Assassin Hunter

by August Palumbo

  Voter turnout was heavy, but the machine counting allowed the poll commissioners to complete their evening tally shortly after the eight o’clock closing time. Antoine Broussard’s official duties were finished. He picked up Danielle from her home and drove directly to his house to freshen up before going to party headquarters to await the election results. His movements were exactly as Frank Duplessis had described. He pulled his car into the carport adjacent to his house when Lyle and Sheriff Arceneaux approached him. Arceneaux greeted him and Danielle, and introduced Lyle Melancon as an ATF agent. Broussard was startled, and asked why the sheriff himself and a federal agent would visit his home. He relaxed slightly when Lyle answered him in French. They told him there was urgent business at hand, and that he and Danielle were needed back at the sheriff’s office immediately. Within a minute they were whisked away.

  Lyle went directly to a rendezvous spot on a side road about three miles from the Blue Goose in Rayne. He handed me a rich alligator-skin wallet containing the driver’s license and other effects of Antoine Broussard, along with a Rolex President wristwatch and a gold crucifix attached to a gold neck chain. He also gave me a small scented handkerchief embroidered in red around the edges and with the initials “DD” in one corner. I wrapped the items in the handkerchief and slipped them into my coat pocket.

  “Did Broussard give you any trouble?”

  “No, it went pretty smooth. But he’s scared out of his mind. So is Danielle. They’re on ice in the sheriff’s office.”

  A voice transmission came over Lyle’s radio to let him know Frank Duplessis was at The Blue Goose. “The subject has arrived.” He acknowledged the message, then turned to me.

  “That’s it. Get over there and put this baby to sleep.” We reached out and shook hands and the feel of the familiar bear paw wrapped around my fingers was reassuring. I started to leave when Lyle took a small glass jar from a paper bag. He dipped his fingertips in it and flicked his fingers toward me. I flinched as several small crimson droplets splashed onto my white shirt and dark blue coat. “Chicken blood,” he said. “I had T-Red come up with this. He’s scratching his ass wondering why. Nice effect.”

  Frank Duplessis was seated in his truck in the rear parking lot of the Blue Goose. Unlike our first meeting there, he was prompt, maybe because he was anxious. I parked directly behind him to block any quick escape in the event that something went awry. I got into the passenger side slowly, and held the door open for a few seconds so the dome light would help him notice the blood on my clothes. He eyes went straight to the red dots splattered against my white shirt.

  “He’s dead. Let’s make it quick, Frank.” I reached into my pocket and threw the personal effects of Broussard and Danielle in his lap. He opened the wallet and thumbed through the I.D., credit cards, and family photos, straining because of the limited light. He slowly examined the Rolex and gold religious article, and a sardonic smile came to his face, the same eerie look he got when he gave me the orders to kill. He put Broussard’s objects down when he recognized the handkerchief. He held it up to the dim light, then drew it to his face with both hands and breathed in it’s scent. The twisted smile was replaced by a worried look.

  “You didn’t kill her, did you?”

  “No. But she’s busted up, needs stitches. Ain’t that what you wanted?

  He grunted and nodded his head affirmatively. Then he leaned over the steering wheel and reached to the left under the dashboard. I instinctively put my hand on the butt of my gun, which was stuck in the front of my waistband. He fidgeted under the dash for a few seconds and removed a small package that had been taped underneath and handed it to me. It was a neat stack of hundred dollar bills bound by bank wrappers, the same size and type he paid me with a few days earlier.

  I put the package into my inside coat pocket, when Duplessis suddenly wheeled toward me with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun and shoved the barrels up against my left temple. The cold steel against my head seemed to freeze my whole body. Blood rushed to my head so fast that I could feel and hear the throbs in my ears. My hand was still on my gun but was useless against a weapon that could take my head off with the slightest touch. So many thoughts flooded my mind, in rapid succession.

  Was this how it ended? Do I die at the hands of a madman caught up in a love triangle? Surely there were more gallant ways for an ATF agent to go out. I thought about not having a wire on me, how it might have brought help. But would it? If the surveillance agents closeby knew there was a gun propped against my head and they charged the scene, any nervous reaction by Duplessis, any slight movement, would kill me. Inexplicably, my thoughts turned to the classroom of my Catholic grammar school, to the words of Sister Catherine teaching the act of contrition, which cleanses the soul before death. But I didn’t say that prayer. Instead, the words of the Hail Mary that we recited so repetitively in the Rosary as kids seemed to pour out into my mind. I hoped to complete the mental prayer before he pulled the trigger. The quick prayer helped me gain control of my thoughts.

  Where did the sawed-off come from? Duplessis obviously had it hidden between him and the door out of my sight. My instincts had been correct to grab my gun when he reached forward, but I relaxed for just a second when the object he reached for turned out to be money. In that split second he got the advantage. These thoughts all flooded over me in a matter of only a few seconds. I was physically and mentally braced for whatever death brings. Then I began to think rationally, and gained control of the thought process. If he intended to kill me, would he do it in a public place? A double-barreled sawed-off would literally blow my brains out. Would he do that in his own vehicle? Not likely. And if he was robbing me, why did he pay me in the first place? He had to have something else in mind, and this bolstered me. I didn’t move a muscle and kept looking straight ahead, but said in the calmest, harshest voice I could muster, “What the fuck is this? Are you ripping me off? Why didn’t you just keep the money?”

  “Fuck the money. I just want you to listen, and listen good.” His voice was slow and deliberate, as if he had practiced what he said. “Leave T-Red alone.”

  “T-Red?”

  “You said you had to kill him because he put us together. He’s a pain in the ass little bastard but he don’t deserve to die. Leave him alone.”

  Duplessis then lowered the shotgun and placed it in his lap. That quickly, it was over. My hand was still on my gun and I could have killed him - justifiably. But something told me he was no longer an immediate threat, just a sick individual. I broke open the shotgun, ejected the two twelve-gauge shells and put them in my coat pocket, then threw the shotgun back in his lap. Then I wasted no time getting out of the truck. However, before I closed the door, I looked him in the eye and said, “See you in hell, Frank.”

  I left Broussard’s property and Danielle’s handkerchief with him to be recovered as evidence in his possession. I tore out of the parking lot without giving the surveillance agents the headlight signal to move in. I drove to the rendezvous spot and waited for Lyle. He pulled his G-car in the opposite direction of mine and rolled down the window. “No go?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s done. But the motherfucker has a sawed-off, and I didn’t want you guys going in on him without warning.”

  “We’ll handle it. I’ll meet you at the Plantation.”

  My delay in signaling gave Duplessis the opportunity to get out of the parking lot of the Blue Goose. A few miles away he was overtaken by the surveillance teams and was taken down without incident.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 28

  I stretched out on my back across the bed, rubbed my eyes, and quietly waited for my blood pressure to return to normal. The silence ended with a knock on the door. “Nice place you have here,” Lyle said sarcastically as he entered. “What a pit.” During the whole time I lived there he had never seen my room, never even been inside or around the hotel except to retrieve my notes from the garbage alley.

  “Welcome to my castle. Now
you know why I spent so much time in The Gallop. Classier place.” He set two cups of strong coffee on the small table in the corner of the room. “I guess it’s over, now that I’m drinking coffee instead of Bloody Marys.”

  “Not quite. The sheriff has asked you to come to his office. Broussard and Danielle are quite upset and somewhat in disbelief. He’d like you to talk to them, a horse’s mouth sort of thing.”

  “I can’t talk about the case with them, Lyle, you know that. Can't you handle it? I’ve had enough for one day.”

  He glanced down into the cup containing the dark pool of coffee and said, “We owe it to the sheriff. We dumped all this crap in his jurisdiction on short notice to get it out of St. Landry Parish.”

  He was right. I took off the blood-stained shirt and changed into a clean one. Before we left I asked him about Duplessis. “The sawed-off was reloaded,” he answered. “He was plenty surprised when we pulled him over. He offered no resistance, but kept asking what it was all about. We didn’t tell him shit. Let him find out at the arraignment.”

  “That prick. He didn’t intend to kill me, only throw a scare into me. But if he had moved just to slap a mosquito I’d be dead. Make sure to add assault to his charges.”

  “We can’t.”

  “What?”

  “To charge assault on a federal officer we have to prove he knew you were a fed. Picture this. Defense attorney in court: “How could he possibly know you were a federal officer when, according to you, he just paid you to commit murder?”

  “Shit. You're right.”

  We went through a private entrance to Sheriff Arceneaux’s office where he waited for us. The room looked more like the den of a hunting lodge than the executive office of a police agency. Behind a huge desk was a stone hearth fireplace. Above the mantle stared the fierce yellow eyes of a mounted swamp wildcat, with a perpetual growl showing long, gnarled teeth. A small alligator head sat on the desk. The room was cozy, with several plush chairs and a large sofa that all faced the fireplace. The only reminders that this was a law enforcement office were a glass-enclosed gun rack on the wall and several sharpshooting trophies on the coffee table.

  Arceneaux greeted us warmly. He was a short, stout man in his sixties with neatly combed gray hair. He wore leather cowboy boots below his starched khaki pants and a brown plaid cowboy shirt. He spoke with the same thick Cajun accent as the other bayou natives. After he offered a firm handshake he got quickly got to the point. “Good to know you, son. I’ve got some very scared citizens in the next room. They’re also puzzled and don’t know what to believe. Can you help me?”

  “I’ll meet with them but can’t give particulars of the case until it’s disposed of in court.”

  “I understand,” he said. He left us in the room alone and went to get Broussard and Danielle.

  Lyle sat unevenly on the edge of the big desk with one leg dangling and the other on the floor. We looked around the office and he said, “The high sheriff in a place like this is more than the law. He knows most of the people and has to be their friend, advisor, arbitrator, and sometimes their confessor, besides being their sheriff. We’ll be out of here in a few days, but he has to stay and deal with the fallout. He wants these people to know he didn’t cook up Frank’s arrest, that it was our case.”

  A moment later Arceneaux returned with the intended victims. Antoine Broussard was strikingly neat, with dark wavy hair and a darker complexion than most Cajuns. He was in his mid-forties without a wrinkle in his face. He walked in with a small radio in his hand, and occasionally placed it to his ear as if he was keeping up with the score of a football game. He was listening for election results. Danielle Duplessis was a thin, small-framed woman with short, dark hair and green eyes emphasized by red, puffy eyelids from crying.

  Both of them fixed their eyes on me as the sheriff explained that Frank hired me to kill Broussard in front of Danielle. Their blank expression became a probing stare.

  “Sheriff Arceneaux didn’t know anything about this until today,” I told them. “I can’t give you any details right now but you should know, that had Frank reached a true killer before he reached me, you would be dead, Mr. Broussard.”

  “Oh, my God,” Danielle whispered.

  Broussard put his radio down and held her. “I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you,” he said. He asked several concise questions, which Lyle and the sheriff answered. But they really weren’t there to ask questions, just to get a look at the man who was supposed to commit this heinous act, this killer-federal agent. The brief meeting satisfied them, although they seemed more despondent, more resolved to the situation after we met. The sheriff escorted them from the office into a long, well-lit hallway. As he held the door open for them, Broussard turned back toward me for a moment. He started to speak, but hesitated and gave me a simple nod. I knew what he meant.

  Through the open door I got a glimpse of the long hallway and a room at the end of it. Frank Duplessis stood in the room as an officer removed the handcuffs from behind his back and began to fingerprint him. The sheriff returned and thanked us. He and Lyle had a brief, back-slapping conversation in French, then he broke into English for the benefit of us both. “Payoffs and crooked deals have been a way of life here since the ink was still wet on the Louisiana Purchase. Being an honest sheriff and getting reelected don’t go together. But here I am, socializing with the feds.” We laughed.

  I couldn’t wait to get back to my room. I threw my clothes on the floor and got in the shower. The hottest water that would come out of the old pipes cascaded down my body. I soaped from scalp to feet. In what had become a ritual at the end of every undercover assignment, I scrubbed away the stale smoke and smells associated with the case. It had the effect of washing away The Gallop, Frank Duplessis, Cliff Dubroc, Ritmo Angelle, Phil Tanzini, Luke Trombatore, Cabbage Boy, and the other undesirable characters and places that had become part of my life. I stayed there for what seemed like an hour until the water ran cold.

  Two days later I packed my things and loaded up the Camaro. The drizzly, damp weather would slow the normal two hour drive to New Orleans. As I leaned over to place a briefcase on the floorboard, there was a tap on my behind accompanied by T-Red’s voice. “Bugging out on me?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Will you be back?”

  “Only if I’m needed in court.”

  T-Red leaned against the car and crossed his legs. “It’s been fun, ain’t it?

  “Let’s put it this way, Red. Everybody’s gotta be someplace.”

  “Well, it hasn’t been a thrill for me either. But we’re both still here, with our asses in one piece. That’s something.” His tone was as dreary as the weather.

  “I wish I could have cut you out sooner, but we never know how it’s going to play out. If you keep your mouth shut, nobody will know you were involved. We’re not even giving your name to the DA.”

  “I figured I could count on that.” His voice perked up. “Hey, Tony, too bad you’re leaving town. Delta Downs opens next week and I’ve been galloping an old cockroach of a horse that’ll go off at twenty to one. He’ll win.”

  I looked down into the tiny man’s eyes set against his ruddy face. “Here’s a yard. Bet it for yourself,” I told him. He took the hundred-dollar bill with a grin, then he grabbed me by the forearms and gripped them tightly. I returned the gesture. “What am I supposed to do you little bastard, kiss you goodbye?” He bent over laughing. He walked through the light mist to his old, dilapidated pickup truck that was parked several spaces away. I noticed two small children, a boy and girl about the same age, seated in the truck. Two more boys, pre-teens, one slightly older and bigger than the other, sat in the bed of the truck just behind the cab. The children were dressed in worn clothes, and all four had the same thick, reddish-brown hair as T-Red.

  I had spent the better part of a year with this man who, regardless of his motives, risked his life alongside mine, and had never known he had a family. Never
even asked. For that matter, never cared. It struck me that if Duplessis had taken my head off, or Tanzini had stuck a shiv in me, or any other peril had befallen me, at least my family would have a government pension and insurance to fall back on. If T-Red had met the same fate, his innocent, unwitting kids would have gotten zip. I swung my car around and called out to him. He walked over to the window, and I reached into my pocket and grabbed whatever bills were in it. Without counting it I stuffed all the money I had into his shirt pocket. I made a gesture toward the children in the truck and said, “Bet it on them.”

  I never saw T-Red again.

  The windshield wipers slowly slapped time. The radio announced that President Gerald Ford had gotten more Republican votes than California governor Ronald Reagan in the Louisiana primary, and Jimmy Carter had edged out the shortened list of Democrats. Antoine Broussard had delivered Acadia Parish. Traffic thickened in the arteries leading to downtown as the New Orleans skyline became visible above the misty haze. I drove into the basement parking facility of the federal building and went directly to the ATF conference room.

  The room was chilly and felt even colder because of the damp weather. Lyle sat in a chair at the long table and busily thumbed through notes on a tablet. Without looking up he said, “The crew from Washington is here.” I sat across from him and listened to the quiet flow of cold air through the air condition vents, interrupted occasionally by a crackling sound each time Lyle turned a page. I thought about the last time I was in this room, when I was given Gina’s divorce papers and had exploded. Within a few minutes the heavy door opened and SAC Jim King entered, followed by an attractive young brunette. He introduced her as an investigative assistant and she sat down to take notes. Paul McKinney and Jim Fenton soon followed and took seats at the table.

  We exchanged the cursory handshakes, but the air was heavy with weariness. We all were drained from the prolonged case and all that it entailed, and nobody looked forward to the volumes of reports each of us would be writing in the next few days. King conducted the meeting as he and McKinney peppered me with questions, mostly of a technical nature and to prepare court presentation. The debriefing took about an hour, then I was brought up to speed on happenings behind the scenes. King was matter-of-fact in his delivery. “Duplessis is still locked up on a half-million dollars bail. He pled not guilty at his arraignment. No news on whether he’ll plea guilty or go to trial. We picked up Ritmo Angelle at The Gallop and Cliff Dubroc in a Lafayette whorehouse. They also pled not guilty in their case and are awaiting a trial date. Higher bail was set for them but we expect them to post it soon. We can’t find Phil Tanzini. We’ve notified Scotland Yard and Interpol that he may be in England. We’ve only recovered a small amount of the buy money but we’re working on it.”