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“Looks like you managed to stay off the computer.”

He worked his wrist inside the cuff.

“I'm maxing out here on this situation, chief,” he said.

“Don't call me that again.”

“You ever fish with a Dupont special, blow fish up into the trees? You cut to the chase, that's how it gets done. Who you think runs this country?”

“Why don't you clear that up for me?”

14 o

“You're a smart guy. Don't make like you ain't.”

“I see. You and your friends do?”

He smiled painfully. “You got you a good routine. I bet the locals dig it.”

Through my window I saw the sheriff, Kelso, and the night man from the jail out in the hall. They were watching Emile Pogue. Kelso's eyes were distorted to the size of oysters behind his thick glasses. He and the night man shook their heads.

“We selling tickets? What's going on?” Pogue said.

“You ever work CID or get attached to a federal law enforcement agency?” I said.

“No.”

“Somebody with insider experience kidnapped a man out of our jail. They murdered him out at Lake Martin.”

His laugh was like the cough of a furnace deep under a tenement building.

“Don't tell me, the black guy looking out of the fishbowl has got to be the jailer,” he said.

Kelso and the night man went down the hall. The sheriff opened my door and put his head inside.

“See me on your way out, Dave,” he said, and closed the door again.

“It doesn't look like you're our man,” I said.

“I got no beef, long as we get this thing finished .. . What you writing there?”

“Not much. Just a speculation or two.” I propped the legal pad on the edge of the desk and looked down at it. “How's this sound? You probably enlisted when you were a kid, volunteered for a lot of elite units, then got into some dirty stuff over in ”Nam, the Phoenix Program maybe, going into Charlie's ville at night, slitting his throat in his sleep, painting his face yellow for his wife to find in the morning, you know the drill.“

He laughed again, then pinched the front of his shirt with his fingers and shook it to cool himself. I could see the lead fillings in his molars, a web of saliva in his mouth.

”Then maybe you went into poppy farming with the Hmongs over in Laos.

Is that a possibility, Emile?“

”You like cold beer? At the White Rose they had it so cold it'd make your throat ache. You could get ice-cold beer and a blow job at the same time, that's no jive. You had to be up for it, though, know what I'm saying?“

”You should have gone out to Washington State,“ I said.

”I'm a little slow this evening, you got to clue me.“

”That's where your kind end up, right, either in a root cellar in the Cascades or fucking up other people's lives in Third World countries.

You shouldn't have come here, Emile.“ I tore off the page on my legal pad, which contained a list of items I needed for the bait shop and couldn't afford, and threw it in the wastebasket. Then I unlocked his cuffed wrist from the D-ring.


Tags: James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux Mystery