by Robert Crais
“I’m supposed to meet a guy here. What time you open?”
“ ’Bout five, give or take. Who you lookin’ by?” She gave me a loose smile. She was maybe forty-five, but looked older, with rubbery skin pulled tight by all the smiling. The Hispanic guy stopped working to look at us.
“Oh, just a friend.” Mr. Mysterious.
“You keepin’ it a big secret or what, sug? I’m here all the time.” When she said it she noticed the Hispanic guy and snapped at him. “Don’t just stand there, goddammit! Put that stuff away! Endelay!” The Hispanic guy spun back to his work with a vengeance. I wasn’t sure if he understood what had been said to him, but he understood that she was pissed. The Clairol Queen flipped her hand at him, disgusted. “These spics are somethin’. Gimme a good nigger any day.”
I said, “A guy named LeRoy Bennett said I could find him here.”
She went back to the smiling and folded herself against the bar. It was probably a pose that played well with the older guys after a dozen or so beers. “Oh, yeah. LeRoy’s here all the time. I can take a message, you want.”
“Nah. I’m on my way to Biloxi. I’ll catch him on the way back.”
I went back to the car and climbed in beside Pike. “They open at five. LeRoy’s here all the time.”
“Who could blame him?”
We drove up the road for a mile and a half, then turned around and went back. One hundred yards past the bait shop I eased onto the shoulder, and Pike got out with his duffel and moved into the trees. I drove on for maybe another four hundred yards until I found a gravel timber road running across a plank bridge, and pulled off. I locked the car, then trotted back to the bait shop. By the time I got back Pike was inside and set up, watching the bar through a clean spot he’d made on the dusty plate glass.
The Bayou Lounge might have opened at five, but no one showed up until six, and then it was mostly younger guys with deep tans and ball caps, looking like they had just gotten off work and wanted to have a couple of cold ones before heading home. Someone cranked up the Rockola at nine minutes before seven, and we could hear Doug Kershaw singing in French.
Pike and I made cold sandwiches and drank Diet Coke and watched the people come and go, but none of them were Milt Rossier or LeRoy Bennett or even René LaBorde. Crime might have been rampant, but if it was, we didn’t see it.
The bait shop was an empty cinder-block shell containing the remnants of a counter and a couple of freestanding shelves and a cement floor. We sat on the floor, surrounded by the odd-cut piece of plywood and about a million rat pellets. Everything was covered with a thick layer of heretofore undisturbed dust, and everything smelled of mildew. “Just think, Joe, some guys have to wear a tie and punch a time clock.”
Pike didn’t answer.
At 8:15 that night, seven cars were parked in the oyster shell lot and maybe a dozen people were inside the Bayou Lounge, but Milt Rossier and LeRoy Bennett were not among them. Pike rarely spoke, and there wasn’t a great deal to do in our watching, and I found myself thinking of Lucy, wondering where she was and what she was doing, seeing her in her office, seeing her on the couch in her family room, seeing her snuggled with Ben watching Star Trek. After a while I got tired of all the thinking about it and tried to stop, but then I thought that maybe I could walk across to the Bayou and use the pay phone to call her. Of course, if I did, ol’ Milt and LeRoy would probably amble in at exactly that time. It’s one of those laws of nature. Pike said, “You deserve someone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ms. Chenier.”
I stared at him. Do you think he reads minds? “We enjoy each other’s company.”
He nodded.
“I like her and she likes me. It’s nothing more or less than that.”
He nodded again.
By 9:15 we were down to two cars, and by ten the lot was empty except for the blue Ford Ranger. Pike said, “This place is a gold mine.”
At twenty minutes before eleven, a beat-up Mercury station wagon bumped into the lot and sat with its engine running. The little Hispanic man and a Hispanic woman I had not seen came out, got in, and the wagon lurched away. The woman was carrying what looked like a brown paper grocery bag. Pike said, “Latin guy driving.”
I squinted, but couldn’t be sure. “Joe? Do you find it odd that there are so many Latin people down here on the bayou?”
Pike shrugged.
At ten minutes after eleven, the Bayou Lounge went dark, and the woman who ran the place got into her Ford and drove away. Pike and I gathered our things, walked up the road to our car, then returned to the motel. I wanted to phone Lucy, but it was just before midnight, and I thought I might wake her or, if not her, Ben.
The last thing I remember that night was the sound of Lucy’s laugh and the smell of her skin, and the deep, hollow feeling of her absence.
26
At eighteen minutes after five the next morning, Joe Pike slipped into the woods fronting Milt Rossier’s crawfish farm. I went back to Ville Platte and parked beneath the oak tree one block down from LeRoy Bennett’s house. The sky began to lighten at twenty minutes after six, and by 7:30 the old man who lived next to LeRoy was again working at the beige Chevelle with the Bond-o and the putty knife. A fluffy white cat strolled up to the old man, shoulder bumped against his legs, and the old man scratched at the cat’s head. The old man and the cat seemed to be enjoying each other when LeRoy Bennett came out with a little green towel, hawked up a lugey, and let’r fly into the overgrown front lawn. The old man stopped with the cat and scowled at Bennett. Bennett had to see him but pretended he didn’t, and neither of them spoke to the other. LeRoy wiped the dew off his front and back windshields, then tossed the wet towel up onto his front steps, climbed into the Polara, and drove away. The old man watched him drive off, then looked at the towel and at LeRoy’s crummy yard. The towel looked like hell, just thrown there. The old man looked at his own immaculate yard and shook his head. Probably wondering why he should bother with all the yard work if LeRoy was going to let his place look like a shit hole, probably thinking that all the stuff you hear on the talk radio was right; America was going to hell in a handbasket and he was stuck with living proof of it.
The plan had been for me to stay on LeRoy until four, whereupon I would break contact and pick up Pike to return to the Bayou Lounge. We hoped that LeRoy would, in his capacity as Milt Rossier’s right-hand man, have a variety of important errands to accomplish through the day, perhaps one or more of said errands providing a clue as to Milt Rossier’s criminal operation. When LeRoy Bennett cleared the corner, I pulled a quick U-turn, took it easy going around the corner to make sure he wouldn’t see me, then followed him directly to the Ville Platte Dunkin’ Donuts. LeRoy stoked up on crullers with sprinkles, then bought four dollars of gas at the Sunoco self-serve and tooled directly to Rossier’s place. By 8:36 that morning, LeRoy was sitting in the white lawn chairs outside Rossier’s main house, flipping through a magazine, and I was crouching behind the fallen pine tree with Joe Pike. So much for clues. I said, “Some operation.”
Pike was watching him through a fine pair of Zeiss binoculars. “He’s not reading. He’s just looking at the pictures.”
I nodded. “Geniuses rarely go into crime.”
We sat on plastic poncho liners amid the sumac and the small plants of the forest’s floor and let the day unfold. The heat rose, and with the heat the air grew heavy and damp, and a thick gray buildup of rain clouds appeared overhead. The woods were alive with the sounds of bees and lizards and squirrels and swamp martins, and only occasionally did we catch the voices of the people before us, moving through their labors in the ponds and pools of the fish farm. It was ordinary business and none of it appeared illegal or suspicious, but maybe all of it was.
About midmorning Milt Rossier came out of his house, and he and Bennett strolled down past the ponds to the processing sheds. Milt stopped and spoke with each of the foremen, nodding as they spoke and o
nce taking off his hat and mopping his brow, but that was probably not an actionable offense. René LaBorde came out of the processing shed and lurched his way over to them and followed them around, but no one spoke to him. I hadn’t seen him arrive, and Pike hadn’t mentioned him, so maybe he had been in the processing shed all along. Maybe he lived there.
The guy who bossed the processing shed came out when Rossier and Bennett got down there, and the three of them spoke. René stood outside their circle for a time, then walked to the turtle pond and waded in up to his knees. The straw boss saw him first, and everybody got excited as LeRoy ran over to the edge of the pool, yelling, “Goddammit, René, get outta there! C’mon, ’fore Luther bites you!” René came back to the shore but stared down at the murky water, his shoes and pants muddy and dripping. He didn’t seem to know what he had done or to understand why he’d been made to stop. Pike shook his head. “Man.”
After a while, Rossier and LeRoy started back to the main house and everyone went back to work. René continued staring down at the water, his large body giving the occasional lurch as if his synapses had misfired. Halfway up to the house, Rossier saw that René wasn’t following, slapped at LeRoy, and LeRoy trotted back for René. René followed LeRoy back to the main house, and the two of them sat in the white chairs, passing the day, the water and mud drying on René’s pants, LeRoy looking at the pictures in his magazine.
The clouds continued to build, and by three o’clock the sky was dark. Lightning arced somewhere in the trees behind us, producing a deep-throated rumble, and it rained, slowly at first but with increasing intensity. LeRoy and René went into the main house and, one by one, the people working the ponds sought shelter in the processing sheds. Pike and I pulled on ponchos and made our way out to the car. We were leaving earlier than we had planned, but with everyone hiding from the rain the possibility of crime seemed remote. We stopped at an AM/PM Minimart on the state road to Reddell, and I used a pay phone to call Lucy at her office. She was with a client, and Darlene asked if I wanted to leave a message. I said to tell her that I had called and would call her again when I had the chance. Darlene said that that wasn’t much of a message, considering. I said considering what? Darlene laughed and hung up. Do women always tell each other everything?
The sky was the color of sun-bright tarmac, and forks of lightning were dancing along the horizon when Pike and I again moved into the bait shop across from the Bayou Lounge. The rain hammered down in a steady, thunderous assault, and leaked in tap-water streams through the roof, but it was better than standing in the woods. By seven that night, the only people in the place were a couple of old codgers who’d come in a white Bronco. By eight they were gone, and by nine the same green wagon once more came around for the Hispanic couple. By 9:30 the Bayou Lounge was closed. Maybe the rain had kept people away. Maybe if it rained all year round, the crime rate would be zero.
Pike and I went through it again the next day and the day after, with no great variety of pattern. Every morning I would wait for LeRoy Bennett outside his house, and every morning he would beeline first to the Dunkin’ Donuts and then to the crawfish farm where he would sit and wait and page through his magazines. Working off the sugar high, no doubt. Once Milt Rossier came out at midday and said something to LeRoy, and LeRoy hopped into his Polara and bro-died away. I ran back through the woods to the car in time to see LeRoy hauling ass up the road toward town. I followed him directly to the Ville Platte McDonald’s where he loaded up on a couple of bags worth of stuff, then hauled ass back to Rossier’s. I guess even criminals like Big Macs.
If the days were bad, the nights were worse. We would sit in the dust on the bait shop floor, watching the cars come and go, and noting the people within them, but the people within them were never LeRoy Bennett or Milt Rossier, nor did anything happen to point to or indicate illegal activity. Once, a fat man in a cheap suit and a thin woman with Dolly Parton hair had sex in the backseat of a Buick Regal, and two nights later the same woman had sex with a skinny guy with a straw Stetson in the back of an Isuzu Trooper, but you probably couldn’t indict Milt Rossier for that. Another time, three guys staggered out of the bar, laughing and hooting, while a fourth guy in a white ball cap stumbled out into the center of the road, dropped his pants, and took a dump. He lost his balance about midway through and fell in it, and the other three guys laughed louder and threw a beer can at him. Nothing like a night out with the boys.
Over the next three days I had exactly two opportunities to call Lucy, and missed her both times, once leaving a message on her home answering machine and once again speaking with her assistant. Darlene said that Lucy very much wanted to speak with me and asked if couldn’t we prearrange a time when I might call. I told her that that would be impossible, and Darlene said, “Oh, you poor thing.” Maybe Darlene wasn’t so bad after all.
We had two dry days and then another day of rain, and all the watching without getting anywhere was making me cranky and depressed. Maybe we were wasting our time. Maybe the only illegal stuff was the stuff behind closed doors, and we could sit in the woods and the bait shop until the bayous froze and we’d never quite make the link. Pike and I took turns exercising.
At 8:22 on the fourth night in the bait shop, the rain was tapping the roof and I was doing yoga when Pike said, “Here we go.”
LeRoy Bennett and René LaBorde pulled in and parked next to the blue Ford. Six cars were already in the lot, four of them regulars and none of them suspicious. LeRoy climbed out of the Polara and swaggered into the bar. René stayed in the car. Pike said, “I’ll get the car.”
He slipped out into the rain.
At 8:28, a dark gray Cadillac Eldorado with New Orleans plates pulled in beside the Polara. A Hispanic man in a silver raincoat got out and went into the bar. At 8:31, Pike reappeared beside me, hair wet with sweat and rain. Maybe two minutes later, the Hispanic man came out again with LeRoy Bennett. The Hispanic man got into his Eldo and LeRoy got into his Polara, and then the Polara moved out with the Eldo following.
Pike and I hustled out to our car and then eased onto the road after them. As I drove, Pike unscrewed the bulb in the ceiling lamp. Be prepared.
No one went fast and no one made a big deal out of where they were going, as if they had made the drive before and were comfortable with it, just a couple of guys going about their business. Traffic was nonexistent, and it would have been better if we’d had a car or two between us, but the steady rain made the following easier. We drove without lights, and twice oncoming cars flicked their headlights, trying to warn us, the second time some cowboy going crazy with it and calling us assholes as he roared by. If the guy in the Eldo was watching the rear he might have seen all the headlight switching and wondered about it, but if he was he gave no sign. Why watch the rear when you own the cops and you know they’re not looking for you?
We turned onto the highway leading to Milt Rossier’s crawfish farm, and I thought that was where we were going, only we came to the gate and passed it, continuing on. I dropped farther back, and Pike leaned forward in his seat, squinting against the rain and the windshield wipers to keep the red lights in sight. Maybe a mile past Rossier’s gate, the Eldo’s taillights flared and Pike said, “They’re turning.”
The Polara grew bright in the Eldorado’s headlights as it turned onto a gravel feeder road forking off into the marsh through a heavy thatch of wild sugarcane and bramble. We waited until their lights disappeared, then closed the distance and turned across a cow bridge. An overgrown cement culvert thrust up from the earth by the cow bridge, ringed by chain link to protect pipes and fittings and what looked in the darkness to be pressure gauges. Abandoned oil company gear. I said, “If this was anymore nowhere, we’d be on the dark side of the moon.”
The little road narrowed and followed the top of a berm across the marsh, moving in and out of cane thickets and sawgrass and cattails, occasionally crossing other little gravel roads even more overgrown. We had gone maybe half a mile when a wide
waterway appeared on the left, its banks overgrown but precise and straight and clearly manmade. I said, “Looks like an industrial canal.”
Pike said, “They turn and head back on us, we’ve got a problem.”
“Yeah.” When we came to the next crossing road, we stopped and backed off the main road, far enough under the sawgrass to hide the car, then went on at a jog. Once we were out of the car we could hear the rain slapping the grass and the water with the steady sound of frying bacon. We followed the little road for maybe another quarter mile and then an enormous, corrugated tin building bathed in light rose up from the swamp like some incredible lost city. It stood on the edge of the canal, a huge metal shed, maybe three stories tall, lit with industrial floodlamps powered by a diesel generator. Rusted pipes ran in and out of the building, and some of the corrugated metal panels were hanging askew. The isolation and the technology lent a creepy air to the place, as if we had stumbled upon an abandoned government installation, once forbidden and now best forgotten.
The Polara and the Cadillac were at the foot of the building, along with a couple of two-and-a-half-ton trucks. Both of the trucks were idling, their exhausts breathing white plumes into the damp air like waiting beasts. Pike and I slipped off the road and into the sawgrass. I said, “Pod people.”
Pike looked at me.
“It’s like the nursery Kevin McCarthy discovers in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The one where the pod people are growing more pods and loading them onto trucks to be shipped all over the country.”
Pike shook his head and turned back to the building. “You’re something.”
A huge, hangarlike door was set into the side of the building. Three guys in rain parkas climbed out of the trucks, opened it, then climbed back into the trucks, and drove them inside. A couple of minutes later, the steady burping of a diesel grew out of the rain and a towboat came up the canal, running without lights and pushing a small barge. It reduced speed maybe a hundred meters from the mouth of the big shed, and the Hispanic guy walked to the water’s edge and waved a red lantern. The towboat revved its engines, then came forward under power and slipped inside the building. LeRoy and René and the guy from the Cadillac hurried in after it. Pike and I skirted the edge of the lighted area until we could see through the truck door. I had thought that we’d see people loading bales of marijuana onto the barge or maybe forklifting huge bricks of cocaine off the barge, but we didn’t. Inside, maybe three dozen people were climbing off the towboat and into the trucks. Many of them looked scruffy, but not all. Many of them were well dressed, but not all. Most of them were Hispanic, but two were black, three were white, and maybe half a dozen were Asian. All of them looked tired and ill and frightened, and all of them were carrying suitcases and duffel bags and things of a personal nature. Pike said, “Sonofabitch. It’s people.”
