Assassin Hunter

by August Palumbo

  “Well, he’s breathing. I didn’t want to touch anything after I found out he was a Fed.”

  The driver’s side door was still open, and Lyle was sprawled face up across the front seat. He was fully dressed including a coat, but his clothes were wrinkled. His hair was disheveled and he needed a shave. I leaned into the car, which was filled with the strong smell of alcohol. I checked his pulse, and was relieved when he grunted as I shook him. I found a room key in his hip pocket, and Paul helped me slide the big guy across the seat. He was unable to sit or stand up, so we propped him up between us, pulled his arms around our shoulders, and carried him like an injured football player to his room. We dumped him across the bed, and Paul agreed to stay with him another minute.

  I returned to Lyle’s G-car and removed his papers, notepads, binoculars, and the backup handgun that he kept in the glove compartment, then locked the car and secured his things in the room. Paul watched patiently as I removed Lyle’s coat and belt. I turned to him and said, “Thanks, man. What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing, really. I’m just glad he’s all right and I didn’t have to call ATF about this. Are you an ATF agent too?”

  “No,” I laughed, “I’m his brother-in-law.” Paul nodded and I knew he bought the lie. “You might have saved his job. Can we repay you?” I took a large roll of bills from my pocket. He stared at the money, but politely refused with a negative wave of his hands.

  “I hate to see cops get in trouble, even Feds. The press beats up on them, the bad guys beat up on them, the hippies call them pigs and spit in their face. Lyle seemed like a nice guy so he deserved a break.”

  I couldn’t let him leave without finding out if he had learned anything about me, or the investigation, from Lyle. He explained that they had a friendly conversation in French in the lounge, and he didn’t even know what Lyle did for a living until he found him passed out in the car.

  “I can’t check on him later,” Paul said, “because I have a six o’clock wakeup for a morning sales call.”

  “No problem, he’ll be zonked out well past that. Thanks again.” Satisfied that he was a genuine Good Samaritan, one incidentally with lots of savvy, I showed him the door and accepted his business card. I took Lyle’s shoes off, unstrapped his shoulder holster containing the semi-automatic pistol with the ATF badge embossed on the side plate, and placed a blanket over him. I gave him a final jostle and was assured that he was simply plastered when he released a foul, liquor-laden belch. I scribbled a brief note for him to find under his car keys:

  Call me when you find out where you are.

  Love, Tony

  On the drive back to Lafayette, I hop-scotched the Camaro through more fuel tankers and thought about the chink in Lyle’s armor. I dismissed thoughts about him drinking when I might need him. After all, he wasn’t a backup partner in the pure sense of the term, somebody to respond quickly if I needed help. Working under, there’s no such thing – you’re out in the cold. You survive with nothing except your own wits and ability. For now, Lyle’s faux pas would be overlooked. I figured he was entitled to an occasional social error, considering the years of stress he had suffered under sometimes impossible conditions. Despite the transgressions, like an old fire horse he always answered the call. Yet, neither of us needed heat from the Internal Affairs headhunters who surely would have been dispatched to dispense their own brand of justice, had Archambeau not befriended him. We could ill afford to have them running around Acadiana flashing badges to build a trite personnel case. I would surely talk to Lyle about it in the right place and at the right time.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  I spent a lot of time at the track and in The Gallop, trying to make contact with Frank Duplessis or Luke Trombatore, without success. It was possible that Trombatore was only in town passing through, and Lyle’s check of the police agencies was negative for any current intelligence on him. His last recorded surveillance had been an FBI stakeout of the Glass Slipper in New Orleans two months earlier, which disclosed nothing except that a couple of FBI agents made a few hours overtime watching the place.

  Early one evening when the track was closed T-Red met me at The Gallop. One of his army of cousins was having a large crawfish boil, a Cajun custom of steaming the small lobster-like crustaceans and consuming them in large quantities, along with equally large quantities of beer. He had invited me the day before. We met for a drink before heading to the party. We sat at the bar when Ritmo walked over, and after his usual friendly greeting his face turned serious as he addressed me. “I’ll bring your drink over to the booth. You can have yours here, Red.”

  “What’s up, Ritmo?” I asked.

  “Just follow me.”

  Ritmo mixed my drink and motioned for the other bartender to handle things behind the bar. I followed him to one of the private booths in the darker section of the club. He set my drink on the table and sat down opposite me on the black vinyl seat. There was anxiety in his voice, which initially made me uneasy. I thought I had gained his confidence, so I wondered if he was going to warn me about some impending danger. I wondered if my cover was blown, and sat quietly and listened. Ritmo got straight to the point.

  “I’ve got a piece of the action on a deal if I can make it fly. You know anything about bonds and securities?”

  “Why, Ritmo? You want to invest in the stock market?” I managed a slight smile but Ritmo wasn’t laughing.

  “Very fucking funny,” he growled.

  There was a second of silence between us, then I squared up my look at Ritmo and said, “I might know something about that. What’s the play?”

  “I’ve got access to some stuff, supposed to be negotiable paper, big numbers. The seller wants fifty cents on the dollar. Are you interested?”

  “There’s all kinds of paper, Ritmo. It depends on what you’ve got. I’ll have to see the stuff or at least a sample. Then we can talk.”

  “Tony, this is no chicken-shit deal. How big a bite can you take?”

  “Are you fucking deaf, Ritmo? I told you it depends on what you've got. If I can’t handle it or I’m not interested, I’ll pass.”

  My answer was calculated to put him on the spot, but I knew it did the same for me. If we went any further, I would get to look at the securities. If he refused to show them to me, the opportunity was lost.

  “Okay, I have to make a phone call. Sit tight.”

  Ritmo left the booth and I noticed that he didn’t go to his phone behind the bar to make the call. He walked into Cliff Dubroc’s office. T-Red took an occasional glance my way and I could see that he was more than inquisitive about what was happening. He carried his beer over to my booth and sat down.

  “What are you bastards cutting me out of?”

  “I thought you wanted less involvement Red, not more.”

  “Not when I smell money. Just keep me in mind if I can get a little piece of it.”

  “No chance.”

  My senses heightened as Ritmo came out of the office accompanied by Cliff Dubroc. They approached the booth, and in French Ritmo told T-Red to get lost. I had heard the phrase enough during my time in the area to pick up its meaning. T-Red got up and returned to the bar. Ritmo and Cliff sat down next to each other, opposite me in the booth. My booth was now getting the traffic that others had gotten during the past weeks. I guessed what deals and schemes had been hatched on those vinyl seats. Ritmo spoke the simplest of all introductions in low volume.

  “Tony, Cliff.”

  The professorial-looking pimp extended his hand over the table and gave me a weak, clammy handshake. Cliff’s speech betrayed his academic appearance. He spoke in a very thick Cajun brogue and I had trouble understanding some words, even after I had heard the accent daily for weeks.

  “What do you know about this shit, Tony?”

  “You want me to scope it out for you or are you looking for a buyer?”

  “Maybe both.”

  I didn’t know if Cliff had the securitie
s and wanted to sell them, or if he was the buyer and needed expertise to judge their authenticity and value. In order to gain sight of them, I made sure to let him know I was interested either way.

  “I need to see the merchandise to know if the paper is real and not counterfeit, and to tell if they’re negotiable.”

  Cliff peered through his wire-rimmed glasses and said, “Come back at eleven o’clock tonight.” He rose from his seat and went back to his office. I had set up a possible buy of stolen securities with a man who had said less than a dozen words to me.

  “What end are you working, Ritmo?”

  “Cliff’s. I won’t put the bite on you, Tony, but maybe if the deal goes well you’ll throw me a bone. I just need to make it happen.”

  “What kind of paper is it? Where is it from?”

  “Fuck if I know. I haven’t seen it and wouldn’t know what it was if I had.” Ritmo was being honest with me. I found it interesting that a convicted killer like him was now brokering a securities transaction, although to him it was just another piece of swag with a bigger price tag.

  T-Red and I drove through sparsely populated evergreen country roads to Church Point, a small town in the heart of Acadiana named for its ancestral village in Nova Scotia. It was dark by the time we approached a small house at the end of a dirt road sprinkled with old oyster shells, which the Cajuns use instead of gravel to keep the road from washing out during rains. Spotlights were mounted on the rear of the house, which illuminated the large back and side yards. About thirty cars and pickups were parked to one side of the house, and a hundred or so people milled around two long, narrow tables covered with old newspapers. The tables were piled high with several mounds of bright red crawfish releasing steam into the cool night air. Mixed in with the crawfish were small red potatoes, ears of corn, large onions, and whole garlic cloves that had been boiled in with the crawfish for flavor.

  Several men attended a large stainless steel pot the size of an oil drum that was heated by a gas grill connected to a large propane gas tank. A tall, rotund man stirred the pot with a large paddle, an oar from a pirogue. Occasionally the man whistled, and a teenage boy would submerge a large metal bucket with a perforated bottom into the pot and extract the crawfish. Each time, a large cloud of steam released from the bucket as he hauled it over to the tables and dumped another pile of the miniature lobsters onto the old newspaper. The guests stood around the tables and peeled the coarse shells and sucked the heads from the crawfish to draw out the flavored seasoning. Every bite seemed to require a swig of cold beer from plastic cups, which were constantly replenished by a keg set in a large, galvanized, old-time washtub filled with block ice.

  A standard Cajun band consisting of a fiddle, small accordion, bass, and drum played while an octogenarian sang in French. Most of the people held loud conversations in French, laced with an occasional English word or phrase. T-Red introduced me to his cousin, who was the host.

  “Meet Gaston, the biggest liar in the world,” he said. The large man who had been boiling the crawfish smiled broadly and exposed a missing front tooth.

  “You like crawfish, monami?” Gaston asked.

  “I’ve had them before, thanks. Nice party.”

  “Hell, we do this all the time. Let me get back to the pot.”

  “What’s the occasion, Red?”

  He frowned as if I should know better than to ask. “Cajuns don’t need reason to have a Fais-Do-Do. We celebrate births, deaths, weddings, good shrimp seasons, winning a horse race, or sometimes just the weather, even if it’s bad.”

  It was now just past winter and the nights were quite pleasant. This one was no exception. Several couples clapped and danced to the whining sound of the band. Children danced with old folks, and teenagers embraced as they did the simple but ancient Cajun line dance. For me the crawfish boil was a welcome diversion from the mental gymnastics of the case. I enjoyed the simplicity and good-natured fun around me and was pleasantly surprised at the genuine, warm welcome I received from everyone. T-Red goaded me into trying my hand at eating crawfish. Although they are plentiful in New Orleans, I had never taken a liking to them.

  “Have some mud bugs, Tony.”

  “Mud bugs?”

  “Yeah, that’s what we call them. They burrow into the mud in the swamps.”

  I did my best to peel the hard shells away and eat the meaty tails, which were actually quite tasty, but I refrained on the custom of sucking the heads. I did have a couple of beers which, on top of the earlier drink at The Gallop, gave me a slight buzz. A petite, elderly woman no more than five feet tall approached me. She had short, silver-blue hair in small curls. Her faced carried the lined wrinkles and crow’s feet around the eyes that seemed to be a trait among the old people in the area. She spoke to me in French and I looked over at T-Red for a translation, which soon wasn’t needed when she extended her arms to me, an invitation to dance. I took her hands and followed her lead, and we bounced to the staccato rhythm of the Zydeco accordion. She smiled the whole time we danced. I found myself smiling also, and enjoyed the experience as the old lady chattered constantly to me, either not aware or not caring that I didn’t understand a word of what she said. I burst out into laughter as the thought came over me that lessons in Cajun dance might be a worthwhile course to teach undercover agents.

  Our dance was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder in the manner of an old-fashioned dance cut-in. I turned around to see Cheri standing with her arms extended toward me. The little old lady immediately loosened her grasp on my hands and stepped back. She motioned for me to dance with Cheri, and blushed without stopping her chatter. Cheri stepped into the woman’s spot. I continued my clumsy rendition of the dance with her. When the band took a break, we sat on a large ice chest, had a beer together, and I asked about her daughter. Cheri lit a cigarette and took a long drag from it.

  “She’s fine now, Tony, great thanks to you. I’d like you to meet her.”

  She took me by the hand like I was a schoolboy and led me to another older woman holding a child on her knee. The little girl was about a year old, with bright blue eyes, fair skin, and long, blonde ringlets. Her face was a smaller, duplicate copy of Cheri’s.

  “This is Monique.”

  I got down on one knee to be eye-level with her and smiled. “You’re so pretty, Monique, just like your mother.” I knew the child wasn’t old enough to understand but I said it for Cheri’s benefit. Cheri gave me that same half-embarrassed, half-proud look I had seen at our initial meeting. Something about it reminded me of that first night, of The Gallop, and about my real business. I was in this place because it was my job, not because I was there to socialize. My mind jerked back and focused on my meeting with Cliff Dubroc in the next hour. I told Cheri I had to leave.

  “You have somebody better to dance with?”

  “In fact, I do.”

  She gave me a puzzled and disbelieving look. I then winked and nodded towards the old lady who had asked me to dance. Cheri let out a long, protracted laugh, then folded her arms and gave me a businesslike look. “I thought we might finish the night dancing in private,” she said.

  I was stunned for a brief moment, unprepared for the proposition. I took Cheri's hand and began dancing as the band played a slow number. She snuggled her small, soft body very close to me as we moved to the music and for a minute I drifted into the moment. T-Red’s timing couldn’t have been better as he pried my shoulder away from her and stuck his head between us. He spoke to Cheri.

  “We got business to take care of. You can play with Tony some other time.”

  She looked disappointed, but T-Red’s interruption gave credence to my dodging her, and, in fact, saved me from having to come up with an excuse without insulting her. We thanked Gaston for the food and hospitality, then drove away from Church Point. My enjoyment of the temporary relief from the case was cut short by T-Red’s bitching. He wanted to return with me to The Gallop.

  “Let me in on the deal, will you?�
�

  “Forget it, Red.”

  We got near the club and I switched gears mentally to prepare for the meeting with Cliff and Ritmo. I reached under the car seat and retrieved my handgun, which I had stashed there before the party. I secured it in the familiar place in my waistband, and hoped that I hadn’t slept through too many classes on securities during my days at the academy.

  The Gallop was rather crowded by the time I arrived. Ritmo was busy behind the bar so I had to wait a few minutes for my drink. As he put it down in front of me he leaned over and said, “Wait a few minutes. Be cool.”

  “I’m always cool, Ritmo.”

  Ten minutes later, Cliff Dubroc stood in the doorway of his office with his hands in his pockets. This was the first time I had seen him in the club at night. He stood there quietly for a couple of minutes, surveying the action in the club. I knew that he was also looking for anyone that looked like the heat, as well as whether I had brought anybody with me. He removed his hands from his pockets and went back into the office after nodding at Ritmo. Ritmo then gave a small wave at me to follow him and led me into Cliff’s office. Then he immediately left and closed the door behind him. When he did, a confident feeling came over me. Ritmo knew that I usually carried a gun, yet he had not checked or disarmed me before bringing me in. I now knew for sure that I was accepted.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  The office was small and cramped. There was a low ceiling of tiles and a single fluorescent light above the desk. An old, large, well-used standup safe stood in one corner behind the desk. An equally old metal file cabinet occupied the other corner. There was a small credenza alongside the wall that matched the old file cabinet. The only semblance of opulence was the large cherry wood desk Cliff Dubroc sat behind. The desk and credenza were covered with sports and racehorse magazines thrown randomly on top of them. The walls were covered almost completely with victory photos of racehorses, some of the pictures yellowed with age and mostyellowed from cigarette smoke. Sparse patches of dark paneling peeked through the wallpaper of photos. Cliff Dubroc was in most of them.