Part 5 (1/2)

”I go, 'How about a drink? Or something to eat?'

”She looks over my shoulder and sees the security guys coming for us. Then she looks all around for her friends, but she'd already lost them in the crowd. She goes, 'I'm up s.h.i.+t's Creek, handsome. Can you get us out of here?' My big-boy started flipping around in my slacks, like it had gone on autopilot and was trying to break out of jail.”

Molly shut the kitchen window.

”Sorry,” Clete said.

”What happened?” I asked.

”She said her name is Trish Klein. She says you and her old man were buds. She says you were there when some guys took his head off with a shotgun.”

I stared through the trees at the bayou, trying to a.s.similate Clete's story and connect it with the other information I had on Dallas Klein's daughter. But Clete wasn't finished. ”This morning an FBI broad knocked on my door. Her name is Betsy Mossbacher and she's got a king-size broom up her a.s.s. The Feds had a tail on Trish Klein last night, and now they've connected me with her and you with me. What's this bulls.h.i.+t about, Dave?”

”You're getting it on with grifters now?”

”Don't change the subject.”

”I knew Trish Klein's father in Miami. He was a guard on an armored truck. He owed money to some wiseguys and I think they made him give up the truck's schedule. They cleaned the slate when they boosted the truck. I think Trish Klein is here on a vendetta. The Feds think she was mixed up in taking down a savings and loan in Mobile that was a laundry operation for the Mob.”

His big arms were propped on his knees, his face pointed straight ahead. But I could tell he was thinking about the girl now and not about her father.

”You were in the sack with her?” I asked.

”I wish. Do I look old, Dave? Tell me the truth,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine.

Chapter.

5.

I F YOU EVER BECOME a low-bottom boozer, you will learn that the safest places to drink, provided you know the rules, are blue-collar saloons, pool halls, hillbilly juke joints, and blind pigs where two thirds of the clientele have rap sheets.

Upscale hotel bars and Dagwood-and-Blondie lounges in the suburbs have a low tolerance for drunks and shut you down or call security before you can get seriously in the bag. When you drink in a rat hole, you can get s.h.i.+t-faced out of your mind and not be molested as long as you understand that the critical issue is respect for people's privacy. Marginalized people don't want confrontation. Violence for them means life-threatening injuries, bail bond fees, fines paid at guilty court, and loss of work. It could also mean a trip back to a work camp or a mainline joint. They couldn't care less about your opinion of them. They just ask that you not violate their boundaries or pretend you understand the dues they have paid.

In New Iberia, most of the dope is sold on inner-city street corners by g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers. At dusk they a.s.semble in dirt yards or in front of boarded-up shacks, their caps on backward, sometimes wearing gang colors, and wait for pa.s.sing cars to slow by the curb. They're territorial, armed, street-smart, and dangerous if pushed into a corner. Most of them do not know who their fathers are and have sentimental attachments to their grandmothers. Oddly, few of them expect to do mainline time. None of them will deliberately challenge authority. Most important of all, none of them has any desire to become involved with respectable society, except on a business level.

But Tony Lujan and a friend knew none of these things about marginal people or chose to ignore them on Monday afternoon, when they decided to stop at the McDonald's on East Main, far from the black neighborhood where a dealer by the name of Monarch Little sold crystal meth and rock and sometimes brown skag to all comers, curb service free.

Monarch had a thick pink tongue that caused him to lisp, a gnarled forehead, and skin whose s.h.i.+ny pigmentation made me think of a walrus. He wore two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes with gas cus.h.i.+ons in the soles, the stylized baggy pants of a professional weight lifter, and a huge ball cap turned sideways on his head, which, along with a washtub stomach and the shower of brown moles on his face, gave him the harmless appearance of a cartoon character.

But in a street beef, with nines, shanks, or Molotovs, Monarch did not take prisoners. As a teenager he had been in juvie three times, once for setting fire to the house of a city cop who had felt up his sister in the backseat of a cruiser. He marked his eighteenth birthday by shoving a pimp in the face and watching him tumble down a staircase. The pimp's brother, a human mastodon who had once torn a parking meter out of concrete and thrown it through a saloon window, put out the word he was going to cook Monarch in a pot. The pimp's brother caught four nine-millimeter rounds in the chest from a drive-by while he was watering his gra.s.s on Easter morning.

Monday afternoon the lawns of the Victorian and antebellum homes along East Main were sprinkled with azalea bloom. Great bluish-purple clumps of wisteria hung from the trellised entrances to terraced gardens that sloped down to Bayou Teche. The wind ruffled the canopy of oaks that arched over the street; the air was balmy and smelled of salt and warm flowers and the promise of rain. Monarch, with two of his cohorts, pulled into McDonald's and parked his Firebird next to an SUV, in the shade of a live oak tree. He went inside and ordered a bag of hamburgers and cartons of fries while his two friends listened to the stereo, the speakers pounding so loudly the window gla.s.s in other vehicles vibrated.

Tony Lujan sat in the pa.s.senger seat of the SUV, spooning frozen yogurt into his mouth. His friend, the driver, was darkly handsome, his cheeks sunken, his lips thick and sensuous, his hair growing in locks on his neck. He was dressed in black leather pants, a black vest, and a long-sleeved striped s.h.i.+rt, like a nineteenth-century gunfighter might wear.

”How about it on the Tupac?” he shouted at the black kids in the Firebird, at the same time flinging his half-eaten hamburger over the top of the SUV at a garbage can.

”Easy, Slim,” Tony said, his eyes raising from his frozen yogurt.

The hamburger's trajectory was short. Half of a bun glazed across the Firebird's hood, stippling it with mustard.

Monarch had just walked out the front door of the McDonald's. He paused on the walkway, his bag of food in one hand, and fingered the skin under his neck chains. He walked to the driver's window of the SUV. ”You just t'rew baby s.h.i.+t on my ride,” he said.

”It was an accident,” Tony said, leaning forward in the pa.s.senger seat so Monarch could see his face. He dipped his fingers into his s.h.i.+rt pocket and removed a five and a one. He extended the money toward Monarch. ”It's six bucks at the car wash up on Lewis Street.”

But the driver took Tony's extended wrist in his hand and moved it and the money back from the window. ”You said 'baby thit'?” the driver asked Monarch, unable to suppress a laugh.

Monarch picked a leaf off his arm and watched it blow away in the wind. He pinched the saliva from the corners of his mouth and looked at the wetness on his fingers, then glanced at the university sticker on the back window. ”You going to colletch?”

”Colletch? Yeah, man, that's us,” the driver said. ”Look, I'd really like to talk to you, but unless you dial down Snoopy Dog Dump or whatever, we're going to have to boogie, because right now I feel like somebody poured cement in my ears. How do you listen to that c.r.a.p, anyway?”

”The mustard on my 'Bird need somebody to clean it off, not at no car wash, either,” Monarch said.

”Look, this is from the heart, okay?” Tony Lujan's friend said. ”That lisp you got probably isn't a speech defect. It's because you've got damaged hearing. You p.r.o.nounce words the way you hear them, and you hear them incorrectly because you've blown out your eardrums listening to guys whose biggest talent is grabbing their d.i.c.ks in front of an MTV camera.”

Monarch tilted up his chin and ma.s.saged his throat. The moles on his face looked as hard and s.h.i.+ny as almonds. His stomach rose and fell under his s.h.i.+rt; his eyes seemed to grow sleepy. He reached down into his bag of hamburgers and fries and removed a wadded-up handful of paper napkins. Then he proceeded to wipe the mustard off his car hood, his expression flat, even yawning while he cleaned the last yellow smear off the paint.

He opened his door to get back in the Firebird, the edge of the door touching the side of the SUV.

”That d.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.r,” Tony's friend said.

”Say what?” Monarch said.

”Cool it, Slim. The guy's not worth it,” Tony said to his friend.

Monarch reached inside his Firebird, gathered an object in his hand, and dropped it in his pocket. Then he turned around and opened the pa.s.senger door of the SUV. ”Both of y'all out on the pave,” he said.

”You don't want to do this, man,” Tony said.

”If a n.i.g.g.e.r scratch your 'sheen, we gotta check it out, call the insurance man, make sure everyt'ing get done right,” Monarch said.

Tony's friend was already coming around the front of the SUV. ”Hey, man, I told you we don't understand jungle drums. Can you translate ''sheen' for me?” He started laughing. ”I'm sorry, man, you ever see those Tweety Bird cartoons? You sound just like him. I ain't dissing you. It's cool. You could turn it into a nightclub act. It's like Tweety Bird married Meat Loaf and they had a kid.”

”That mean your 'machine,' see, and the reason I knowed you was going to colletch was I seen this 'sheen before, down on Ann Street, when you and a UL girl was scoring some Ex. See, we knowed who the UL girl was 'cause she was balling down the line long before she was balling you. Except none of us would ball her anymore 'cause of her gonorrhea. One guy still lets her give him head, but he say it ain't very good.”

The street was quiet except for the rustle of the wind, a plastic cup rattling in the parking lot.

”Slim can hurt you, man,” Tony said.

Monarch's right thumb was hooked on the edge of his pants pocket, his knuckles like pale quarters under his skin. His eyes s.h.i.+fted sideways, out toward the street. His hand worked its way into his pocket and Tony Lujan involuntarily stepped back. Monarch smiled and lifted his car keys jingling from his pocket. ”Is that where I hit it, that li'l line in the dust?” he said, examining the SUV's door.

He rubbed away the dirt and then dug a bronze-colored key into the paint, peeling it back in a long curlicue, cutting through the primer, exposing a s.h.i.+ny strip of metal. His face clouded with concern. ”No, that ain't where I hit it. It was just a smudge in the dirt. Or maybe I ain't hit it at all. What y'all t'ink?”

He raked a long silver line across the first one, forming an X, then straightened up and blew his nose softly into a Kleenex. No one had moved. While Monarch had vandalized the SUV, one of his cohorts had squirmed bare-chested through a window on the pa.s.senger side of the Firebird and had positioned himself on the window jamb, his underwear bunched on his stomach, a black bandanna tied down tightly on his scalp. In his right hand was a semiautomatic that he held flatly against the roof, the muzzle pointed at Tony Lujan and his friend Slim.