In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 14

"We'll see you around, Camel. Thanks for your help. Say, what's the name of the black guy working the bus depot?"

"I travel by plane, my man. That's what everybody do today," he said, and licked the top of the peeled egg before he put it in his mouth.

FOR YEARS THE AIRLINE HAD BEEN THE MAIN HIGHWAY between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. When I-10 was built,the Airline became a secondary road and was absorbed back into that quasi-rural slum culture that has always characterized the p.e.c.k.e.rwood South: ramshackle nightclubs with oyster-sh.e.l.l parking lots; roach-infested motels that feature water beds and p.o.r.nographic movies and rent rooms by the day or week; truck stops with banks of rubber machines in the restrooms; all-night glaringly lit cafes where the smell of fried food permeates the counters and stools as tangibly as a film of grease.

I went to three clubs and got nowhere. Each time I walked through the door the bartender's eyes glanced up to meet me as they would somebody who had been expected all evening. As soon as I sat at the bar the girls went to the women's room or out the back door. The electronic noise of the country bands was deafening, the amplified squelch in the microphones like metal raking on a blackboard. When I tried to talk to someone, the person would nod politely in the din as though a man without vocal cords were speaking to him, then go back to his drink or stare in the opposite direction through the layers of cigarette smoke.

I gave up and walked back to my truck, which was parked between the clapboard side of a nightclub and a squat six-room motel with a small yellow lawn and a dead palm tree by the drive-in registration window. The air smelled of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks by the river, dust from the sh.e.l.l parking lot, liquor and beer from a trash barrel filled with empty bottles. The sky out over the Gulf trembled with dry lightning.

I didn't hear her behind me.

"Everybody on the strip knew you were coming two hours ago, cutie," she said.

I turned and squinted my eyes at her. She drank out of her beer bottle, then puffed off her cigarette. Her face was porcine, her lipstick on crooked, her dyed red hair lacquered like tangled wire on her head. She put one hand on her hip and waited for me to recognize her.

"Charlotte?"

"What a memory. Have I tubbed up on you?"

"No, not really. You're looking good."

She laughed to herself and blew her cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the dark.

Thirty years ago she had been a stripper and hooker on Bourbon Street, then the mistress of a loanshark who blew his brains out, the wife of an alcoholic ex-police sergeant who ended up in Angola for doping horses at the Fairgrounds, and the last I heard the operator of a ma.s.sage parlor in Algiers.

"What are you doing out here on the Airline?" I said.

"I run the dump next door," she said, and nodded toward the motel. "Hey, I got to sit down. I really got crocked tonight." She shook a wooden chair loose from the trash pile by the side of the nightclub and sat down in it with her knees splayed and took another drink from her beer bottle. An exhaust fan from a restroom was pinging above her head. "I already heard what you're looking for, Streak. A guy bringing the chickens in from the country, right?"

"Do you know who he is?"

"They come and they go. I'm too old to keep track of it anymore."

"I'd sure like to talk to this guy, Charlotte."

"Yeah, somebody ought to run an iron hook through his b.a.l.l.s, all right, but it's probably not going to happen."

"Why not?"

"You got the right juice, the play pen stays open."

"He's connected?"

"What do you think?"

"With the Balboni family?"

"Maybe. Maybe he's got juice with the cops or politicians. There's lots of ways to stay in business."

"But one way or another, most of them go down. Right?"

She raised her beer bottle to her mouth and drank.

"I don't think anybody is going to be talking about thisguy a whole lot," she said. "You hear stories, you know what I mean? That this guy you're looking for is somebody you don't want mad at you, that he can be real hard on his chippies."

"Is it true?"

She set her empty bottle down on the sh.e.l.ls and placed her hands loosely in her lap. For a moment the alcoholic s.h.i.+ne left her eyes and her expression became strangely introverted, as though she were focusing on some forgotten image deep inside herself.

"When you're in the life, you hear a lot of bad stories, cutie. That's because there aren't many good ones," she said.

"The man I'm looking for may be a serial killer, Charlotte."

"That kind of guy is a john, not a pimp, Streak." She leaned on her forearms, puffing on her cigarette, staring at the hundreds of bottle caps pressed into the dirt at her feet. Her lacquered hair was wreathed in smoke. "Go on back home. You won't change anything here. Everybody out on this road signed up for it one way or another."

"n.o.body signed up to be dead."

She didn't reply. She scratched a mosquito bite on her kneecap and looked at a car approaching the motel registration window.

"Who's the main man working the bus depot these days?" I said.

"That's Downtown Bobby Brown. He went up on a short-eyes once. Now he's a pro, a real piece of s.h.i.+t. Go back to your family, Streak, before you start to like your work."

She flipped her cigarette away backhandedly, got to her feet, straightened her dress on her elephantine hips, winked at me as though she might be leaving a burlesque stage, and walked delicately across the oyster sh.e.l.ls toward her motel and the couple who waited impatiently for her in the heat and the dust and the snapping of an electric bug killer over the registration window.

YOU CAN FIND THE PREDATORS AT THE BUS DEPOT ALMOST ANYtime during the twenty-four-hour period. But they operate best during the late hours. That's usually when the adventurers from Vidalia or De Ridder or Wiggins, Mississippi, have run out of money, energy, and hope of finding a place to sleep besides an empty building or an official shelter where they'll be reported as runaways. It's not hard to spot the adventurers, either. The corners of their mouths are downturned, their hair is limp and lies like moist string on their necks; often their hands and thin arms are flecked with home-grown tattoos; they wash under their arms with paper towels and brush their teeth in the depot restroom.

I watched him walk across the waiting room, a leather satchel slung on a strap over his shoulder, his eyes bright, a rain hat at an angle on his head, his tropical white s.h.i.+rt hanging outside his khakis. A gold cross was painted on the side of his satchel.

The two girls were white, both blond, dressed in shapeless jeans, tennis shoes without socks, blouses that looked salt-faded and stiff with dried perspiration. When he talked with them, his happy face made me think of a mythical goat-footed balloonman whistling far and wee to children in springtime. Then from his satchel he produced candy bars and ham sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, plums and red apples that would dwarf a child's hand.

The girls both bent into their sandwiches, then he was sitting next to them, talking without stop, the smile as wide as an ax blade, the eyes bright as an elf's, the gold cross on his satchel winking with light under his black arm.

I was tired, used up after the long day, wired with too many voices, too many people on the hustle, too many who bought and sold others or ruined themselves for money that you could make with a Fuller-brush route. There was grit in my clothes; my mouth tasted bad; I could smell my own odor. The inside of the depot reeked of cigar b.u.t.ts and the diesel exhaust that blew through the doors to the boarding foyer.

I took the receiver off a pay phone by the men's room and let it hang by its cord.

A minute later the ticket salesman stared down at my badge that I had slid across the counter.

"You want me to do what?" he said.

"Announce that there's a call at the pay phone for Mr. Bob Brown."

"We usually don't do that."

"Consider it an emergency."

"Yes, sir."

"Wait at least one minute before you do it. Okay, podna?"

"Yes, sir."

I bought a soft drink from a vending machine and looked casually out the gla.s.s doors while a bus marked "Miami" was being loaded underneath with luggage. The ticket salesman picked up his microphone, and Bob Brown's name echoed and resonated off the depot walls.

Downtown Bobby Brown's face became quizzical, impish, in front of the girls, then momentarily apologetic as he explained that he'd be right back, that somebody at his shelter probably needed advice about a situation.

I dropped my soda can into a trash bin and followed him to the pay phone. Downtown Bobby was streetwise, and he turned around and looked into my face. But my eyes never registered his glance, and I pa.s.sed him and stopped in front of the USA Today machine.

He picked up the telephone receiver, leaning on one arm against the wall, and said, "This is Bobby. What's happenin'?"

"The end of your career," I said, and clenched the back of his neck, driving his face into the restroom door. Then I pushed him through the door and flung him inside the room. Blood drained from his nose over his lip; his eyes were wide, yellow-white-like a peeled egg-with shock.

A man at the urinal stood dumbfounded with his fly opened. I held up my badge in front of him.

"This room's in use," I said.

He zipped his trousers and went quickly out the door. I shot the bolt into the jamb.

"What you want? Why you comin' down on me for? You cain't run a shake on somebody, run somebody's face into a do' just because you-"

I pulled my .45 out of the back of my belt and aimed it into the center of his face.

He lifted his hands in front of him, as though he were holding back an invisible presence, and shook his head from side to side, his eyes averted, his mouth twisted like a broken plum.

"Don't do that, man," he said. "I ain't no threat to you. Look, I ain't got a gun. You want to bust me, do it. Come on, I swear it, they ain't no need for that piece, I ain't no trouble."

He was breathing heavily now. Sweat glistened like oil on his temples. He blotted drops of blood off his nose with the backs of his fingers.

I walked closer to him, staring into his eyes, and c.o.c.ked the hammer. He backed away from me into a stall, his breath rife with a smell like sardines.

"I want the name of the guy you're delivering the girls to," I said.

"n.o.body. I ain't bringing n.o.body to n.o.body."

I fitted the opening in the barrel to the point of his chin.

"Oh, G.o.d," he said, and fell backward onto the commode. The seat was up, and his b.u.t.t plummeted deep into the bowl.

"You know the guy I'm talking about. He's just like you. He hunts on the game reserve," I said.

His chest was bent forward toward his knees. He looked like a round clothespin that had been screwed into a hole.

"Don't do this to me, man," he said. "I just had an operation. Take me in. I'll he'p y'all out any way I can. I got a good record wit' y'all."

"You've been up the road for child molesting, Bobby.Even cons don't like a short-eyes. Did you have to stay in lockdown with the snitches?"

"It was a statutory. I went down for nonconsent. Check it out, man. No s.h.i.+t, don't point that at me no more. I still got st.i.tches inside my groin. They're gonna tear loose."

"Who's the guy, Bobby?"

He shut his eyes and put his hand over his mouth.

"Just give me his name, and it all ends right here," I said.

He opened his eyes and looked up at me.

"I messed my pants," he said.

"This guy hurts people. Give me his name, Bobby."

"There's a white guy sells dirty pictures or something. He carries a gun. n.o.body f.u.c.ks wit' him. Is that the guy you're talking about?"

"You tell me."

"That's all I know. Look, I don't have nothin' to do wit' dangerous people. I don't hurt n.o.body. Why you doin' this to me, man?"

I stepped back from him and eased down the hammer on the .45. He put the heels of his hands on the rim of the commode and pushed himself slowly to his feet. Toilet water dripped off the seat of his khakis. I wadded up a handful of paper towels, soaked them under a faucet, and handed them to him.

"Wipe your face," I said.

He kept sniffing, as though he had a cold.

"I cain't go back out there."

"That's right."

"I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man."

"You're never coming back here, Bobby. You're going to treat this bus depot like it's the center of a nuclear test zone."

"I got a crib . . . a place . . . two blocks from here, man. What you-"

"Do you know who-is?" I used the name of a notorious right-wing racist beat cop from the Irish Channel.

His hand stopped mopping at his nose with the towels.

"I got no beef wit' that p.e.c.k.e.rwood," he said.

"He broke a pimp's trachea with his baton once. That's right, Bobby. The guy strangled to death in his own spit."

"What you talkin' 'bout, man? I ain't said nothing 'bout -I know what you're doin', man, you're-"

"If I catch you in the depot again, if I hear you're scamming runaways and young girls again, I'm going to tell -you've been working his neighborhood, maybe hanging around school grounds in the Channel."

"Who the f.u.c.k are you, man? Why you makin' me miserable? I ain't done nothing to you."

I unlocked the bolt on the door.