into the Buick. I think he's still in there."

      "What?" he said, and ripped his .357 from his belt holster. Then he said to the two uniformed cops, "What have you fucking guys been doin' out here?"

      "Hey, Lou, come on. We didn't know who this—"

      "Shut up," he said, walked up to the Buick, looked inside, then jerked open the passenger door. The interior light went on.

      "What is it?" the cop with the shotgun said.

      Lou didn't answer. He replaced his revolver in his holster and reached down with his right hand and felt something on the floor of the automobile.

      I walked toward him. "Lou?" I said.

      His hands felt around on the seat of the car, then he stepped back and studied the ground and the weeds around his feet as though he were looking for something.

      "Lou?"

      "She's dead, Dave. It looks like she caught one right through the mouth."

     
"She?"
I said. I felt the blood drain from my heart.

      "You popped Amber Martinez," he said.

      I started forward and he caught my arm. The headlights of the city police car were blinding in the rain. He pulled me past the open passenger door, and I saw a diminutive woman in an embryonic position, a white thigh through a slit in a cocktail dress, a mat of brown hair that stuck wetly to the floor carpet.

      Our faces were turned in the opposite direction from the city cops'. Lou's mouth was an inch from my ear. I could smell cigarettes, bourbon, and mints on his breath.

      "Dave, there's no fucking gun," he whispered hoarsely.

      "I saw the muzzle flashes. I heard the reports."

      "It's not there. I got a throw-down in my glove compartment. Tell me to do it."

      I stared woodenly at the two uniformed cops, who stood in hulking silhouette against their headlights like gargoyles awaiting the breath of life.

Chapter 13

T
he sheriff called me personally at 5 A.M. the next morning so there would be no mistake about my status with the department: I was suspended without pay. Indefinitely.

      It was 7 A.M. and already hot and muggy when Rosie Gomez and I pulled up in front of Red's Bar in her automobile. The white Buick was still parked across the street. The bar was locked, the blinds closed, the silver sides of the house-trailer entrance creaking with heat.

We walked back and forth in front of the building, feeling dents in the tin, scanning the improvised rain gutters, even studying the woodwork inside the door jamb.

      "Could the bullets have struck a car or the pickup truck you took cover behind?" she said.

      "Maybe. But I didn't hear them."

      She put her hands on her hips and let her eyes rove over the front of the bar again. Then she lifted her hair off the back of her neck. There was a sheen of sweat above the collar of her blouse.

      "Well, let's take a look at the Buick before they tow it out of here," she said.

      "I really appreciate your doing this, Rosie."

      "You'd do the same for me, wouldn't you?"

      "Who knows?"

      "Yeah, you would." She punched me on the arm with her little fist.

      We walked across the dirt street to the Buick. On the other side of the vacant lot I could hear freight cars knocking together. I opened all four doors of the Buick and began throwing out the floor mats, tearing up the carpet, raking trash out from under the seats while Rosie hunted in the grass along the rain ditch.

      Nothing.

      I sat on the edge of the backseat and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. I felt tired all over and my hands were stiff and hard to open and close. In fact, I felt just like I had a hangover. I couldn't keep my thoughts straight, and torn pieces of color kept floating behind my eyes.

      "Dave, listen to me," she said. "What you say happened is what happened. Otherwise you would have taken up your friend on his offer."

      "Maybe I should have."

      "You're not that kind of cop. You never will be, either."

      I didn't answer.

      "What'd your friend call it?" she asked.

      "A 'throw-down.' Sometimes cops call it a 'drop.' It's usually a .22 or some other piece of junk with the registration numbers filed off." I got up off the seat and popped the trunk. Inside, I found a jack handle. I drove the tapered end into the inside panel of the back door on the driver's side.

      "What are you doing?" Rosie said.

      I ripped the paneling away to expose the sliding frame and mechanism on which the window glass had been mounted.

      "Let me show you something," I said and did the same to the inside panel on the driver's door. "See, both windows on this side of the car were rolled partially up. That's why my first rounds blew glass all over the place."

      "Yes?"

      "Why would the shooter try to fire through a partially opened window?"

      "Good question."

      I walked around to the passenger side of the Buick. The carpet had a dried brown stain in it, and a roach as long and thick as my thumb was crawling across the stiffened fibers.

      "But
this
window is all the way down," I said. "That doesn't make any sense. It had already started to rain. Why would this woman sit by an open window in the rain, particularly in the passenger seat of her own car?"

      "It's registered to Amber Martinez?"

      "That's right. According to Lou Girard, she was a hooker trying to get out of the life. She also did speedballs and was ninety pounds soaking wet. Does that sound like a hit artist to you?"

      "Then why was she in the car? What was she doing here?"

      "I don't know."

      "What did the homicide investigator have to say last night?"

      "He said, 'A .45 sure does leave a hole, don't it?' "

      "What else?"

      "He said, 'Did you have to come over to Lafayette to fall in the shithouse?' "

      "Look at me," she said.

      "What?"

      "How much sleep did you get last night?"

      "Two or three hours."

      I threw the tire iron on the front seat of the Buick.

      "What do you feel now?" she said.

      "What do you mean?" I was surprised at the level of irritation in my voice.

      "You
know
what I mean."

      My eyes burned and filmed in the haze. I saw the three oaks in the vacant lot go out of focus, as though I were looking at them inside a drop of water.

      "Everyone thinks I killed an unarmed woman. What do you think I feel?" I said. I had to swallow when I said it.

      "It was a setup, Dave. We both know it."

      "If it was, what happened to the gun? Why aren't there any holes in the bar?"

      "Because the guy behind this is one smart perp. He got a woman, probably a chippy, to make calls to your dispatcher to give the impression your fly was open, then he got you out of your jurisdiction and involved you in another hooker's death. I think this guy's probably a master at control."