DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  "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.

  "This deal's going sour," Lionel said.

  "There's nothing wrong with the deal. Stop acting like a cunt," Boggs said.

  "I ain't going back to Angola," Lionel said. "I ain't going down for snuffing a cop, either."

  "This guy's shark food. Count on it. He don't have to be the only one to go over the gunwale, either. You getting my drift?" Boggs said.

  "You got nothing to lose, Jimmie Lee. We do," Lionel said.

  "You got a lot to lose, man. It's important you understand that," Boggs said. He had shifted the barrel of the automatic so that it now hovered between me and Lionel.

  "We just wanted to hear a little more of what Mr. Robicheaux had to say," Fontenot said.

  "I'll show you what he's going to say," Boggs said, and he knotted my shirt in his fist at the back of my neck, pulled me erect, and pushed the barrel of the automatic hard into my spine. "He's gonna say 'please,' and he's gonna say, 'I'll pay you money,' and he's gonna say, 'Mr. Boggs, I'll do anything you want if you don't hurt me.'"

  He pushed me ahead of him on the deck, his clenched hand trembling with energy, then stomped on my leg just above the calf, as though he were breaking a slat, and knocked me to my knees. He let the automatic swing loosely over
the back of my neck. In the reflection of the running lights the blood from my mouth looked purple on the backs of my hands. My ears were filled with sound: the waves bursting against the bow and hissing back along the hull, Jimmie Lee Boggs's heated breathing, a buoy clanging somewhere beyond the oil platform, a thick, obscene noise like wet cellophane crackling when I tried to swallow.

  "Lionel, you got two minutes to load the stash and come back with my shotgun," Boggs said. "Don't fuck up my morning."

  "We'll transfer the goods. There's no problem, Jimmie Lee," Fontenot said.

  "I didn't think there was," Boggs said.

  Out of the corner of my vision I could see Fontenot and Lionel carrying the crates back to Boggs's boat. Their rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the deck.

  "I'll hand it up to you," I heard Fontenot say.

  "Why don't you take swimming lessons, go to the Y?" Lionel said.

  "You know why I like a shotgun?" Boggs asked me. His dungarees were bell-bottomed and dark with water above his white socks.

  "No hands, no face," he said. "Think of a broken cherry pie."

  The jugboat dropped off the edge of a big wave and slapped hard against the water. Then I heard someone behind me.

  "Here it is," Lionel said.

  "Thank you, my man," Boggs said.

  "What do you want to do with his boat?" Lionel said.

  "I'll open up the cocks and down she goes."

  "Hurry all this up, it's gonna be light."

  "Just get the fat man on board and let me worry about the rest of it."

  Lionel walked away toward the stern, and I saw Boggs's feet and legs move in front of me. I heard him rack a shell into the chamber of a shotgun.

  "Would you look up here so I could have your attention a minute?" he said.

  I raised my head slowly, my eyes traveling over his thighs, which were tensed against the roll of the deck, his flat stomach under his gray suspenders, his sawed-off pump shotgun with a stock that had been wood-rasped into a pistol grip, his red mouth crimped in expectation, as though he had just sucked on a salted lime. My split eye throbbed, blood and saliva ran off my lip, my pulse roared in my ears.

  "Boggs…" I said.

  He didn't answer.

  "Boggs…"

  I opened my mouth to let it drain. I spit on myself.

  "Boggs…"

  "What?" he said.

  "You'd fuck up a wet dream. Shoot and be done with it."

  I saw his eyes narrow. They were liquid and rheumy, like a lizard's, the whites flecked almost entirely red with broken blood veins. His right hand, wrapped around the trigger guard, was white and ridged with bone. The edges of his eyes trembled with anger. His tongue tasted his lip, and he looked like a man whose sexual satisfaction was about to be denied him.

  "We gotta go, Jimmie Lee," Lionel said from the stern.

  But Boggs's attention had shifted. He stared out into the fog, the shotgun at port arms, his dyed, threadlike hair wet and stuck against his scalp like a duck's feathers. Then I saw and heard it, too: the glow of running lights in the fog, the drone of a big engine, of boat screws that cut a deep trough in the water.

  Suddenly no one was interested in me. I raised up slowly from all fours and sat back on my heels. Lionel had been trying to push Fontenot's huge weight up onto the bow of the cabin cruiser, but they were both frozen now on the stern of the jugboat. Fontenot's neck looked like a turtle's inside his life jacket.

  The electric arc of a searchlight burst through the fog. It was hot and white and blinding to the eyes, and now the jugboat and the green, white-capping waves had the strange luminescence of objects lighted by a pistol flare.

  A man's voice boomed through a bullhorn across the water: "This is the New Orleans Police Department. You're under arrest. Put down your weapons and lace your hands on your head."

  Lionel's arm went up, and he aimed the nine-millimeter across the roof of the pilothouse.

  "No!" Fontenot shouted. Then he shouted it again, "No!" His face was round and soft and full of disbelief.

  But it was too late. Lionel and Boggs were both shooting now, the muzzle flashes from their guns almost lost in the searchlight's hot glare. I could hear the brass hulls from Lionel's pistol clinking on the pilothouse roof. Then the searchlight glass shattered and almost simultaneously two kneeling figures on the bow of the police boat, bill caps turned backward on their heads, began firing M-16 rifles on full automatic bullets off the deck rails, gear boxes, pots and pans and stove in the galley, scissored through the tin side of a bait well, and trapped Ray Fontenot helplessly against the back rail of the jugboat.

  He tried to crouch down behind the corner of the pilothouse, his mouth wide and pink with words that no one could hear. His fists were balled, his wrists crossed in an X in front of his eyes; then the bullets danced across his life jacket, split the canvas like dry blisters popping, and his throat and great heaving chest erupted with red flowers. His mouth hung open as though he had swallowed a chicken bone.

  I lay flat on the deck, my arms folded across the crown of my skull. Boggs was hunkered down behind the iron gear box that had held the crates of cocaine, and the M-16 rounds whanged off the top and the sides and sparked in the darkness. But he didn't wince. He kept firing, pumping the empty shell casings out on the deck, his body small and constricted with muscle like a rifleman's. His shotgun must have been loaded with double-aughts or deer slugs, because I could hear the damage to the police boat, the glass breaking, the hard slap of heavy shot across wood surfaces.

  Then the police boat veered back into the fog, turning into its own wake, but not before one of the kneeling figures on the bow emptied his clip and bit into the auxiliary gasoline drum welded against the jugboat's deck rail. The gasoline gushed across the deck and drained into the engine well. I don't know what ignited it—a spark jumping off a metal surface, shorted wiring, or an exploded starter battery—but suddenly the deck was flaming, the gas drum was ringed with fire; then it blew with a whoompth, like a large furnace kicking on deep in the bowels of a tenement building.

  I crawled across the deck, squeezed under the bottom rail, and rolled over the side. I could not see the police boat now, but before I dropped into the water I saw Jimmie Lee Boggs running for the stern, his hard, lean body silhouetted among the flames. Lionel was on his knees by the pilothouse, his hand pressed against a hemorrhaging wound in the center of his throat. His shoulders shook and convulsed as though he were trying to expel a piece of angle iron from his chest. He tried to catch Boggs's dungarees with his fingers as Boggs went past him. The back of Lionel's hand was scarlet and shining in the fire's light. But Boggs pulled the mooring line free, jumped from the stern rail onto the bow of his boat, and in seconds started the engine, opened the throttle full-out, and spun on the back of a breaking wave into the fog.

  I treaded water and drifted away from the jugboat. It was burning brightly now, from bow to stern, and when the anchor rope burned through, it floated sideways in the swell, and a big wave broke against the pilothouse and turned to steam. The water was cold and smelled of oil and gas. In the distance I could hear the thinning sound of Boggs's cabin cruiser and the police boat in pursuit. I tried to save my strength and float on my back, but each time I rose with a wave, the water broke across my mouth and nose, and I had to right my head and churn with my hands and feet again.

  The tide was coming in, and I couldn't swim against it to the oil platform. The Coast Guard was out there somewhere, but it had probably become occupied with the shrimper. The jugboat was only a red glow in the fog now. I heard another whoompth, a sound like boiling water, a rush of air bubbles, the hiss of steam rising from heated metal; the red glow died, and the fogbank was absolutely white.

  A few minutes later it began to rain again. The rain danced on the water, drummed on my head, beat in my ears. So this is how your death comes, I thought. You don't buy it with the enemies of your dreams—the black-clad toy men whose breath, even in your sleep, stunk of
fish; a psychotic killer of children who tried to push an ice pick behind your ear; the Vegas hit man who handcuffed you to a drainpipe, taped your mouth, and spoke compassionately to you about the means of your execution while you stared helplessly at the white threads of light in his vacuous blue eyes. Instead, you slip down into a cold green envelope beneath the roll and pitch of the waves; you drift and bump across the sandy Gulf floor, your clothes stringing bubbles to the surface, your eyes a feast for crabs and eels.

  Then the fog began to flatten on the water and break up into turning wisps and wraiths that hovered just above the waves, and the eastern sky went gray. A soft rose-colored light broke on the horizon, and I saw the quarter moon for the first time that night. Fifty yards away a round shape, like the back of an enormous seagoing turtle, floated in the swell. I swam to it, one long stroke at a time, breathing sideways, blowing water out my nose, until finally my hand struck the life jacket that was wrapped around the chest of Ray Fontenot.

  I had to roll him over to get to the laces. His body was strung with kelp, his skin blistered with burns and streaked with oil, his sightless eyes poached in his head. I jerked the jacket free and put my arms through the openings and felt the tension and ball of pain go out of my lower back as I was suddenly made weightless, bobbing along in a cresting wave that swept me toward the Louisiana shore.

  For a short time I fell asleep, then awoke to the sound of sea gulls, the shadows of pelicans gliding by overhead, the heavy, fecund smell that speckled trout make when they school up, the early sun like a red wafer over the long green roll of the Gulf.

  Five minutes later I heard an outboard engine, and I tried to wave my arms above the waves. Then he saw me and turned his engine so that he made a wide circle and approached me with the waves at his stern. It was a bass boat, a long, aluminum, flat-bottomed boat designed for freshwater fishing, not for weather or being any distance from land. The man sitting at an angle in the stern, with the throttle of an Evinrude in his hand, wore Marine Corps utility pants, a gold and purple LSU jersey with Mike the Tiger on the front, a pale blue porkpie hat mashed down on his big head.