Rourke smiled.
It still wasn't going to rain. It could get like that in New Orleans sometimes, when the black clouds stacked up one on top of another, pressing down on your head, and the heat built up inside you until it felt like your blood was about to start boiling in your veins, and it still wasn't going to rain.
Hell on earth, Daman Rourke had always known, was a state of mind of your own creation, but if you were of a mind to turn the abstract into the physical, then hell on earth would be a slaughterhouse. A slaughterhouse in New Orleans on a July evening, when it should have rained but wasn't going to.
They stunned the cows before they killed them by hitting them on top of the head with a sledgehammer. You could hear the cows hit the floor, hear their legs thrashing about, and sometimes they screamed.
They would hang the cows from great hooks to butcher them, sending them upside down on conveyor belts to men in aprons stiff with gore, who hacked into the beasts with curved knives that were black and pitted from use. They would cut the jugular first, and the hot blood would spray in great fountain arcs, then slow to a trickle, and then an ooze. The butchers would slit the cow open from crotch to throat, then, and the knife would cut through hide and muscle and fat and bone with a ripping sound. Glistening white and pink guts would spill out onto the killing floor, blood would run in the gutters, and the smell of death would be strong.
It was from a small, glass-enclosed office in such a place that Casey Maguire ran his many businesses. The legal ones, like the slaughterhouse itself, and the illegal: the racketeering and the bootlegging. Maguire wasn't by nature a terribly cruel and sadistic man, but he understood that by bringing a man within the sight and smell of blood and death and butchery you put him face-to-face with fear. Being cut, hacked into pieces, sliced up, bleeding, dying in terrible pain—it was primal, this sort of fear.
Rourke didn't even notice the bloody carcasses as they swung past him and Fio on their creaky hooks. He saw only Casey Maguire, who was standing outside his glass-paned office that overlooked the killing floor, talking to a man in a bloodied butcher's apron. The taste in Rourke's mouth was the cold, oily metal of a gun barrel. His blood was singing a long, high, blue note, and the world had taken on a heightened clarity, all sharp edges and bright colors and pulsating movements.
Paddy Boyle and four more rodmen were hanging about inside the glass-walled office, playing cards around a large gray metal desk. They glanced up to take mild note of the cops' presence and then went back to their game.
The floor beneath Rourke's feet vibrated with the racket made by the conveyor belt. A cow squealed in its death throes. Even with the giant fans blowing, it was hot as misery.
Rourke thought his fury was a living, breathing thing, but then Casey Maguire turned his head and their gazes met, and for a flash of a moment a look crossed over the other man's face; Rourke tasted sweet sacramental wine and felt the dizzying motion of a Ferris wheel.
Rourke made a staying motion with his hand telling Fio to hang back, and he went to meet Casey Maguire alone, halfway across the killing floor Rourke had filled his smile with good-ol'-boy charm, but now his horizon kept tilting, and he was feeling that queasiness again, like a seasickness.
“Hey, Case,” he said. “How's your day goin'?”
Maguire's mouth held a faint answering smile, but that white light was in the backs of his eyes. “It was going fine until you bad-ass cops came 'round to roust me again. What is it that I'm supposed to've done this time?”
Rourke kept his smile as his gaze went over the other man's head to the pair of skinning vats. He watched, seemingly fascinated, as a beef carcass swung around on its hook and plunged into the scalding water with a loud hiss.
He brought his gaze back to Maguire's face, so that he could watch the man's eyes. He felt the tension building inside him, like a fall off a high wire—a long, thin scream.
“I came here to tell you you're a lying son of a bitch,” Rourke said. “And that you killed your brother.”
Maguire's eyelids flickered as his gaze slanted away. “Jesus, have you started blowin' the snow again? I told you how it was Vinny who killed him. Whatever new story you're peddling now, I don't think you're going to be getting a lot of takers.”
Rourke smiled again. “I can try Al Capone. Give him my story along with a brand-new ball bat to play with.”
A muscle flexed hard behind Maguire's jawbone, as if he'd suddenly bit down on a nut with his back teeth, but the gaze he turned back to Rourke was full of an odd bewilderment. “Always the goddamn cop, Day. Why couldn't you have just let it alone?”
Rourke stared back at this man who once, long ago, had been his friend, whom he'd once loved like a brother. “Because they matter,” he said. “Bobby Joe, Sean, Vinny, Charles St. Claire…our Bridey. The dead matter.”
“Bridey.” Maguire's eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened Rourke saw genuine anguish in their depths. “Bridey was never supposed to have happened—the Chicago outfit did that. What I told you was the truth. Except for the part about why I had to kill Vinny.”
“And the part you left out about you killing Bobby Joe because he was the one skimming the club's gate receipts and fixing fights.”
Paddy Boyle had left the glass-enclosed office but he was hanging back, waiting to see if the boss needed him. Rourke spared him a glance and then brought his attention back to Maguire. He was aware of Fio's presence behind him, ready, but still far enough back to allow the bootlegger to feel unthreatened.
“Vinny was my bone,” Rourke said. “You fixed it so his body would be found because I wasn't leaving Bobby Joe's murder alone. You wanted me to think you'd killed Vinny, but for the wrong reason—that you'd done it in revenge for your brother. Lafamille. You knew you'd never stand trial for a murder like that in this town, and you were always more scared, anyway, of Al Capone and the Chicago outfit finding out how you'd let your little brother steal 'em blind.”
Maguire's head snapped back a little with the sudden hard clenching of his fists, and Rourke heard Fio stir, coming a couple of steps closer. “The stupid little fuck. We had it made and he was about to blow it with a nickel-and-dime con.”
“Yeah, y'all sure can't say that crime don't pay down here in N'Awlins,” Rourke said, drawling the words.
Maguire actually laughed. He looked down and saw that his fists were still clenched and he relaxed them, spreading his long fingers out wide. “Would you believe I never killed anybody before Bobby? Maybe if I'd had more practice, I'd've known not to do it in front of witnesses, 'cause then it gets to be like fucking dominos. That nigger and Vinny see me do it, and that nigger tells two cops, and the next thing I know I got a fucking payroll of guys I'm buying off to keep quiet about what they know.”
“And then they got greedy,” Rourke said.
“Sean got greedy. Vinny got hopped up to the eyeballs and then he got scared. That prick Roibin Doherty offered to get rid of them for me, and he was too stupid to figure out that once he did that he had to be the next to go. Fucking dominos.”
A smile, part irony and part mean, pulled at the bootlegger's mouth as he looked at Rourke, and he shook his head as if there were no surprises left. “But smart as you are, I don't think you'd have found your way here without help. I'll bet I owe that all to your little childhood sweetheart, Remy Lelourie.”
The horizon tilted beneath Rourke's feet. He fought, putting it right by sheer force of will. “What does she have to do with it?”
Maguire smiled and shook his head again. “I'm surprised at you, Day, that, knowing her as you do, you wouldn't think to wonder who she was screwing once her marriage was over. As small as New Orleans is, we were bound to find each other, don't you think? Me and the Cinderella Girl? That way, I could fuck fame and she could fuck trouble.”
The horizon tilted again, hard, and Rourke had to blink the dizziness out of his eyes. “You're lying,” he said.
“Am I? One day we're lying in bed toge
ther, Remy Lelourie and I, and she's got this wild look in her eyes and this humming going on inside her that's like a live electrical wire. Does that sound like the Remy Lelourie we both know? So she dares me to tell her the worst thing I've ever done, and like a chump I say I killed my brother. Then I ask her what was her worst thing, and she says loving Daman Rourke.”
The edge was rushing at Rourke now, like a freight train roaring. A part of him was aware that Paddy Boyle was coming toward them at last, and he could hear Fio's breathing, smell Fio's sweat, as the other cop closed the distance between them, coming up now to stand beside him.
Maguire spread his hands out from his sides and took a step back. “She's been setting us up,” he said. “Playing us one against the other, Day. Can't you see it?”
Paddy Boyle had brought his tommy gun with him, but he stopped to lean it up against the wall of the skinning vats, which meant that he, at least, still wasn't expecting trouble. The .45- caliber Thompson submachine gun, with its fifty-round drum magazine, had the weight of a sledgehammer and was a pain in the ass to lug around.
“Setting us up…setting it all up,” Maguire was saying, backing another step. “I take the fall, you bring me down. And she's home free.”
Paddy Boyle scratched a match on a piece of sandpaper that was tacked to the wall and lit a cigarette. He flipped the match into a puddle of blood and it hissed as it hit. He turned and his gaze met Rourke's, then skittered away. Boyle's face looked bad—swollen and crisscrossed with black stitches, his mouth purple and blood-blistered, his front teeth broken off jagged like an alligator's.
“Don't do this, Day,” Maguire said. “Don't do it.”
Rourke put his hands in his pockets slow and easy. He heard Fio take a step behind him and he shifted sideways, closer to the skinning vats.
He smiled. “Hey, Paddy. I sure did a good job of making you ugly. Didn't I do a good job of it, Fio?”
“Ugly as a hog's butt,” Fio said.
Rourke could feel Maguire's eyes clicking back and forth now between him and Fio, but he kept his gaze focused on Boyle. “Ugly as a jailhouse rat.”
The only thing that surprised Rourke was that the man tried to hit him with the flat of his hand, a slap, the way a woman would. He caught Boyle's swinging arm at the wrist and brought his own right hand out of his pocket and with it a small leather bag filled with lugs and ball bearings. He brought his arm up from his side, hard, thrusting the whole weight of his body behind the blow, and smashed the sack of lugs and ball bearings square into Boyle's already wasted face. He felt and heard the bone and cartilage in the man's nose collapse and the rest of his teeth break off with a noise like sticks popping.
The force of the blow knocked Boyle sideways into Fio, who grabbed him around the neck by his tie, swinging him up and around, using him as a shield, just as one of the rodmen burst out the door of the office with his tommy gun blazing.
The first of the .45 slugs caught Boyle in the small of the back and stitched a line up his spine to his head as the tommy gun's muzzle rose into the air, lifted by the back-thrust of the firing rounds. Boyle's body jerked like a marionette, and then his head exploded.
Casey Maguire had drawn a hogleg from the small of his back as he screamed Rourke's name, and Rourke was down on the floor, rolling toward the skinning vats, ripping his .38 Special from his shoulder holster, firing, and three red blossoms exploded on Maguire's chest.
Rourke came back out on the other side of the skinning vats at a run and snatched up the tommy gun from where it still leaned against the wall, his hand wrapping around the pistol grip, his finger squeezing the trigger, even as he was bringing it up, aiming it at the goon framed in the office doorway, and the man danced as the .45 slugs tore through his chest and guts and blood misted in a cloud.
The other rodmen had taken coverbehind the wall beneath the windows and the metal desk. Fio fired his .38 frombehind the shield of a beef carcass, while Rourke kept his finger on the trigger, and the heavy machine gun rattled his whole body, and the explosions roared in his ears like a cannon going off.
The rounds hit and blew out the windows. Flying shards of glass and metal and splinters of wood zinged and ricocheted off the walls. The men in the office fired back, and their slugs bounced off the metal skinning vats and slammed into the meat carcasses with loud twacking noises, and the air filled with divots of bloody meat and gore.
There was such a tornado of noise and devastation that it took Rourke a moment to realize that the hammer on the tommy gun was falling on an empty chamber. He felt rather than heard a movement behind him.
He whirled just as a giant of a man in a bloody leather apron rose up from behind the second skinning vat. Rourke saw the maw of an old Colt Peacemaker point at his face and it seemed that at any moment he would see the hammer falling and the bullet coming at him from out of the bore.
Rourke threw the tommy gun at the butcher's face and the man ducked sideways, just as one of the gaping, bloodied carcasses came along the conveyor belt and swung from its meat hook, slamming into the butcher's back. The man's Colt fired, the bullet passing so close to Rourke's head he felt it lift his hair—and the butcher tipped forward, into the scalding vat.
The man shot back up out of the boiling water like a geyser, screaming, thrashing, and Fio shot him in the face.
The slaughterhouse fell into an eerie silence then, but for the tinkle of falling glass and the hiss of steam from the water leaking out of one of the vats onto the bloodied floor, the creak of the conveyor belt that still swung around overhead.
“Give it up, boys,” Fio called out to whoever of the rodmen might still be left alive in the office.
He was met with silence, a piece of wood settling, and then the crackle of more falling glass as something came flying through the shattered window, to hit the floor and roll slowly toward them.
A Chicago pineapple.
Rourke had already pushed up onto his feet and was running toward it, his feet slipping and skidding in the puddles of blood, and bullets dancing and pinging around him like hail. He heard Fio scream “Shit!” and then the firing of Fio's .38, giving him cover. No sooner did Rourke's hand close around the grenade than he was throwing it back through the office window and hitting the floor, covering his ears with his hands. The small bomb exploded as it hit the desk, ripping through the metal with a sound like a tearing scream.
A scream that fell into a deafening silence as the world was filled with the smell of cordite and smoke and bloody, butchered meat. Cow and man.
Time hung suspended for a moment, and then they heard the slap of running feet from outside and the whoop-whoop of sirens. Rourke met Fio's eyes across the killing floor. Fio's face was filmed with cow's blood, and his sandy hair was sticking straight up in stiff tufts. His eyes were so distended they were white all around the edges.
“Are you happy now?” Fio said, his voice croaking.
Rourke didn't answer, for he was scooting now at a crouch over the bloody, littered floor. He knelt beside Casey Maguire and tried to close the holes in the man's chest with his hands.
Case's eyes fluttered open and focused on his. “I swear it on the blue star,” he said, the words thick bloody bubbles on his lips. “I didn't kill Charles St. Claire. The bitch set us up, Day. She set me up to take the fall.”
Rourke pressed his hands into the wounds. The blood ran through his fingers, but then after a while it stopped.
He stood and walked across the slaughterhouse killing floor toward the open door, which showed black, heavy clouds settling into a hot night. It still wasn't going to rain.
Chapter Thirty-Two
LUCILLE WAS OUT ON THE DECK OF THE HOUSEBOAT, taking down the wash that was hanging from a line strung between the outriggers. She was smiling as she watched him walk up the gangplank, until she got a look at his face, at the blood that was all over him.
He stood before her, his hands hanging useless, thick at his sides. He could feel his face hardening in
preparation for being able to bear himself what he was about to do to her, and he wanted to stop it, but he couldn't. He stood before her and destroyed her life with words, and there was no way of doing it without pain.
She listened, staring at his face, and her own face was empty, barren. “You did this,” she said.
He looked back at her, and once again there were no words left for him. He couldn't say how he had done it, but he knew he had.
She stood with her hands fisted at her sides, and then she threw her head back as if she were screaming, although she made no sound.
He went to her and touched her, and her face shattered. He tried to gather her up against his chest as she fought him, beating at him with her fists, and she made a noise like a rag tearing, a sound that broke into words he couldn't understand, and then he did.
“You killed him, Day. LeRoy loved you, and you killed him.”
Somehow he got his arms around her and he held her tight, as if they both might die there on a hot summer's evening on the Bayou St. John.
Rourke lay on the bed in the dark, with his shoes off and his shirt unbuttoned, a whiskey glass resting on his naked belly. It was his own bed, and he was alone in it.
The heat still beat relentlessly through the night. He'd gone from the houseboat out to the swamp, to break the news to LeRoy's grandmama and his brother, LeBeau, and then to the station house before he had been able to come home, and all the while he was smelling the death and blood on himself. He could see it too, without even having to close his eyes. Slices of it in frozen, three-dimensional images, like photographs in a stereoscope.
Red blossoms bursting open on Casey Maguire's chest. A fly crawling around LeRoy's open and bloody mouth. LeRoy, lying dead in a field of sugarcane, who didn't look like he'd ever been alive.
Remy with tears and tenderness both in her eyes, looking into his eyes, and lying, lying, lying.
We had lit the candles in the sconces by the fireplace and he held up his glass and looked at the light through the champagne, like you do, to see the bubbles, and he laughed and said something about Cain having a lot to answer for.
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