The conversation then turned to household bills, the nosy neighbor who was constantly curious about my long absences from home, and extended family matters. The sound of Gina’s voice had a soothing effect on me and reminded me of my real life, and how much I missed it. She asked if I was eating right and on schedule, and I lied.
“Yes, of course.” I almost made a comment about the abundance of wonderful Cajun food, then remembered not to give her too much information on where I was. We exchanged kisses on the phone and I made the usual promise to call soon. She had not asked me when the case would be over or what it was about. She spared me the anguish of making up answers or trying to give answers I didn’t have.
“Next time call when Nick is awake.”
“My time is up on the phone and I’m out of change. "Ti amo." As the phone went dead it reminded me of the detachment from my family and real life, and threw me back into reality, to the phone booth at the Plantation. I walked down the narrow hall to my room and felt the guilt of not being home and of the hardships placed on Gina and Nick. I wondered if the case was worth it, if the job was worth it, if anything happening here really mattered at all.
* * *
CHAPTER 16
I was awakened by loud rapping on my door. The room was still dark; and the green digital numbers, glowing from the alarm clock, told me it was almost five o’clock. I flicked on the table lamp and reached for my gun laying on the night table beside the bed. I slowly walked to the door with the revolver pointed straight up, looked through the peephole, and saw T-Red pounding his fist on the door.
“Are you alone, Red?”
“No, I got the fucking Boston Symphony with me.”
I unlatched the chain and turned the doorknob, then turned around and walked straight to the chair alongside the bed and plopped down in it. T-Red let himself in and stood on the other side of the bed gazing at my sleepy face and the gun resting in my lap.
“You know I don’t like you coming here Red, and lately it’s been a habit with you. This better be good.”
“Good? My information is numero uno. How much scratch did you make on that horse last night?” he asked while he looked at the stack of money folded over and held together with a rubber band on my night table.
“Let’s skip the commercial and get right to it.”
T-Red sat on the edge of the bed and told me that the tip on the winning horse came from Frank Duplessis.
“That’s not even his horse, Red.”
“I know. I thought it was odd that he let me in on it because he doesn’t share much information. But, hey. . . we take it where we can find it, right? Anyway, after the race Duplessis grabs me leaving the cashier’s window in the grandstand and pulls me aside. He says I can return the favor and asked if I remembered that matter he discussed with me about The Gallop. He’s kind of talking in code, you know, and real low. I could barely hear him above the crowd noise. So I nod yeah, and he says to come to his place this morning. This is it man, he wants to meet you.”
“What did you tell him about me?”
“That you were connected, could get the job done, a pro. I told him he had already seen you with me that morning weeks ago at the bush track. Also, he better have plenty of cash if he was serious.”
I was pleased the way T-Red handled the set-in. Duplessis wanted us to meet him at his training facility that morning, and after my change of clothes we headed out to a state road north of Evangeline Downs. T-Red was quieter than usual and I figured he was contemplating the end of his involvement with me. I told him to make the re-introduction to Duplessis brief and then cut out away from our conversation. T-Red pointed me onto a winding dirt road that cut through tall pines, cypress trees, and small lowlying areas with pools of standing water. The low areas were full of palmettos, whose evergreen fronds of spindly leaves gave lush green color to the swamp. We arrived at a large clearing, which was Duplessis’ training center. Two long barns stood parallel to each other, constructed of gray cinder-block and covered with large tin roofs that hung over the shed-rows. The stalls faced the outside of the barns, and most of the horses stood with their heads sticking out above the lower half of the Dutch doors in each stall. We drove slowly to the end of the first barn and parked behind the building. I followed T-Red through the shed-row area, where white leg bandages that had been washed were strung across the railing to dry. The pungent smell of horse liniment lingered throughout the barn. There were fifteen or twenty horses stalled on either side of the building and the same amount in the parallel barn. I asked T-Red if Frank Duplessis owned that many horses.
“Nah. He has about a dozen for himself and trains the rest for owners in the oil and gas business here and in Texas. About half of these are babies being broken for the races.”
Several young Cajun boys were atop horses coming to and from the half-mile training track in front of the barns. A half-dozen grooms, all black, tended to the horses as they came off the track from their workouts. There were two large cement pads where the grooms were bathing horses. We walked to a small tack room used as an office and T-Red stuck his head inside, but found it empty. He asked one of the grooms where we could find Duplessis and an elderly black man, small and thin with snow-white hair, answered back while pointing to the track. I noticed that all the black grooms and the Cajun riders spoke French to each other with the occasional English word or phrase mixed in.
We walked up a small incline to the track rail and stood on the wooden steps used for observation of the workouts on the bull-ring track. Directly in front of us was a two-horse starting gate used to train inexperienced horses, as well as to break veteran horses from the gate for timing their workouts. A beautiful young two-year-old filly was being led to the gate by an older rider. She was a light dappled gray color with an intelligent head and excellent conformation, and her build and color resembled more of the ultimate Arabian ancestry shared by all thoroughbreds. She looked all around in the curious manner of two-year-olds; and it was easy to tell she had not had much gate training up to this point. She was somewhat jittery as the rider urged her into the starting gate. Frank Duplessis stood behind the horse as she entered the gate, holding a large aluminum water syringe in his hand. When the filly was inside the gate stall, Duplessis quickly closed the rear door, locking horse and rider in the gate. He then lifted the horse’s tail with one hand, and with the other took the one-hundred ml syringe with its six inch tube and shoved it forcefully into the horse’s rectum. He injected the syringe with a quick blast. I could see the filly’s eyes roll back for an instant, exposing the whites of her eyes. Her body muscles tightened and her ears pinned back at the same time. About a full second later, Duplessis released the front door of the starting gate and the bell rang, and the horse shot out of the gate like a rocket with the exercise rider holding on for dear life. Duplessis looked our way, laughing, with the large metal syringe dangling from his hand. After a quarter mile around the track, the rider gained control of the filly and galloped her back to the starting gate.
The young horse was now covered in body sweat which turned her coat a dull, battleship gray color. There was a froth of kidney sweat between her hind legs and a trickle of reddish-orange liquid running down her legs from under her tail. As the rider urged the horse into the starting gate once again, Duplessis stuck the large syringe into a gallon glass jar of red liquid and pulled back the plunger, filling the syringe. When she was in the gate, Duplessis latched the rear and this time shoved the syringe into the horse’s vagina and injected the red liquid. He waited a second, then released the front door and when the bell rang the filly again bolted out of the gate like lightning.
“What the hell is he doing, Red?”
“I thought you were a racetracker, Tony. Frank is the best at training a young horse to break out of the gate quickly. That’s Tabasco sauce in that syringe.”
I had seen many strange things around race tracks, many different approaches, but this kind of cruelty ranked right up the
re with letting horses die from painful colic to collect insurance money and letting them run on fractured legs to collect a share of purse money. The hot Cajun concoction, produced only miles away at Avery Island and found in small bottles on every restaurant table in America, had found another, more perverse use. My face flushed with anger, then I suddenly remembered that this was out of character for a hit man. I did my best to put aside what I had seen. Duplessis walked towards the barn and motioned for us to follow him to his small office in the tack room. There was a grin on his face and he was pleased with the gray horse’s reaction to his gate training method. Without turning his head toward us Duplessis said, “Wait till that bitch runs in the Louisiana Futurity this fall. She’ll leave the gate faster than a quarter horse.”
I watched as the elegant filly with distress in her eyes was led to the wash rack. Her ears twitched and her breathing was labored in short, heavy breaths. As soon as the rider un-tacked her, the old white-haired groom ran a hose with cool water down her back, then mercifully hosed out under her tail. As we finished the walk to Frank Duplessis' office I knew that I would never look at another bottle of Tabasco the same way.
In the office, T-Red spoke to Duplessis in French for a minute then said, “This is the Tony I told you about.” He then turned around and without another word walked back out to the track, just as I had instructed. Frank Duplessis stuck out his hand to shake. I just stared at him for a moment and didn’t reach back to him, which put him on the defensive. He frowned and lowered his lanky frame into a large, dilapidated chair that leaned to one side. He sat behind an old, small, cheap metal desk that looked like surplus from a government office.
I sat down on a bale of alfalfa that was stacked against the wall of the converted tack room. Leather bridles hung from large nails on all four walls and in one corner there were a couple of metal garbage cans with Oats crudely written on the covers. A thick layer of dust covered everything in the room.
“T-Red tells me you can be trusted and you’re the man to do a job for me, is that true?”
“Depends on the job and how green your money is. Keep talking.”
“I want somebody taken care of, I don’t want to see them anymore. You know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean. Before we go any further we need to get the money straight. You Coon-asses try to get by on the cheap with everything, and I’m sure this is no exception.”
He didn’t like the comment but took it in stride. I didn’t mind pissing him off and needed him to dislike me. Since we were alone and I was not wearing a wire, anything he said would later have to be corroborated as evidence. I wanted to leave the particular details for a later meeting when our conversation could be recorded. However, I needed to cement a general deal of some sort now, or there might not be a future meeting.
“One guy. I want one guy taken out of the picture. What’s the freight?”
“Twenty large. Ten up front, ten on the back end.”
Duplessis rubbed his chin and stared at nothing in particular on his desk.
“That’s a lot of money. What if I supply the equipment?”
“Like what?”
“Loaded pistol with a silencer.”
He now had me mulling over the proposition. A silencer put him squarely in ATF jurisdiction, he could get up to ten years in a federal prison just for possessing a silencer. I knew we would also need the intelligence on who was making an assassination tool like a silencer. Murder itself and conspiracy to commit murder were state crimes, so with a silencer coming into play ATF had hard-core authority to keep the ball rolling in this case, no matter what the other agencies involved in the bank heist/murder in New Orleans wanted to do.
“Twenty thousand. That’s the deal with or without the equipment. But I’ll use what you supply if it’s cool.”
I wanted to seem indifferent about the gun and silencer. Too much eagerness about that aspect could tip him off to ATF presence. At this point I didn’t know if he had access to a silencer or if he was on a fishing expedition about me.
“Ten up front?”
“That’s the deal. I’ll also need details from you on who, where, and when. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the why. Right now this whole conversation is bullshit until I see the cash.”
“How do I know you won’t rip me off for the front money?”
“You’ve already done your homework. Ritmo told me you’ve been asking questions and that he vouched for me. And if you didn’t trust T-Red I wouldn’t be here.
“Okay, so what’s next?
“You can reach me at The Gallop when you’ve got the money.”
“It’ll be a few days. I’ll have the information you asked for as well as the cash.”
I stood up, leaned over Duplessis’ desk and stared him in the face only inches away. “If any word gets back to me about what we discussed here, two things will happen. First, the deal is off. Second, look over your fucking shoulder because I might take you out for bringing heat on me.”
“I understand. Don’t worry, because I have a lot to lose if this goes bad. That won’t happen.”
His eyes looked down as I walked to the doorway. Before I got out of the small room he looked back up and said, “Twenty grand is a lot of money for one hit.”
“Two hits, Frank.”
“What do you mean?” he asked with a puzzled look.
“T-Red. I need to eliminate him after the job, maybe before - since he’s the only one besides us who knows about this issue.”
The coldness in his face warmed a little. For just a second he seemed worried, even concerned. He hadn’t thought about anybody else being killed, and he had no reason for T-Red to die other than the fact that he had put Duplessis and I together. But the hesitation in his face quickly disappeared and the cold resolve returned as he said, “Whatever it takes. I’ll be in touch.”
I stepped into the shed-row and called for T-Red. Duplessis gazed at him with a lingering look. He now knew that T-Red was a man whose days were numbered. As we walked to the car I saw Duplessis watching me, and I could read his thoughts about how I would kill this unintended victim, a man I was pals with, just because it was part of my business. It clearly registered on the horse trainer’s face that he was sold.
* * *
CHAPTER 17
Every day since I was on the ground Lyle Melancon supervised a squad of ATF agents working behind the scenes. They ran the names, addresses, and license plates listed in the notes I dropped for Lyle. They did the leg work on criminal background checks, and identified people and places from public records and files maintained by police agencies. They checked with our network of informants and scoured the daily newspapers in a multi-state area for any news of unsolved murders or contracts. For all we knew, the hit could have been set up in Louisiana to be carried out anywhere in the country – or outside the country for that matter. We had our fingers crossed constantly that no bodies turned up before I could work myself in to take the contract. Since my meeting with Frank Duplessis we could all breathe a little easier. I was convinced that he wanted me to do the job. But there was no guarantee that he hadn’t already talked to someone else or hired more than one killer to make sure his murder scheme succeeded. The possibility was remote but couldn’t be overlooked.
In addition to support agents in the field, the special operations division in Washington was monitoring the case, and I knew the cost of the operation was climbing. I wasn’t surprised at the news Lyle gave me when I phoned him about the setup with Duplessis.
“We’re underway, big boy.”
“Thank Christ. How did it go?” Lyle asked.
“He’ll be back to me soon. No details yet on the intended victim, but we set up the terms. This guy means business.”
“The ivory tower is breathing down our necks, Tony. I don’t know if they’re antsy about the cost, or the pressure from the FBI and the New Orleans Police Department, or a combination of both. McKinney and the boys want to m
eet with you.”
“Tell me this is a joke, Lyle. I’m up to my ass right now.”
“I wish it was. They’re on their way to New Orleans and want to meet with you in the next couple of days, as soon as you can work yourself away.”
“Let’s do it tomorrow and get it over with. I can’t be gone long because the deal is too hot. I’ll drive in and be there for eight o’clock. That’ll spoil their government-paid vacation to New Orleans and cut it short. Those guys never come to the field when the case is in Bumfuck, Alaska.”
“I’ll be there too. And Tony, clean yourself up before you come.”
That night The Gallop was hot. It was as crowded as I had ever seen. The blues band had their volume cranked up over the noise level of the crowd. T-Red sat on a stool slumped over the bar and was half lit. I sat next to him. He turned slowly towards me, said nothing, then looked straight ahead at the mirror behind the bar. I had never seen him drunk before, but he was on his way. He wasn’t happy to see me and I sensed hostility. I leaned over and had to shout into his ear because of the noise.
“What’s the word, Red?” He didn’t answer. I tried again.
“Okay, spill it. Let’s hear the bitch-and-gripe session.”
He leaned back towards me and shouted in my ear. The conversation took place with us talking inches from each other’s ears, bobbing back and forth so we could be heard, but not overheard by others. “We left Frank’s place and all you talked about was bullshit. You didn’t let me in on what happened with him, and this morning at the track he acted strange around me. I’m stuck in the middle not knowing shit, and I want out.”
“Pazienza, Red. You’ve wanted out since day one. And you’re not in the middle – you’re one of the good guys for the first time in your cheesy life. I don’t have time to explain now. Just avoid Frank.”
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