DR07 - Dixie City Jam (47 page)

'Read them.' I could hear my own breath in the phone. I wrote
the numbers down as he read them off. 'Those are the coordinates for
that Nazi sub, Ben. You check with
The Times-Picayune
,
you'll find Clete ran that ad.'

'I don't get it.'

'Buchalter kidnapped Martina and forced Clete to find out
where I'd seen the sub. I gave him the coordinates. But it took a
couple of days for the ad to come out. Look, we need to get a boat or a
chopper out there.'

'Call your own department.'

'We don't have anything available.'

'You think I can snap my fingers on Saturday afternoon and
come up with a boat or a helicopter? We don't have jurisdiction out on
the salt, anyway.'

'You don't understand. I left a message on Clete's machine. I
told him Martina's all right. As soon as he retrieves the message, you
know where he's headed.'

'So let him light up the fun house. It's what Purcel does
best.'

'He might lose, too. I need a boat.'

'You won't get it from me this weekend.'

'Motley—'

'It's
Motley
now? Why don't you call
Nate Baxter? See what kind of help you get.'

I started back home, It was getting dark now, and the palm
trees along the highway were beating in the wind, the rain spinning in
my headlights. It would take me at least four and a half hours to reach
New Iberia, then another seven, maybe more, with the bad weather, to
get my boat down Bayou Teche and into the gulf south of Grand Isle.

I pulled into a filling station by the Pearl River and called
Lucinda Bergeron's house. The gum trees around the phone booth were
green and brightly lit by the filling station's signs, and the leaves
were ripping like paper in the wind.

'Zoot?'

'Hey, Mr. Dave, what's happenin'?'

'Where's your mom?'

'She ain't here. Something wrong?'

'I've got to get ahold of her. I need a boat.'

'She went to the grocery. What kind of boat you looking for?'

'A fast one,' I said.

'You ax the right man.'

'Oh?'

'I tole you at your house. But you wasn't listening real good,
remember? I worked on all kinds of boats.'

'Who owns this boat, Zoot?'

'A man who don't mind lending it, I promise. When you coming?'

An hour and a half later I parked the truck at a boatyard way
out in Jefferson Parish. It had quit raining; and the sky was dark, and
water was dripping off the tin shed where Zoot waited in a cabin
cruiser with the interior lights on. I took my Japanese field glasses
from the glove compartment, then unlocked the iron box welded to the
bed of my pickup and removed my old army field jacket and the AR-15 and
my Remington twelve-gauge with the barrel sawed off right in front of
the pump that I had wrapped in a canvas duffel bag. I dropped a box of
.223 rounds and a box of double-ought buckshot into the bag and pulled
the drawstring. When I walked out onto the dock under the shed I saw
that Zoot wasn't alone.

'Hello, Lucinda,' I said, stepping down into the boat.

She was dressed in jeans, a purple sweater, and a nylon NOPD
windbreaker. Zoot fixed his attention on the clearing sky, tapping his
palms on the wheel, whistling quietly.

'What would you like to hear from me first?' she said.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You call my house and ask a seventeen-year-old to provide a
boat for you?' she said.

'Believe what you want, Lucinda. I'm not up to an argument
tonight.'

'You were willing to bring a minor and civilian into a
potentially dangerous situation? With no consultation with anyone else?'

'I couldn't get a boat from Motley. I don't have time to go
back to New Iberia. You think it's right Purcel may be out there by
himself?'

'I can't quite tell you how angry I am,' she said.

'Then why'd you let him come?'

She didn't answer. I lowered my voice. 'Maybe nobody's out
there. Maybe I should have waited for you to come home. Maybe I should
have gone back to New Iberia,' I said. 'I did what I thought was best.'

I waited. Her arms were folded across her chest, her hands
cupped on her elbows. I looked at Zoot, and he turned over the engines
and backed us out of the slip. The wind was cool and damp and smelled
of salt and dead gars that had been hit by boat propellers. Lights
flickered across the clouds in the south.

We headed down Bayou St. Denis. It was a beautiful boat,
custom-built with teakwood and mahogany panels in the cabin, brightwork
that had the soft glow of butter, wide beds down below, sonar, a pump
toilet, a small galley, and twin two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude
outboard engines that could hit fifty knots. When we entered Barataria
Bay, Zoot tried to open her up.

'The chop's too heavy. You're going to beat us to death,
partner,' I said.

The glass was beaded with the spray off the bow. The moon had
broken from behind the clouds, and our wake glistened behind us like a
long brown and silver trough. Zoot wore a black knitted cap rolled up
on top of his head and chewed on a matchstick. When he eased back on
the throttle, I saw the two ignition wires wrapped together and
swinging loose at the bottom of the instrument panel.

'What kind of engineering do we have here, Zoot?' I said,
raising my finger toward the wires.

'The man out of town right now. He forgot to leave the key
where it's always at,' he said.

'I see.'

'That's a fact. He lets me take it all the time. I'll
introduce y'all sometime.'

'That's very kind of you.'

I looked down below at Lucinda, who was sitting on a cushioned
storage locker with her legs crossed, staring straight ahead. Her
nickel-plated .357 revolver glinted in her belt holster. I realized
that I had read her wrong.

I walked down the steps and sat on a bunk across from her. I
could feel the steady vibration of the bow coursing through the chop.

'You're over the black dude in the motel?' I said.

Her mouth parted slightly.

'It's like anything else. It passes,' I said.

The skin wrinked at the corner of her left eye.

'The first time a guy dealt the play on me, I thought I'd wake
up with his face in front of me every day of my life,' I said. 'Then
one day it was gone. Poof. Three years later I put another guy down.'

'Why are you doing this?' she said.

'Because this boat's a little warm.'

'It's a little…'

'Right. Warm. Not hot exactly. Terms like
borrowed
and
lend-lease
come to mind,' I said, and leaned
forward on my hands. 'You've got your own agenda tonight, Lucinda.'

'He tortured my son.'

'You know when a good cop does it by the numbers? The day he
thinks he
shouldn't
do it by the numbers.'

'I get this from the friend and advocate of Clete Purcel?
Wonderful.'

'Don't let Buchalter remake you in his image.'

She looked into my face for a long time.

'Your advice is always good, Dave,' she said. 'But it's meant
for others. It has no application for yourself, does it?'

We stared silently at each other as the hull of the boat
veered toward the cut at Grand Terre.

It was a strange, cold dawn. With
first light the sky looked
streaked with india ink, then the wind dropped suddenly and the sun
came up red and molten on the gulf's watery rim. The tide was coming
in, rose-dimmed, heavy with the fecund smell of schooled-up trout,
flecked with foam toward the shore, the air loud with the cry of gulls
that glided and dipped over our wake. I watched the gray-green landmass
of Louisiana fall away behind us,

Zoot stood erect in front of the wheel, his hooded workout
jersey zipped up to his chin, his long hands resting lightly on the
spokes. He had cranked open the glass, and the skin of his face looked
taut and bright with cold.

'How you doing, Skipper?' I said.

'Not bad. She asleep?'

'Yes.'

'You know what she said about you the other day?'

'I wouldn't want to guess.'

'She say, "He's probably crazy but I wouldn't mind if I'd met
him before he was married."'

'You'd better not be giving out your mama's secrets,' I said.

'Why you think she tell it to me?' he said.

Through my field glasses I could see the black, angular
silhouettes of two abandoned drilling platforms against the sun and a
freighter with rusty scuppers and a Panamanian flag to the far west.
Zoot cut back on the throttle, and we rocked forward on our own wake.

'Look at the sonar, Mr. Dave,' he said. 'We're in about forty
feet now. But see where the line drops? That's a trench. I been over it
before. It runs maybe two miles, unless it drifts over with sand
sometimes.'

'You're pretty good at this.'

'I ain't even gonna say nothing. You and her just alike. Got
one idea about everything, so every day you always surprised about
something.'

'I think you're probably right.'

'
Probably?'
He shook his head.

But I wasn't listening now. Just off the port bow, beyond one
of the drilling platforms, I saw the low, flat outline of a salvage
vessel, one that was outfitted with side booms, dredges, and a silt
vacuum that curved over the gunwale like the body of an enormous snake.
I sharpened the image through the field glasses and saw that the ship
was anchored bow and stern and was tilted slightly to starboard, as
though it were straining against a great weight.

Then I saw something move on the drilling platform closest to
us. I stepped outside the cabin and refocused the field glasses. The
tide was washing through the pilings at the base of the platform, and
upside-down in the swell, knocking against the steel girders, was the
red and white hull of a capsized boat. I moved the glasses up a ladder
to the rig itself and held them on a powerful, sunburned, bare-chested
man whose Marine Corps utilities hung just below his navel.

'What is it?' Lucinda said behind me. The side of her face was
printed with lines from her sleep.

I handed the glasses to her.

'Take a look at that first rig,' I said.

She balanced herself against the sway of the deck and peered
through the glasses.

'It's Clete Purcel,' she said. 'He looks half frozen.'

'With a sunk boat,' I said. 'Clete's no sailor, either. Which
means he probably went out with somebody who didn't make it to that
ladder.'

'Who?'

'I don't like to think about it.'

'Who?'

'The elderly preacher comes to mind.' I went back inside the
cabin. 'Zoot, take us on into the rig. But try to keep it between us
and that salvage ship so whoever's onboard doesn't get a good look at
us.'

'It's Buchalter and them Nazis?' he said. I saw his long,
ebony hands tighten involuntarily on the wheel.

'Maybe it's just an ordinary salvage group trying to raise
some drilling equipment.'

'There's some oil field junk down out here, but not yonder,
Mr. Dave.'

'Okay, podna.'

'I know what you got in that canvas bag. If the time come, is
one of them for me?'

'You have any experience with firearms?'

'A lot.'

'With what kind?'

'The kind you shoot things wit'… Me and my cousin,
we gone under the Huey Long Bridge and shot bottles all over the place.'

'Look, Zoot, we want the people on that salvage boat to think
we're a fishing party. Can you set the outriggers and put some trolling
rods in the sockets while I take the wheel?'

'Sure,' he said, but his eyes were still on the canvas bag.

'Just keep your hood tied on your head, too, in case they put
binoculars on us.'

'You ain't gonna let me have one of them guns?'

'If that's Buchalter out there, we'll call the Coast Guard.'

'Then why you bring all them guns?'

I'd never guess you were Lucinda's son, I thought to myself.

I kept the bow pointed in a straight line at the rig and the
salvage ship. The sun had broken through a bank of lavender and black
clouds, and you could see flying fish and the stringlike tentacles and
swollen pink air sacs of Portuguese man-o'-wars in the swell. The day
should have warmed, but the wind had risen again and the tidal current
looked green and cold flowing under the oil platform, rolling the
capsized boat against the pilings and the steel ladder.

To the south there was a frothy white line along the horizon
where the waves were starting to cap.

Zoot worked his way forward onto the bow, and I cut the gas
and let the cabin cruiser drift into the ladder that extended out of
the water, upward to the platform where Clete Purcel was leaning over
the rail, staring down at us, the sandy curls of hair on his shoulders
and chest blowing dryly in the wind.

He came down the ladder fast, his face pointed downward, his
love handles flexing, his huge buttocks working as he clanged onto each
rung. When he dropped onto the bow, he kept his face pointed in the
opposite direction from the salvage ship and made his way aft along the
side of the cabin.

His teeth were chattering when he came through the hatchway.

'Streak, I love you,' he said. 'I knew my old podjo wouldn't
let me down. I ain't kidding you, I was turning to an ice cube up
there. I tried to wrap myself up in a piece of canvas, but it blew
away.'

'What happened?'

'It's Buchalter. We found him about three this morning,' he
said, pulling a blanket around his shoulders.

'We came up on him from the south. I thought we had him.
There's a metal stairs on his port side. We were going to drift up to
it, then take them from behind while all that machinery was roaring.
Except we hit a log and punched a hole in the hull.'

He sat on top of a locker filled with life vests and scuba
gear and worked the stopper from a bottle of Cutty Sark he had taken
from the liquor cabinet. The scar through his eyebrow and across the
bridge of his nose looked like a stitched strip of pink rubber.