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letting his eyes leave mine, as though he were genuinely glad to see me.
"How do you do, sir?" I said. "I didn't mean to disturb y'all. I just
need a minute or two of Perry's time."
"We're gonna have lunch. I got any kind of food you want," Sookie said.
"Thanks just the same," I said. "You want to shoot?" he said, offering me
the shotgun. I shook my head.
"Well, I'm gonna let you gentlemen talk. It's probably over my head,
anyway. Right, Dave?" he said, and winked, inferring an insult that had not
been made, casting himself in the role of victim while he kept others off
balance. He slipped his shotgun into a sheepskin-lined case and propped it
against the back rail of his houseboat, then opened a green bottle of Heineken
in the galley and drank it on the deck, his skin healthy and tan in die salt
breeze that blew off the Gulf.
"What are you doing with a shitpot like that?" I asked Perry.
"What's your objection to Sookie?" "He fronts points for the casinos," I
said. "He's a lobbyist. That's his job."
"They victimize ignorant and compulsive and poor people."
"Maybe they provide a few jobs, too," he said. "You know better. Why do
you always have to act like a douche bag, Perry?"
"You want to tell me why you're out here?" he asked, feigning patience.
But his eyes wouldn't hold and they started to slip off mine.
"You're in with them, aren't you?" I said.
"With whom?"
"The casinos, the people in Vegas and Chicago who run them. Both Barbara
and Zerelda tried to tell me that. I just wasn't listening."
"I think you're losing it, Dave."
"Legion Guidry blackmailed your grandfather. Now he's turning dials on
you. How's it feel to do scut work for a rapist?"
He looked at me for a long time, the skin trembling under one eye. Then
he turned and walked down the grassy bank to the stern of Sookie's houseboat
and lifted the shotgun from the deck railing. He walked back up the incline
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toward me, unzipping the case, his eyes fastened on my face. He let the case
slip to the ground and cracked open the breech.
"Make another remark about my family," he said.
"Go screw yourself," I said.
He took two shotgun shells from his shirt pocket and plopped them into
the chambers, then snapped the breech shut.
"Hey, Perry, what's going on?" Sookie called from the stern of his boat.
"Nothing is going on," Perry replied. "Dave just has to make a choice
about what he wants to do. Right, Dave? You want to shoot? Here, it's ready to
rock Or do you just want to flap your mouth? Go ahead, take it."
He pressed the shotgun into my hands, his eyes blazing now. "You want to
shoot me, Dave? Do you want to roll all your personal misery and unhappiness
and failure into a tight little ball and set a match to it and blow somebody
else away? Because I'm on the edge of reaching down your throat and tearing
out your vocal cords. I can't tell you how much I'd love to do that."
I opened the breech on the shotgun and tossed the shells into the grass,
then threw the shotgun spinning in a long arc, past the bow of Sookie's
houseboat, the sun glinting on the blue steel and polished wood. It splashed
into water that was at least twenty feet deep and sank out of sight.
"You ought to go out to L.A. and get a card in the Screen Actors Guild,
Perry. No, I take that back. You've got a great acting career right here.
Enjoy your lunch with Sookie," I said.
"Are you crazy? That's my Parker. Are you guys crazy?" I heard Sookie
shouting as I walked back up the knoll to the cruiser.
But any pleasure I might have taken from sticking it to Perry LaSalle and
Sookie Motrie was short-lived. When I arrived home that afternoon, Alafair was
waiting for me in the driveway, pacing up and down, the bone ridging in one
jaw, her hair tied up on her head, her fists on her hips.
"How you doin'?" I said.
"Guess."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"Not much. My father is acting like an asshole because he thinks he's the
only person in the world with a problem. Outside of that, everything's
fine."
"Bootsie told you about my breaking off our dinner plans last night?"
"She didn't have to. I heard you. If you want to drink, Dave, just go do
it. Stop laying your grief on your family."
"Maybe you don't know what you're talking about, Alafair."
"Bootsie told me what that man, what's his name, Legion, did to you. You
want to kill him? I wish you would. Then we'd know who's really important to
you."
"Pardon?" I said.
"Go kill this man. Then we'd know once and for all his death means much
more to you than taking care of your own family. We're a little sick of it,
Dave. Just thought you should know," she said, her voice starting to break,
her eyes glistening now.
I tried to clear an obstruction out of my throat. A battered car passed
on the road, the windows down, a denim-shirted man behind the wheel, the
backseat filled with children and fishing rods. The driver and the children
were all laughing at something.
"I'm sorry, kiddo," I said.
"You should be," she said.
That night I lay in the dark, sleepless, the trees outside swelling with
wind, the canopy in the swamp trembling with a ghostly white light from the
lightning in the south. I had never felt more alone in my life. Once again, I
burned, in almost a sexual fashion, to wrap my fingers around the grips and
inside the steel guard of a heavy, high-caliber pistol, to smell the acrid
odor of cordite, to tear loose from all the restraints that bound my life and
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squeezed the breath from my lungs. And I knew what I had to do.
CHAPTER 24
Later the same night I drove past a deserted sugar mill in the rain and parked
my truck on a dead-end paved street in a rural part of St. Mary Parish. I
jumped across a ditch running with brown water and cut through a hedge to the
stoop of a small house with a tin roof set up on cinder blocks. I slipped a
screwdriver around the edge of the door and prized the door away from the
jamb, stressing the hinges back against the screws until a piece of wood
splintered inside and fell on the linoleum and the lock popped free. I froze
in the darkness, expecting to hear movement inside the house, but there was no
sound except the rain linking on the roof and a locomotive rumbling on railway
tracks out by the highway.
I pushed back the door and walked through the kitchen and into the
bedroom of Legion Guidry.
He was sleeping on his back, in a brass bed, the breeze from an
oscillating fan ruffling his hair, dimpling the sheet that covered his body.
Even though the air outside was cool and sweet smelling from the rain, the air
in the bedroom was close and thick with the odor of moldy clothes, unwashed
hair, re-breathed whiskey fumes, and a salty, gray smell that had dried into
the sheets and mattress.
A blue-black .38 revolver lay on the nightstand. I picked it up quietly
and went into the bathroom, then came back out and sat in a chair by the side
of the bed. Legion's jaws were unshaved, but even in sleep his hair was combed
and the flesh on his face kept its shape and didn't sag against the bone. I
placed the muzzle of my .45 against his jawbone.
"I suspect you know what this is, Legion. I suspect you know what it can
do to the inside of your head, too," I said.
A slight crease formed across his forehead, but otherwise he showed no
recognition of my presence. His eyelids remained closed, his bare chest rising
and falling with no irregularity, his hands folded passively on top of the
sheet.
"Did you hear me?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
But he used the word "yes," not "yeah," as would be the custom of a Cajun
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