But Kovick’s flake wasn’t working for him, either because it had been stepped on too many times or because Bertrand was so wired he could slam a gram and still not extinguish the fire in his stomach or stop the racing in his heart. When he came down the exit ramp into Algiers, he felt like he had stepped into an elevator shaft. A truck swerved around him, blowing its horn. A stop sign flew by him as though it had been suddenly planted on the edge of his vision. He reached again into the bag of blow and knocked it on the floor. Up ahead, a cop was waving cars past an accident scene. By the time he reached the street where Kovick’s flower shop was located, he was hyperventilating and thought he was going to pass out.
He parked at the end of the block. He could not remember when he had been this afraid. He tried to think of credible reasons for not going into the store. Two guys who looked like greaseballs were eating lunch at a table under an awning that extended out from the display window. How could he be expected to take on guys who killed people for a living? He could catch Kovick somewhere else, on an even playing field. It didn’t have to be here, it didn’t have to be today. There wasn’t any shame in using his head.
Secretly he knew the real enemy in his life was not Kovick but the fear that had been his companion in the darkness of his room and at every sunrise and at the breakfast table with his mother and on the school bus and in the school yard and in the crack house where he first got seriously wiped out and on the mattresses where he had screwed girls and performed acts that made him wonder if he was a degenerate. Fear was a gray balloon that floated from place to place, object to object, and each time he tried to confront it, it moved someplace else, transforming the most innocuous of situations into dilemmas that he would never confess to anyone else, lest they know him for the frightened man he was.
Now he was trying to run from the guy who had turned his life into a nightmare. Which was worse? he asked himself. To die here or to be chased and laughed at until Kovick’s people finally caught him and taped his mouth and carried him into a basement where Kovick would be waiting for him in a raincoat and rubber boots.
But the greaseballs stuffing their faces with sandwiches under the awning weren’t products of his imagination, he told himself. He’d never get past them. Even trying was like spitting in the lion’s mouth.
When he had almost convinced himself he had a legitimate reason for postponing his appointment in Samarra, the greaseballs finished eating, put their lunch trash in a paper sack, and drove away in a convertible.
Bertrand drove around the block twice, hoping a flood of customers would enter the shop, giving him a viable reason to head back to Houma. Instead, the sidewalk remained empty and no cars pulled to the curb. In fact, the flower shop seemed to have been created brick by brick without any tangential association to the world around it, like an island where Bertrand Melancon was destined to confront the face that had looked upon him with disdain and contempt all his life.
He stuck the .38 snub down in his belt, pulled his shirt over the checkered grips, and got out of the car. He thought he could feel the earth tilt sideways
.
Then he realized he had no plan. All the time he had been driving from Houma, his mind had been on recovering the .38 and the flake. When that was out of the way, he had immediately started figuring out ways to avoid confronting Kovick. Now he was in front of Kovick’s shop with his pud in his hand and no plan. What was he supposed to do? Go through the front door shooting? What if he missed? What if Kovick had a gun under the counter?
He walked to the end of the block and entered the alleyway that led behind the shop. Garbage cans lay on their sides on the asphalt and clusters of untrimmed banana trees rustled in the wind. The back door to the flower store was ajar. Bertrand could feel his chest constricting, his lungs burning as though someone had poured battery acid in them. He kept his right hand on his shirtfront so the wind wouldn’t expose the .38 and used his other hand to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He never thought anyone could be this afraid.
He pulled back the metal door and looked into the rear of the shop. A tall woman was standing at a worktable, talking on the phone. She smiled at him and motioned him inside by cupping her fingers at him.
He stared at her, befuddled. She must have thought he was a delivery man. Then another realization started to dawn on him: She was Kovick’s wife. She had been in the photograph with him in the Times-Picayune.
What better way to get even with Kovick than to cap his wife, he thought. That’s what Eddy would say, at least if Eddy had a mind to think with, if Eddy wasn’t just a sack of viscera attached to a feeding tube.
The woman replaced the phone receiver in the cradle. She was wearing a sundress and had broad shoulders that were tanned and strong-looking, like a countrywoman’s. “Are you here to pull the tile in the bathroom?”
“Ma’am?” he said.
“You’re not with the plumber?”
“I was looking for an address. I ain’t sure I got the right one.”
“What’s the address?”
He couldn’t think. The sound of his own blood roared in his ears. “The address where Mr. Kovick is at,” he said.
God, what had he just said?
“He’s out front. I’ll tell him you’re here. What’s your name?”
“You ain’t got to bother him. I’ll get my tools. They’re in the truck.”
“Wait just a minute,” she said. Then she was gone into the front of the shop.
He couldn’t decide whether to flee or to pull the .38 from his belt before Kovick came through the heavy felt curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back. A truck rattled past the back door onto the side street, and he almost jumped out of his skin. Then, like an apparition in a dream, Kovick pulled back the curtain and stared into his face. Kovick looked like the biggest man Bertrand had ever seen. “What’s the problem?” he said.
Bertrand’s mouth was so dry he almost swallowed his tongue when he tried to speak. “Ain’t no problem, suh,” he said, frozen in place, the thumb of his right hand hitched in his trouser pocket.
Kovick wore a beige suit with pale purple stripes in it and a lavender shirt and a tie that was the color of a pomegranate. His eyes contained a dark light, like obsidian, the focus in them unrelenting. “You here about the bathroom? Some of the pipes are right under the tiles, so you got to be careful how you pry them up. They’re old and it won’t take much to bust them.”
“I ain’t here about no bat’room,” Bertrand said.
“Then what do you want?” Sidney looked at him sideways as he lifted an empty vase out of a carton on the floor and partially filled it from a wall tap. He set the vase on the worktable and began sorting through an order book. “Did you hear me? What do you want, kid?”
Nothing, except your life, motherfucker, Bertrand heard a voice inside him say.