[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

It was a place where Legion Guidry drank. Either before or after he
visited the crib next door.
The two men who sought him out were obviously not from the Atchafalaya
Basin. They wore sports coats and open-necked shirts, and although they were
dark-featured, their accents were not Cajun. They even seemed viscerally
repelled by the litter on the ground, the rusted cars in the undergrowth, the
smoldering pile of garbage behind the bar. When they entered the crib, which
was actually a tar paper-and-board shack, with a woodstove for heat and a
gasoline-powered generator for electricity, one of the black prostitutes rose
from the cot she was resting on and stared mutely at them, waiting for one of
them to produce a badge.
"Where's the guy belongs to that red truck out there?" one of the men
asked. He didn't look at her when he spoke. He had touched a doorknob with his
hand when he entered the shack, and he tore a square of paper towel from a
roll on the table by the prostitute's cot and wiped his palm and fingers with
it.
"That's Mr. Legion's truck," the woman said.
"I didn't ask you his name. I asked where he was," the man said, balling
up the paper towel in his hand, looking for a place to throw it.
The black woman wore a halter and a pair of shorts but felt naked in
Page 105
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
front of the two white men. Their hair was cut short, lightly oiled, neatly
combed, their clothes pressed, their shoes shined. They smelled of cologne and
had shaved late in the day. They had no sexual interest in her at all, not
even a mild curiosity.
"He ain't been here yet," she said.
"This is a waste of time," the second man said.
"He's not up at the bar and he's not here, but his truck is outside. Now,
you want to tell me where he is or you want us to walk you out in the trees?"
the first man said.
"Mr. Legion got a crab trap. He goes out in the bay and brings it back to
the bar and boils up some crabs for his dinner sometimes," the prostitute
replied.
"You never saw us, did you?" the first man said.
"I don't want no trouble, suh," she replied, then pulled at the bottom of
her shorts to straighten her underwear and dropped her eyes in shame when she
saw the looks the two men gave her.
The first man saw a bucket to throw the crumpled square of paper towel
in. But he looked in the bucket first and was so revolted by the contents, he
simply tossed the paper towel on the table and glanced around the room a last
time.
 Y all live here?" he said.
For the next hour the two men sat in the back of the bar, in the shadows, and
played gin rummy and drank a diet soda each and kept their score in pencil on
the back of a napkin. The drone of an outboard motor reverberated through a
flooded woods outside, then they heard the aluminum bottom of a boat scrape up
on land, and a moment later Legion Guidry came through the front door, a cage
trap dripping with blue-point crabs suspended from his fist.
He did not notice the visitors in the back of the bar. He went directly
behind the counter to a butane stove where a tall, stainless-steel cauldron
was boiling and shook the crabs from the trap into the water. Then he hooked
his hat on a wood peg and combed his hair in an oxidized mirror, lit an
unfiltered cigarette, and sat down at a table by himself while a mulatto woman
brought him a shot of whiskey and a beer on the side and a length of white
boudin in a saucer.
"Go tell Cleo I'm gonna be over in a half hour. Tell her I want a fresh
sheet, me," he said to the mulatto woman.
Then he turned and saw the two men in sports coats standing behind him.
"My name's Sonny Bilotti. Man in town wants to talk to you. We'll give
you a ride," one of them said. He wore a tan coat and a black shirt and
gold-rimmed glasses, and he adjusted the gold watchband on his wrist and
smiled slightly when he spoke.
Legion drew in on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke into the dead air.
The few people at the bar kept their faces averted, deliberately concentrating
on their drinks or the water dripping down the sides of the stainless-steel
cauldron into the butane flame. They glanced automatically at the screen door
each time it opened, as though the person entering the room were a harbinger
of change in their lives.
"I ain't seen no badge," Legion said.
"We don't need a badge for a friendly talk, do we?" said the man who
called himself Sonny Bilotti.
"I don't like nobody bothering me when I eat my dinner. Them crabs is
done near boiled. I'm fixing to eat now," Legion said.
"This guy's a beaut, isn't he? We met your girlfriend. She like crabs,
too?" the second man said.
"What you talkin' about?" Legion asked.
"Get up," the second man said. He had removed his coat and hung it on the
back of a chair. His arms were clean of tattoos, firm with the kind of muscle
tone that came from working out on machines at a health club. He placed one
hand under Legion's arm and sensed a power there he had underestimated, then
for the first time he looked directly into Legion's eyes.
Page 106
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
He released Legion's arm and reached for the automatic that was stuck
down in the back of his slacks. Perhaps for just a moment he felt he had
stepped into an improbable photograph that should have had nothing to do with
his life, a frozen moment involving a primitive barroom with plank floors,
ignorant people bent over their drinks, moonlit Spanish moss in the trees
outside the windows, a swamp coated with a patina of algae that was dissected
by the tracings of alligators and poisonous snakes.
The blackjack in Legion's hand crushed the cartilage in the man's nose
and filled his head with a red-black rush of pain that was like shards of
glass driven into the brain. He cupped his hands to the blood roaring from his
flattened nose and saw his friend Sonny Bilotti try to back away, to raise a
hand in protest, but Legion whipped the blackjack across Sonny's mouth, then
swung it across his jaw, breaking bone, and down on the crown of his skull and
across his neck and ears, until Sonny Bilotti was on his knees, whimpering,
his forehead bent to the floor, his butt in the air like a child's.
Legion picked up the sports coat from the chair where the second man had hung
it and wiped his blackjack on the cloth.
"This been fun. Tell Robicheaux to send me some more like y'all," he
said.
Then he dragged each man by his collar to the screen door and shoved him
with his boot into a pool of dirty water.
 But those guys weren't cops, were they?" Perry said.
"Who knows? Maybe they're out of New Orleans," I said.
"They sound like greaseballs?"
"Could be," I replied, looking up the slope at my house among the trees,
avoiding his stare.
"Why would greaseballs want to talk to Legion Guidry?"
"Ask him."
"I tried to. He was in my office this afternoon. He's convinced himself
we're writing a book together and he's in it. He thinks you sent these guys to
do him in and that maybe I helped you."
"That's the breaks," I said.
"Say again?"
"Who cares what he thinks? Why do you represent a cretin like that,
anyway?" I said.
"You're a police officer I have to get out of jail on a felony assault
and you call my other clients cretins?"
"Want to come in and have dinner?" I said.
"What's between you and Legion Guidry? Did you sic a couple of wiseguys
on him?"
"Adios," I said.
"I think your pet hippo, that character Purcel, he's mixed up in this,
too. Tell him I said that. While you're at it, tell him to keep his shit out
of Barbara Shanahan's life," he said.
I picked the newspaper up off the lawn and walked through the deepening [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]