The Neon Rain (7 page)

“Do you already know I’m a police officer?” I said quietly.

“We know a lot about you, Lieutenant. You’ve really spread your name around recently,” the man in the raincoat said.

“I thought Segura was smarter than this,” I said.

“I don’t know. I’ve never met the man. But you’re not smart at all.” He took a revolver casually out of his raincoat pocket and nodded to the man with the tattoo, who went into the bathroom, dropped my .38 into the toilet bowl, and started the water in the bathtub. Annie’s eyes were wide under her hat, and she was breathing rapidly through her mouth.

“I have friends coming over,” she said.

“That’s why you got your hat on,” the man with the tattoo said, smiling from the bathroom door. His hair was cut so close to his scalp that the light made his head glow with an aura. He held a large roll of adhesive tape in his hand.

“I’m going to walk out my door,” she said. Her face was flushed and spotted as though she had a fever, and her voice was filled with strain. “I have friends next door and out in the yard and over on the next block and they can hear everything through these walls and you’re not going to do anything to us—”

“Annie,” I said quietly.

“We’re going to leave now and they’re not going to hurt us,” she said.

“Annie, don’t talk,” I said. “These men have business with me, then they’re going to leave. You mustn’t do anything now.”

“Listen to the voice of experience,” the man in the raincoat said.

“No,” she said. “They’re not going to do this. I’m walking outside now. These are weak people or they wouldn’t have guns.”

“You dumb cunt,” the man with the tattoo said, and swung his fist into the back of Annie’s head. Her hat pitched into the air, and she fell forward on her knees, her face white with shock. She remained bent over and started to cry. It was the kind of crying that came from genuine, deep-seated pain.

“You sonofabitch,” I said.

“Put her in back,” the man in the raincoat said. The other two men pulled Annie’s arms behind her and taped her wrists, then her mouth. Her curly hair hung in her eyes, and there were tears on her cheeks. The two men started to walk her to the bedroom.

“Bobby Joe, nothing except what we have to do here,” the man in the raincoat said.

“You wanted her to walk out on the front porch?” said Bobby Joe, the man with the tattoo.

“That’s not what I mean.
Nothing except what we have to do
. Do you understand?”

“There’s better broads for two bucks in Guatemala City,” Bobby Joe said.

“Shut your mouth, tape her ankles, and get back out here,” the man with the raincoat said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“You’re in way over your head, Lieutenant. I’m just not quite sure of your own degree of awareness. That’s the problem we have to resolve tonight.”

“I’ll give you something else to resolve. I’m going to square everything that happens in here.”

“You’re presuming a lot.”

“Yeah? We can make New Orleans an uncomfortable place for crackers that beat up on women. Or for over-the-hill spooks.”

He looked amused.

“You think you’ve made me?” he said.

“You have a strong federal smell.”

“Who knows, these days, employment being what it is? But at least you’re a professional and you recognize characteristics in people. So you know that Bobby Joe and Erik in there are hired help, not professional at all. They get carried away sometimes. Do you know what I mean? Bobby Joe, in particular. Bad army life, doesn’t like authority, certainly doesn’t like women. A bad combination for your situation. Tell me where Fitzpatrick is and we’ll walk out of here.”

“Who?”

“I was afraid we’d hear that from you.”

The other two men, Bobby Joe and Erik, came out of the bedroom, crossed my wrists behind me, and wound the adhesive tape deep into my flesh. I could feel the blood swelling in my veins. Then the man in the raincoat nodded to Bobby Joe, who jerked my head down with both hands and brought his knee up into my face. I crashed against the coffee table, my nose ringing with pain, my eyes watering uncontrollably. Bobby Joe and Erik picked me up by each arm. Their hands were like Vise-Grips on me. Then Bobby Joe hit me twice in the stomach, and I doubled over and gagged a long string of saliva on the rug.

“Now you’re a cooperative biscuit-eater,” Bobby Joe said, and they led me into the bathroom.

The tub was running over now. Erik turned off the taps, and the man in the raincoat lowered the toilet-seat cover, sat on it, and lighted a Camel cigarette.

“In ‘Nam we wrapped a towel around Charlie’s face and soaked it in water,” he said. “It was kind of like a portable river to drown in. But it always worked. Even better than calling him up on the telephone crank. Let’s have it, Lieutenant, so we don’t have to go through this bullshit.”

They had me on my knees, bent over the tub now. My nose was dripping blood into the water. They waited a moment in the silence, then shoved my head under.

I fought to get up, but it didn’t do any good. My knees felt like they were greased with Vaseline; my stomach was pressed hard over the tub’s rim, and Bobby Joe was leaning all his weight on the back of my neck. My breath bubbled out my nose and mouth, I shook my head violently from side to side with my eyes open, my teeth gritted, then the closure apparatus in my throat broke and I sucked water inside my head and lungs like a series of doors slamming forever.

They pulled me up roaring with water and air, and threw me against the metal legs on the sink.

“This isn’t so bad. There’s no permanent damage done,” the man in the raincoat said. “It’d be a lot worse if Segura’s people handled it. It has something to do with the Latin tradition. I think they got it from the Romans. Did you know that Nero killed himself because the Senate sent word to him that he was to be executed in ‘the old way,’ which meant being whipped to death with his head locked in a wooden fork? If you don’t want to say where Fitzpatrick is, you can write it on a piece of paper. It’s funny how that makes a difference for people sometimes.”

My heart was thundering, my breath laboring in my throat.

“I never heard of the cocksucker,” I said.

I felt Bobby Joe begin to lift me by one arm.

“Wait a minute,” the man in the raincoat said. “The lieutenant’s not a bad fellow. He just doesn’t know what’s involved. If he did, he might be on our team. Fitzpatrick probably gave you a patriotic shuck and you thought you were helping out the good guys.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You’re probably a good cop, but don’t tell us you’re shaking the bushes all over New Orleans and Cataouatche Parish because of a drowned colored girl,” he said.

“Two minutes this time. He’ll tell,” Erik said.

The man in the raincoat leaned down and looked intently in my face.

“He means it,” he said. “Two minutes under water. Maybe you’ll make it. Sometimes they don’t. It happens.”

“All he’s got to do is nod his head up and down, then he can have all the air he wants,” Bobby Joe said.

He jerked me up half-erect by my arm and started to slide me across the wet tiles to the tub’s rim again. But this time I was dripping with water and sweat and I slipped loose from him, fell on my buttocks, and shot one leather-soled shoe like a hammer into his ribcage. He wasn’t ready for it, and I felt a bone go like a stick. The blood drained out of his face, his tongue lay pink on his teeth, his skin tightened on his skull as though he were silently absorbing an intolerable pain and rage.

“Oh my, you shouldn’t have done that,” the man in the raincoat said.

Erik grabbed my hair and slammed my head against the side of the tub. I kicked at all of them blindly, but my feet struck at empty air. Then Bobby Joe locked his powerful arms around my neck and took me over the rim again, his body trembling rigidly with a cruel and murderous energy, and I knew that all my past fears of being shotgunned by a psychotic, of being shanked by an addict, of stepping on a Claymore mine in Vietnam, were just the foolish preoccupations of youth; that my real nemesis had always been a redneck lover who would hold me upside down against his chest while my soul slipped through a green, watery porcelain hole in the earth, down through the depths of the Mekong River, where floated the bodies of other fatigue-clad men and whole families of civilians, their faces still filled with disbelief and the shock of an artillery burst, and farther still to the mossy base of an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, where my father waited for me in his hardhat, coveralls, and steeltipped drilling boots after having drowned there twenty years ago.

Then Bobby Joe’s arms let go of my neck, as though he had tired of me, and I collapsed in a gasping, embryonic heap on the floor. I lay with one eye pressed against the wet tile.

“Get out there and see what it is!” the man in the raincoat said.

Bobby Joe stood erect, stepped over me, and was gone.

“Had a mind-change about Fitzpatrick?” the man in the raincoat said.

I couldn’t answer. In fact, at that point I didn’t even remember the name. Then I heard Bobby Joe in the doorway.

“His bitch got her feet loose from the bedstead and kicked a lamp through the window. The whole goddamn backyard is full of people from a party,” he said.

“Travel time,” the man in the raincoat said. He stood up and combed his hair as he walked past me. “You’re a big winner tonight, Lieutenant. But let the experience work for you. Don’t try to play in the major leagues. It’s a shitty life, believe me. Big risks, lots of crazy people running around, few side benefits like the piece you’ve got in the next room. You’ve got
cojones
, but the next time around, Bobby Joe and Erik will cut them off.”

Then they went out the front door into the dark like three macabre harlequins who on impulse visited the quiet world of ordinary people with baseball bats.

Three patrol cars from the Second District, an ambulance, and a fire truck answered the neighbor’s emergency call. Revolving red and blue lights reflected off the trees and houses; the lawn and house were filled with patrolmen, paramedics, firemen in yellow slickers, neighbors drinking beer and sangria, people writing on clipboards and talking into static-filled radios, and all of it signified absolutely nothing. Any candid policeman will tell you that we seldom catch people as a result of investigation or detective work; in other words, if we don’t grab them during the commission of the crime, there’s a good chance we won’t catch them at all. When we do nail them, it’s often through informers or because they trip over their own shoestrings and turn the key on themselves (drunk driving, expired license plates, a barroom beef). We’re not smart; they’re just dumb.

That’s why the feds were made to look so bad back in the late sixties and early seventies when they couldn’t nail a bunch of middle-class college kids who ended up on the “Ten Most Wanted” list. Instead of dealing with predictable psychopaths like Alvin Karpis and Charles Arthur Floyd, the FBI had to second-guess Brandeis and Wisconsin English majors who dynamited research labs and boosted banks and Brinks’ trucks and then faded back into the quiet life of the suburbs. For a time, the amateurs ruined crime for everybody.

The last one to leave was the scene investigator whom I’d requested. He dusted the doors, the bedroom, the bath, looked at me with a shrug, and walked out the door without speaking, which was his way of telling me what he thought of the fruitless work I had just created for him.

“Did he find something?” Annie said. She sat at the dining room table with a tumbler of whiskey between her fingers. Her face was wan, her voice and blue eyes listless.

“Everything was probably smeared. Fingerprints never do us much good anyway, not unless we have a body or someone in custody. Even if an examiner has a whole handprint set in blood, he still has to compare it with tens of thousands of file prints, and it’s as much fun as threading a needle with your eyes closed. That’s why he looked so happy when he left here. Look, I’m sorry I brought all this stuff into your house. I got careless tonight. I should have made those guys when they stepped out of their car.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Her voice was flat, distant.

“I think you should have gone in the ambulance. A concussion can fool you sometimes.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with a concussion.”

I looked at her colorless, depleted face.

“Listen, let me go to my boat and change clothes, then I’ll take you to an Italian restaurant on the lake where they serve lasagna that’ll break your heart,” I said.

“I don’t think I can go anywhere now.”

“All right, I’ll go up to that Chinese place on St. Charles and bring us something back. I’ll be gone only a few minutes.”

She stared quietly into space for a moment.

“Do you mind not going for a while?” she asked.

“All right, but I tell you what—no booze. Instead, I’m going to fix some hot milk for you, and an omelette.”

I took the tumbler of whiskey from her fingertips. Then her eyes looked desperately into mine, her mouth trembled, and the tears ran down her cheeks.

“He put his hands all over me,” she said. “He put them everywhere. While the other one watched.”

She started to cry hard now, her chin on her chest, her shoulders shaking.

“Listen, Annie, you’re a brave person,” I said. “You don’t know it, but you saved my life. How many people could do what you did? Most people just roll over when violence comes into their lives. A guy like that can’t harm a person like you.”

She had her arms folded tightly across her stomach, and she kept her face turned down toward the table.

“You come in the living room and sit on the couch with me,” I said. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her to the divan. I sat down next to her and picked up her hands in mine. “What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important. You don’t get mad at yourself or feel ashamed because you catch a virus, do you? Listen, I’ll be straight-up with you. You’ve got a lot more guts than I have. I’ve been in a situation where something very bad happened to me, but I didn’t have your courage.”