A Morning for Flamingos (20 page)

“I’m going in on the swell,” I said. “Get ready.”

Two deckhands came out of the wheelhouse and stood by the gunwales in the rain and wind. They were unshaved, and their black hair and beards dripped with water. I came in on the lee side of the shrimper, gunning the engine in the trough, and bumped against the row of tires that were hung along the hull. Lionel grabbed the rope ladder, pushed himself with one foot off the handrail of the jugboat, and scampered on board the shrimper, the aluminum suitcase banging across the gunwale with him.

“What are you going to do with all your money, Mr. Robicheaux?” Fontenot said. He had a lit cigarette cupped on his knee, and he was looking out indifferently at the glaze of light from the shrimp boat on the water.

“Why is it I get the feeling you’re not interested in the questions you ask other people?” I said.

“Oh, forgive me, good sir, if I ever convey that impression. That would be a terrible sense to give someone, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m going back through Atchafalaya Bay, not to Cocodrie. I can put you guys ashore at several places. You tell me where.”

“Not to Cocodrie? But our car is there,” he said. And he said it in a whimsical manner, his eyes still fascinated with the patches of yellow light on the waves.

“I think it’s smart to off-load in a different spot. I told Tony I’ve got the access he needs, a couple of bayous nobody uses except in a pirogue.”

“I’m sure he’ll be intrigued.”

I looked at the side of his face in the glow of the instrument lights. Then I saw the color in his eyes brighten and the corner of his mouth twitch in a grin when he realized that I was staring at him.

“Excuse me if I don’t bubble up at the perfection of it all,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s my fate to simply be an old mule. But Tony will love a tour through the bayous. You two can talk about ‘nape.’”

I continued to stare at him.

“What are you wondering, kind sir?” he said.

“Why he keeps you guys around.”

“We don’t measure up, do we? Listen, you lovely boy, we take the risks but Tony gets the big end of the candy cane. Some might think he’s done very well by us. Would you like to jump between boats like Lionel just did? I don’t think Tony would.”

“My impression is the guy can handle the action.”

“Oh, you must tell him that. He loves that kind of big-dick talk.”

“I don’t know what’s bugging you, Fontenot, but I think this is our last run together,” I said.

“You can never tell,” he said, and grinned again and puffed on his cigarette in the luminescence of the instrument panel.

Ten minutes passed, and I kept the jugboat steady in the trough so it wouldn’t slam up against the hull of the shrimper. Through the rain I could see the silhouettes of several people in the wheelhouse. Then I saw Lionel talking, but his face was turned toward the front glass, not toward the people around him. I squinted hard through the rain.

“He’s talking on the shortwave,” I said.

“Who?”

“Lionel. What’s going on, Fontenot?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me that. Why’s the man on the radio?”

“I don’t know. You think he’s calling the Coast Guard? Use your judgment, sir.”

“Fontenot, if you guys—”

“I’m not up to any more words of assurance tonight, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t believe you belong in our business, to tell you the truth. It isn’t the Rotary Club. It isn’t made up of nice people. I’ve grown a bit weary of you wrinkling your nose at us.”

The two deckhands carried two wooden crates out of the forward hatch and set them inside a cargo net that was slung from a boom. Lionel stepped out of the wheelhouse and waved for me to bring the jugboat alongside again. I waited until the shrimper dipped into the trough, then bumped up against the row of tires. When both boats rose with the swell, Lionel sprang from the shrimper onto my deck. His jeans and denim shirt and canvas life preserver were dark with rain.

One of the deckhands operated the motor on the boom and swung the cargo net out over the jugboat, letting the net collapse in a tangle, with the two crates inside, on the deck. Lionel pulled the crates free, and I put the engine in reverse and backed away from the side of the shrimper. The empty cargo net swung out in open space and cut through the tops of the waves.

I shifted the engine forward again and turned the bow toward the southern horizon.

“I’m going to help him stow it,” I said. “Hold the wheel and keep it pointed into the waves. The throttle’s set, so you don’t need to touch it.”

“Really, now?” Fontenot said.

Outside, the rain was cold and stung my face and hands, and the waves broke hard on the bow and blew back across the deck in a salty spray. I unlocked the forward gear box and lifted one of the wooden crates inside. It was heavy, and the sides were stamped with the name of a South American cannery. Lionel swung the second crate up on the edge of the gear box.

“What were you doing on the radio?” I said.

“What?” He wore long underwear buttoned at the throat under his denim shirt, but he was shivering with the cold.

“You heard me.”

“I wasn’t on the radio.”

“You had the mike in your hand, partner.”

He wiped the water out of his eyes, then focused on my face again.

“Maybe I got a weather report. Maybe I moved it to pick up my coffee cup. Maybe you need glasses.” He dropped the crate on top of the first one. “It doesn’t matter. Tony C. cut you in as a favor. If you want to know, the weight and quality are right. You got a sweet deal, man. I don’t think you deserve it.”

He flipped the top of the gear box shut and walked away toward the pilothouse, balancing himself against the roll of the deck.

It had stopped raining, but the fog was thick and white on the water and I could hardly see the bow of the jugboat.

“This stuff will probably start to lift with first light,” I said. “When we come out of it, I’m going to turn northwest for Atchafalaya Bay. Where do you guys want to go ashore?”

Lionel was looking out into the fog through the front glass. His eyes were narrowed and red-rimmed with fatigue.

“Where do y’all want me to put you off?” I repeated.

We passed a shut-down oil platform. The waves were black and streaked with oil as they slid through the steel pilings.

Still neither Lionel nor Fontenot answered me. Then I heard a boat engine out in the fog before I saw its running lights. Fontenot looked up from his cup of coffee. I turned to port, away from the sound of the engine, just as the hull of a thirty-foot white cabin cruiser came out of the fogbank. I could see the silhouette of a solitary figure at the wheel. I turned to look again at Lionel and Fontenot, as though all the frames in a strip of film negatives had suddenly made sense, and I guess my right hand was already moving toward the .25-caliber Beretta strapped to my ankle, but it was too late. Lionel had taken a nine-millimeter automatic from the canvas carry-on bag at his foot, and he placed the iron sight hard behind my ear. His free hand went down my right leg and pulled the Beretta from its holster.

“Cut the engine,” he said.

I didn’t move.

“It’s not a time for thought,” he said.

I heard his thumb cock the hammer. I turned off the ignition switch, and we drifted sideways with the waves and dipped down breathlessly into a trough.

“Oops,” Fontenot said, and his mouth made an O inside the yellow hood of his raincoat.

“Go forward and throw out the anchor, Ray,” Lionel said. “We’ll swing tight against the rope, and he can come around and tie on the stern.”

“I think we’re doing it the hard way,” Fontenot said.

“It’s the way he wants it. I ain’t arguing with him.”

“The tropics beckon, Lionel. We don’t want to waste time out here.”

“Tell him that. The guy’s got a hard-on about our man here. It’s like talking to a vacant lot.”

Fontenot got up from his chair and made his way along the deck, holding on to the rail. His yellow raincoat glistened in the turning fog. I heard the clank of the chain and the X-shaped welded pieces of railroad track that I used for an anchor as he pitched them off the bow. The jugboat swung with the incoming tide toward the coast and straightened against the anchor rope. The cabin cruiser idled past us, then turned in a circle and came up astern. It was a Larson, built for speed and comfort, its paint as white and flawless as enamel.

“I want you to know something before all this goes down,” Lionel said.

I started to turn my head toward him. He nudged the automatic against my ear.

“No, keep your eyes straight ahead,” he said. “I want you to know it’s not personal. I don’t like ex-cops, I don’t think they should have ever let you in on a buy, but that’s got nothing to do with this. We’ve been somebody’s fuck too long, it’s time we got what’s ours. You just came along at a real bad time.”

I heard the engine of the cabin cruiser die; then somebody threw a knotted rope from the bow onto the roof of the jugboat’s pilot-house.

“That other thing,” he said, “that other thing I didn’t have anything to do with.”

From the direction of his voice I could tell that he was now looking toward the stern.

“What other thing?” I said.

Then his voice came back toward the side of my face: “Are you kidding, man? You were taking the guy up to Angola to fry. What do you think a guy like that feels about you? I’m sorry for you, man, but I got nothing to do with it.”

I didn’t care about the pistol behind my ear now. I turned woodenly in the pilot’s seat and looked up at the bobbing, moored bow of the cabin cruiser. As Tee Beau had said, Jimmie Lee Boggs had cut his hair short and dyed it black, but every other detail about him was as though he had walked out of a familiar dream: the mannequinlike head, the pallid skin, the lips that looked like they were rouged, the spearmint-green eyes with a strange light in them.

He wore rubber-soled canvas shoes, dungarees, a heavy blue wool shirt with wide gray suspenders, and when he stepped from the cabin cruiser onto the back rail of the jugboat and grabbed Ray Fontenot’s hand, his forearm corded with muscle and his stomach looked as flat and hard as boiler plate.

He put one hand on the edge of the pilothouse’s roof and leaned over me. Salt spray dripped from his face, and I could smell snuff on his breath.

“Been thinking of me?” he asked.

“I thought maybe you couldn’t find us,” Fontenot said. “It’s thick out there.”

“Lionel told me on the radio y’all would be coming past an oil platform,” Boggs said. “I just lay south of the rig and listened for your engine. This thing sounds like a garbage truck.”

Then Boggs looked down at me again. I still sat in the pilot’s seat. His wrists looked as thick as sticks of firewood.

“This guy give you any trouble?” he said.

“Not really,” Fontenot said. He had removed his raincoat and was putting on a life jacket.

“You guys get the stuff on board. I’ll take care of it here,” Boggs said. He took the nine-millimeter from Lionel’s hand.

Fontenot cleared his throat. “We wonder if you… if we really need to do that, Jimmie Lee,” he said.

“You got a problem with it?” Boggs said.

“The man isn’t likely to call the law,” Fontenot said.

“You got that right,” Boggs said.

“I don’t see the percentage,” Fontenot said. “Right now we’re simply transferring some product. Why complicate it?”

“I ain’t telling you what to think, Jimmie Lee,” Lionel said, “but the guy’s not going to do anything. He’s a fired cop, a drunk. He tries to make any trouble later, you can have him hit for five hundred bucks.”

“I don’t pay to clip a guy. Besides, you did a guy with a piano wire, Lionel. Why you giving me this bullshit?”

“I got out of it, too. I don’t want to go that route anymore,” Lionel said. “Look, he’s an amateur. You let the amateurs slide, Jimmie Lee. You whack out an amateur, their families make a lot of trouble.”

Lionel blew out his breath. The fog was white and so thick you could lose your hand in it as it rolled off the water and across the deck.

“I don’t want to have to lose my piece. I just bought it,” he said.

“Get the coke on board and bring me the shotgun. It’s clipped under the forward hatch,” Boggs said.

“You guys got to deal with Tony,” I said to Lionel and Fontenot.

“Good try, prick, but Tony’s history. He just don’t know it yet,” Boggs said.

“Sorry, Mr. Robicheaux,” Fontenot said. Then he looked at Lionel and said, “See no evil.”

The two of them started up the deck toward the forward gear box, where the two crates of cocaine were stowed. I was sweating heavily inside my clothes, and my breath was coming irregularly in my chest. The jugboat dipped in the ground swell, and the barrel of the automatic touched the side of my head like a kiss.

“I’ll say it once, and you guys can believe it or not,” I said. The front glass of the pilothouse was pushed ajar, and they could hear me out on the deck. “I’m still a cop. I’m undercover for the DEA. We’re on Coast Guard radar right now.”

I saw Lionel and Fontenot stop and turn around. The fog drifted across their bodies like strips of torn cotton. They started back toward the pilothouse.

“It’s all a sting,” I said. “Minos Dautrieve’s been running it from the start. You know who Minos Dautrieve is, right?”

Boggs’s fingers laced in my hair; then he slammed my head forward on the instrument panel. I felt the skin split above my right eye, and the blood and the salt water leaked down across my eyelid.

“Hold on, listen to him,” Fontenot said.

“You guys rattle too easy,” Boggs said.

“Dautrieve’s a narc out of Lafayette,” Lionel said.

“So he knows that,” Boggs said.

“Clete Purcel is DEA undercover, too,” I said. “You clip me, he’ll even the score. Ask anybody in New Orleans. Check out what he did to Julio Segura.”

Boggs held the automatic by the barrel and raked it across my mouth as though he were wielding a hammer. My bottom lip burst against my teeth, and a socket of pain raced deep into my throat and up into my nose. I leaned forward on the wheel with my mouth open, as though my jaws had become unhinged, while a long string of blood and saliva dripped between my legs.