The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  Just as I got to my truck, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I flipped it open and placed it against my ear. “Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

  “My wife says you want to talk with me,” a voice said.

  “You in town, Sidney?”

  “Why did you call my shop?”

  “I warned you a long time ago about Ronald Bledsoe, but you wouldn’t listen. He’s got his own deal going on those blood diamonds. I think he’s planning to hurt my daughter as well. If that happens, you’re going to have the worst fucking experience of your life.”

  “No, you’re the one who doesn’t listen, Robicheaux. Marco and Charlie and a few other guys from the Giacano family work for me. Bledsoe doesn’t. You got that straight? I want my goods back. It’s a pretty simple concept.”

  “Then who does he work for?”

  “Maybe the Fuller Brush Company. They hire a lot of bald-headed guys.”

  There was still time for one more run at Sidney before he broke the connection. “After the loss of your little boy, did you kidnap your neighbor, Sidney? Did you take his legs off with a chain saw?”

  “I’m going to give you a short answer here. Did I use a chain saw on somebody? No. Did a guy in Jefferson Parish disappear? Yeah, he did. Is he coming back? No, he ain’t. Tell Bertrand Melancon I’m the only person in this state who can keep him alive.”

  The line went dead.

  THAT AFTERNOON we attended Mass in Loreauville, then returned to the house. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin. I went to an AA meeting upstairs at the Methodist church on Main, but I couldn’t shake my conviction that Bledsoe or one of his associates was about to make a move on us.

  Bledsoe was the trigger, but the sense of angst I was experiencing had been a problem in my life long before I met him. Psychologists believe there is a form of long-term anxiety that is caused by turmoil in the natal home: the parents fighting, the child being shaken or dropped, someone constantly bursting through the door in a drunken rage. I can’t say where it comes from. For me it was not unlike seeing a mortar round fall short of your position, followed by a second round that goes long. In that moment you know with absolute certainty you’re registered and the next round is coming down the stack. The feeling you experience is like someone stripping off your skin.

  The truth is, I wanted to drink. Maybe not a lot, just a couple of shots with a beer back, I told myself, just enough to turn down the butane on the burner. Or I wanted to load up my cut-down twelve-gauge pump or my AR-15 and kick it on up to some serious E-major rock ’n’ roll.

  At dusk I looked out the front window just as a cruiser with a black uniformed female deputy behind the wheel pulled into the driveway. Catin Segura got out and gazed at the trees in the yard and the gold and red clusters of four-o’clock flowers opening in the shadows. “You have such a nice place here,” she said.

  “It is,” I said.

  “I was just going off shift and I thought I should mention something to you. I was patrolling the Loreauville Quarters and I saw Otis Baylor talking to a family on their gallery. The address was next door to the house rented by the owner of the hit-and-run tag I ran, Elizabeth Crochet. When I cruised the Quarters again, about ten minutes later, he was knocking on another door, one street over.

  “I asked him if I could help him with anything. He said no, he was an insurance man and was just checking on a couple of clients. I told him I was the same sheriff’s deputy who had investigated the hit-and-run in front of his house. I told him I thought he was there for other reasons.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Thanks for your offer of help.’ Then he got in his car and drove away. What’s he after, Dave?”

  “A guy named Bertrand Melancon.”

  I used my cell phone in the yard to call the Baylor home. When Otis answered, I hung up. Molly and Alafair were going to the movies. I waited until they left, then I drove down Old Jeanerette Road and pulled into Otis’s driveway. He walked out on the front steps, a napkin tucked inside the top of his shirt.

  “Was that you who called about fifteen minutes ago?” he asked.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you can’t leave us alone.”

  “No, that’s not the problem at all, Mr. Baylor. The problem is the fact you were in the Loreauville Quarters. You knew who was driving the hit-and-run vehicle and you used your insurance connections to run the tag number and get the address of the owner. You were in the Loreauville Quarters looking for Bertrand Melancon. Except he wasn’t there, so you started questioning his neighbors.”

  “If you know all this, why bother telling me about it?”

  “I wouldn’t be clever, Mr. Baylor. What I don’t understand is your motivation. Melancon has done irreparable damage to your daughter and family, but evidently he’s tried to make amends. You still want to cancel the guy’s ticket?”

  “What do you mean, ‘amends’?”

  “I talked with Melancon. He said he tried to make it up to y’all. I don’t think he was lying. He knows he’ll probably end up as a contribution to landfill.”

  I don’t think I have ever seen a man look as dumbfounded as Otis Baylor did in that moment. He stared at me for a long time. “Mr. Robicheaux, please don’t be vague or misleading.”

  “What I’ve said to you is an accurate statement. For what it’s worth, I think Melancon is sorry for what he did. I think he also knows it’s a matter of time before he catches the bus. If he’s lucky, somebody won’t use a blowtorch on him first. That’s not an exaggeration. Andre Rochon probably suffered the pains of the damned before he died.”

  “My God in heaven,” he said in dismay, his face white.

  “What have you done, sir?”

  He shook his head, his eyes filming.

  “Talk to me, Mr. Baylor. This is the time to do it.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” he said. “Please excuse me. We have to finish dinner. I have to help my wife with the dishes. I have to help my daughter with some of her schoolwork. Please excuse me, sir.”

  He went inside the house and I heard him snap the door bolt in place. But I didn’t leave the yard. I stood a long time in the shadows, inside the sounds of birds gathering in the treetops and some kids in a pirogue out on the bayou. The wind rattled the shutters on his windows and sent leaves feathering off the eaves. The blinds were drawn, the window frames etched by yellow light from inside. Under other circumstances, the house might have been a picture of familial warmth against the coming of the night. But not a sound came from the house and my guess was that nothing aside from misery lived inside those walls.

  SUNDAY MORNING I convinced Molly and Alafair to go with me to a camp I had rented on the levee by Henderson Swamp. It was a fine place, built of pine, partially set on pilings, the screen gallery facing a bay that was dotted with cypress trees and willow islands. The wind was down, the sac-a-lait had been biting, and I wanted to get out of town and away from concerns about Ronald Bledsoe, at least for a day. We hitched up the boat and trailer, packed food and cold drinks in the cooler, and stretched bungee cords across the rods and life preservers in the bottom of the boat. I glanced at the sky in the south and went back into the house for our raincoats. Alafair followed me inside.

  “Dave, we don’t have to do this,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Run away from this guy.”

  “The perps all go down. Just wait them out and they go down.”

  “How long was Hitler killing people? Twelve years?” she said.

  When we reached the swamp, the bays were dented with raindrops. The early-morning fishermen who had gone out for crappie, or what are called “sac-a-lait” in south Louisiana, were already coming back in. We drove along the top of the levee, past the boat-rental and bait shops and the restaurants that offer swamp tours in French and English. Then we entered a long stretch of verdant waterside terrain that was unmarked by litte
r or development or even weekend fish camps of the kind I had rented.

  Alafair and I put the boat in the water and used the electric motor to fish along a chain of willow islands between the levee and the bay. We tried shiners and then jigs, both without success. The wind had come up and the water was cloudy and too high, the time of day wrong as well. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with Alafair and Molly, away from town, away from the job, away from avarice and deceit and people scamming people and profiting from the desperation and hardship of their fellow Americans.

  The change of the season was already in the air. The leaves of the cypress had turned gold and I could smell gas on the breeze. The flooded woods along the shore were dark, the lily pads that had bloomed with yellow flowers in the summer now curling into brown husks along the edges. I could smell schools of fish under the water, like the seminal odor of birth, but I could see nothing below the darkness on the surface, as though part of a life cycle were being removed from my own life.

  Up on the levee a skinned pickup truck loaded with a family bounced down the road toward a boat ramp. Then a kid on a motorbike went by, followed by a black Humvee with tinted windows rolled halfway up.

  A solitary turkey buzzard turned slowly overhead, as though in anticipation of a death that had not yet occurred. Then it tilted against the sky and glided farther out on the bay, perhaps seeking carrion in another place, or perhaps indicating respite, I didn’t know which. I did not like to dwell on the biblical allocation of threescore and ten. But at a certain age, consciousness of mortality is not an elective study.

  “You worry too much about Molly and me,” Alafair said out of nowhere.

  “Think so?” I said, our boat drifting unanchored in the wind now.

  “What happens, happens. We’re not afraid. Why should you be?”

  Because I live inside you, I thought. Because if you die, so do I.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I just talk to myself sometimes. It goes with the seventh-inning stretch.”

  “You’re too much,” she said.

  Later, a shower passed over the swamp, then the air turned cool and the sky brightened and we went back down the levee for supper at a restaurant that was built over the water. It had been a fine day, even though we had caught no fish, and we began straightening up the camp, washing and putting away the dishes, locking all the windows. Out on the bay, behind a distant line of trees, the sun seemed to be sliding off the watery rim of the world. A determined fisherman in a straw hat had dropped anchor in the willow islands, inside the clouds of mosquitoes that always gathered in the trees just before sunset and usually brought the sac-a-lait up just before dark. He kept wiping mosquitoes out of his face and jigging his pole, like an agitated man trying to impose magic on a fruitless pursuit. Then his line snagged in a tree and he stopped long enough to hose himself down with insect repellent before starting in again.

  “Give me the truck keys, Dave, and I’ll bring the trailer around,” Alafair said.

  “How about a piece of pecan pie before we go?” Molly said.

  “I’d really like to get a little done on my novel tonight,” Alafair replied.

  I gave her the keys and through the back window watched her start the truck and drive toward the crushed brick ramp where we always put the boat in, the empty trailer bouncing behind her. I poured the last of the coffee from a pot on the stove, added a teaspoon of sugar, and drank from it. Through the front window I could see Alafair back the trailer down the ramp until the wheels were hubcap-deep and the taillights submerged. Then she put on a pair of rubber boots she had taken from the truck bed and began wading into the shallows.

  I had thought she would wait for me. Normally when we loaded the boat back onto the trailer, one of us backed the trailer into the water while the other cranked up the outboard and powered the boat onto the rollers, allowing the driver to hook the winch onto the bow and hand-crank the boat snug.

  Out among the flooded willows, I saw the solitary fisherman lean down in his boat and pick up something from the bottom. He knocked his hat off his head to give himself better vision and raised the rifle to his shoulder. I could not make out the features of his face, but the moon had started to rise and I saw the light gleam on his bald head inside the shadows.

  I was already out the screen door and running down the slope when he let off the first round.

  Chapter 28

  PERHAPS A GUST of wind buffeted his boat or the sound of my bursting out the screen door startled him, but the bullet went wide by perhaps two inches and whanged off the housing on my outboard motor. The rifle looked to be a semi-automatic carbine, maybe a.223, with a suppressor on the muzzle. The second and third shots came out of the barrel with a flash and made the same sound as the first round, like someone spitting a dry object from his mouth. Alafair had run in a crouch on the near side of the boat, then had thrown herself to the ground behind the truck. The back half of the truck was parked deep enough in the water so that the shooter could not fire under it.

  The shooter took one shot at me just as I ran for the inside of the cabin. The bullet notched a bright slice of wood out of the doorjamb and broke glass somewhere in the bedroom. I landed on the floor, on my face, and could see Molly crouching below the drain board, working her way toward me.

  “Did he hit Alafair?” she said.

  “No, she’s behind the truck. He can’t get to her unless he moves his boat.”

  Two more rounds blew glass and a potted plant out of the kitchen window, powdering Molly’s head and shoulders.

  I crawled on my hands and knees into the bedroom, where my rucksack lay in the corner. I reached inside the flap and felt my hand clasp the checkered grips of my.45. I unsnapped the holster strap and slung the holster aside, then found the extra magazine I kept in the rucksack and shoved it in my back pocket. I pulled back the slide and fed a brass-jacketed 230-grain hollow-point into the chamber.

  I crawled back into the kitchen. Molly was crouched at the edge of the front door, trying to see where Alafair was, her cell phone in her hand. “I called the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department. Is it Bledsoe?” she said.

  “It must be. Look, the nine-one-one response time out here might be fifteen minutes. I’m going outside. Stay on the floor.”

  “I’m going out there with her.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “Don’t do that. Please, stay here. Please don’t argue about it.”

  “No, I’m not going to leave her there.”

  I started to speak, but I knew my words would be wasted and that I couldn’t afford to lose any more time. Just then, the shooter opened up again, pocking holes in the truck and flattening a tire and drilling two holes in the icebox. I went out the door in a run, crouching low, my right arm extended in front of me, firing at the willow island.

  I saw the flash of the shooter’s muzzle again and realized the shooter had changed his angle of fire. I suspected he was using an auxiliary electric motor and had moved the boat closer to the edge of the willows so he would have easier access to the bay. I dropped to my knees next to Alafair.

  Her face was cut under one eye, her clothes and forearms streaked with mud.

  “Are you hurt, Alf?” I said.

  “No, a piece of aluminum hit me, I think,” she said. “I saw him. He’s got a semi-automatic rifle.”

  “Is it Bledsoe?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “I’m going to get this guy. Molly already put in the nine-one-one. Stay here until the St. Martin Parish guys arrive. Don’t try to go to the cabin. There’s no way the guy can get on land.”

  Hardly were the words out of my mouth when Molly ran from the cabin to the truck, bending low, her cell phone in one hand, a small first-aid kit in the other. She blew her hair out of her eyes and looked at me, her cheeks red. She placed her hand against the side of her neck and examined it. Then she touched her neck with the ends of her fingers. There was a stripe across the side of
it, like a rope burn that had started to bleed.

  I wanted to be mad at her for leaving the cabin and exposing herself to greater danger, but how do you become angry at someone who will risk her life to bring a first-aid kit to her loved ones?

  I worked my way to the front of the truck and fired three more rounds at the shadowy outline of the willows, the ejected shells tinkling on the crushed brick. I heard one round knock into wood, another blow water into the air, and another bite into metal. My slide locked open on an empty chamber.

  I let the magazine drop loose from the butt of the.45 and pulled the loaded magazine from my back pocket and jammed it into the butt. I released the slide, feeding a shell into the chamber. But before I could get off a shot, the shooter cranked his outboard and spun the hull of his boat into open water, plowing a trough across the bay.

  I pushed my boat off the trailer, climbed in over the bow, and started the engine. My boat was only sixteen feet long and was utilitarian in construction and unremarkable in appearance. But the 115-horsepower Yamaha mounted on its stern gave it thrust and capability that were far beyond the expectations for a humble bass boat. I twisted the throttle open and mud and dead vegetation boiled under the propeller. The bow rose into the air and the bottom swerved sideways as I slid between two willow islands. In seconds the hull was slapping across the bay as fast as a speedboat.

  Less than one hundred yards away, I could see the shooter heading for a grove of dead cypress by the levee. He was hunched low in the stern, glancing back over his shoulder as he entered a cove of dead water coated with algae. He swerved around a log, scraping against fluted cypress trunks, and went deeper into the cove, looking back again, his propeller probably miring in nests of hyacinth roots. He disappeared inside the cypress, but I could hear his engine whining, like a skill saw biting into a nail.

  Above the cove, on the levee, I saw the lights of a vehicle go on and off and then remain off.