A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  “Boggs…,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Boggs…”

  I opened my mouth to let it drain. I spit on myself.

  “Boggs…”

  “What?” he said.

  “You’d fuck up a wet dream. Shoot and be done with it.”

  I saw his eyes narrow. They were liquid and rheumy, like a lizard’s, the whites flecked almost entirely red with broken blood veins. His right hand, wrapped around the trigger guard, was white and ridged with bone. The edges of his eyes trembled with anger. His tongue tasted his lip, and he looked like a man whose sexual satisfaction was about to be denied him.

  “We gotta go, Jimmie Lee,” Lionel said from the stern.

  But Boggs’s attention had shifted. He stared out into the fog, the shotgun at port arms, his dyed, threadlike hair wet and stuck against his scalp like a duck’s feathers. Then I saw and heard it, too: the glow of running lights in the fog, the drone of a big engine, of boat screws that cut a deep trough in the water.

  Suddenly no one was interested in me. I raised up slowly from all fours and sat back on my heels. Lionel had been trying to push Fontenot’s huge weight up onto the bow of the cabin cruiser, but they were both frozen now on the stern of the jugboat. Fontenot’s neck looked like a turtle’s inside his life jacket.

  The electric arc of a searchlight burst through the fog. It was hot and white and blinding to the eyes, and now the jugboat and the green, white-capping waves had the strange luminescence of objects lighted by a pistol flare.

  A man’s voice boomed through a bullhorn across the water: “This is the New Orleans Police Department. You’re under arrest. Put down your weapons and lace your hands on your head.”

  Lionel’s arm went up, and he aimed the nine-millimeter across the roof of the pilothouse.

  “No!” Fontenot shouted. Then he shouted it again, “No!” His face was round and soft and full of disbelief.

  But it was too late. Lionel and Boggs were both shooting now, the muzzle flashes from their guns almost lost in the searchlight’s hot glare. I could hear the brass hulls from Lionel’s pistol clinking on the pilothouse roof. Then the searchlight glass shattered and almost simultaneously two kneeling figures on the bow of the police boat, bill caps turned backward on their heads, began firing M-16 rifles on full automatic.

  They blew wood divots out of the deck and pilothouse, exploded my instrument panel, rang metal-jacketed bullets off the deck rails, gear boxes, pots and pans and stove in the galley, scissored through the tin side of a bait well, and trapped Ray Fontenot helplessly against the back rail of the jugboat.

  He tried to crouch down behind the corner of the pilothouse, his mouth wide and pink with words that no one could hear. His fists were balled, his wrists crossed in an X in front of his eyes; then the bullets danced across his life jacket, split the canvas like dry blisters popping, and his throat and great heaving chest erupted with red flowers. His mouth hung open as though he had swallowed a chicken bone.

  I lay flat on the deck, my arms folded across the crown of my skull. Boggs was hunkered down behind the iron gear box that had held the crates of cocaine, and the M-16 rounds whanged off the top and the sides and sparked in the darkness. But he didn’t wince. He kept firing, pumping the empty shell casings out on the deck, his body small and constricted with muscle like a rifleman’s. His shotgun must have been loaded with double-aughts or deer slugs, because I could hear the damage to the police boat, the glass breaking, the hard slap of heavy shot across wood surfaces.

  Then the police boat veered back into the fog, turning into its own wake, but not before one of the kneeling figures on the bow emptied his clip and bit into the auxiliary gasoline drum welded against the jugboat’s deck rail. The gasoline gushed across the deck and drained into the engine well. I don’t know what ignited it—a spark jumping off a metal surface, shorted wiring, or an exploded starter battery—but suddenly the deck was flaming, the gas drum was ringed with fire; then it blew with a whoompth, like a large furnace kicking on deep in the bowels of a tenement building.

  I crawled across the deck, squeezed under the bottom rail, and rolled over the side. I could not see the police boat now, but before I dropped into the water I saw Jimmie Lee Boggs running for the stern, his hard, lean body silhouetted among the flames. Lionel was on his knees by the pilothouse, his hand pressed against a hemorrhaging wound in the center of his throat. His shoulders shook and convulsed as though he were trying to expel a piece of angle iron from his chest. He tried to catch Boggs’s dungarees with his fingers as Boggs went past him. The back of Lionel’s hand was scarlet and shining in the fire’s light. But Boggs pulled the mooring line free, jumped from the stern rail onto the bow of his boat, and in seconds started the engine, opened the throttle full-out, and spun on the back of a breaking wave into the fog.

  I treaded water and drifted away from the jugboat. It was burning brightly now, from bow to stern, and when the anchor rope burned through, it floated sideways in the swell, and a big wave broke against the pilothouse and turned to steam. The water was cold and smelled of oil and gas. In the distance I could hear the thinning sound of Boggs’s cabin cruiser and the police boat in pursuit. I tried to save my strength and float on my back, but each time I rose with a wave, the water broke across my mouth and nose, and I had to right my head and churn with my hands and feet again.

  The tide was coming in, and I couldn’t swim against it to the oil platform. The Coast Guard was out there somewhere, but it had probably become occupied with the shrimper. The jugboat was only a red glow in the fog now. I heard another whoompth, a sound like boiling water, a rush of air bubbles, the hiss of steam rising from heated metal; then the red glow died, and the fogbank was absolutely white.

  A few minutes later it began to rain again. The rain danced on the water, drummed on my head, beat in my ears. So this is how your death comes, I thought. You don’t buy it with the enemies of your dreams—the black-clad toy men whose breath, even in your sleep, stunk of fish; a psychotic killer of children who tried to push an ice pick behind your ear; the Vegas hit man who handcuffed you to a drainpipe, taped your mouth, and spoke compassionately to you about the means of your execution while you stared helplessly at the white threads of light in his vacuous blue eyes. Instead, you slip down into a cold green envelope beneath the roll and pitch of the waves; you drift and bump across the sandy Gulf floor, your clothes stringing bubbles to the surface, your eyes a feast for crabs and eels.

  Then the fog began to flatten on the water and break up into turning wisps and wraiths that hovered just above the waves, and the eastern sky went gray. A soft rose-colored light broke on the horizon, and I saw the quarter moon for the first time that night. Fifty yards away a round shape, like the back of an enormous seagoing turtle, floated in the swell. I swam to it, one long stroke at a time, breathing sideways, blowing water out my nose, until finally my hand struck the life jacket that was wrapped around the chest of Ray Fontenot.

  I had to roll him over to get to the laces. His body was strung with kelp, his skin blistered with burns and streaked with oil, his sightless eyes poached in his head. I jerked the jacket free and put my arms through the openings and felt the tension and ball of pain go out of my lower back as I was suddenly made weightless, bobbing along in a cresting wave that swept me toward the Louisiana shore.

  For a short time I fell asleep, then awoke to the sound of sea gulls, the shadows of pelicans gliding by overhead, the heavy, fecund smell that speckled trout make when they school up, the early sun like a red wafer over the long green roll of the Gulf.

  Five minutes later I heard an outboard engine, and I tried to wave my arms above the waves. Then he saw me and turned his engine so that he made a wide circle and approached me with the waves at his stern. It was a bass boat, a long, aluminum, flat-bottomed boat designed for freshwater fishing, not for weather or being any distance from land. The man sitting at an angle in the stern, with the throttle of the Evi
nrude in his hand, wore Marine Corps utility pants, a gold and purple LSU jersey with Mike the Tiger on the front, a pale blue porkpie hat mashed down on his big head.

  He cut the engine, drifted into me, then reached down and grabbed me by the back of the life jacket. His face was round and flushed red with windburn and the strain of lifting me.

  “What’s happening, Streak?” Cletus said.

  I lay in the bottom of his boat, my skin numb and dead to the touch and wrinkled with water-soak. I could see the coastline, the tide breaking across a sandbar, and white cranes rising from a cypress swamp.

  You went out after me in this? I wanted to say. But I was breathless with cold and the words wouldn’t come.

  “How you like civil service with the DEA?” he said above the engine’s roar. “Those babies really know how to take care of you, don’t they? Yes, indeedy, they do.”

  Chapter 9

  Through my hospital room windows I could see the tops of oak trees, a pink two-story house with iron grillwork across the street, palm fronds on the esplanade, and, where the side street fed into St. Charles, the big green iron streetcar when it passed. My room was white, and the sunlight was bright above the oak trees outside.

  My right eye was crimped partly shut by the tape that covered the stitches in my eyebrow. There were four stitches in my lip, and they felt like a large plastic insect when I moved my tongue across them. I slept through most of the morning, and at noon I ate a lunch of mashed potatoes, baked chicken, early peas, and Jell-O, and fell asleep again. Two hours later I was awakened by Minos’s phone call.

  “What happened out there?” he said.

  I told him.

  “How’d you know which hospital I was in?” I asked.

  “Your buddy Clete called me. Look, I’m sorry about this, Dave. I really am. There’s always risk in undercover work, but we usually do a better job of protecting our people.”

  “How did New Orleans Vice get in on it?”

  “I don’t know. I talked to this character Nate Baxter. He’s a nasty sonofabitch, isn’t he?”

  “You got it.”

  “He stonewalled me, said he couldn’t talk to me without clearance, said he wasn’t even sure who I was.”

  “Did you mention my name?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Don’t tell him anything about our operation. He’ll divulge it or use it in some way for his own ends. In the meantime call his superiors.”

  “I already have a call in. But I appreciate you telling me how to do these things.”

  “You sound a little irritable this afternoon.”

  “Your busted head and the loss of your boat weren’t the only problems that developed out there.”

  “Wait a minute. They got Boggs, didn’t they?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Boggs got away. With fifty keys of pure flake.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Evidently he went between two sandbars and they went over the top of one. At least that’s what the Coast Guard says. Our man Baxter has no comment.”

  “You got the shrimper, didn’t you?”

  “We got the shrimper. But no dope. No money, either. They dumped it all overboard.” I could almost hear him swallow when he said it.

  “It all went for nothing?”

  “That’s what a few people have been telling me today.”

  “What about my boat?”

  “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “Listen, Minos, it’ll take me thirty thousand dollars to replace it.”

  “People down here are not sympathetic to my point of view right now. A half-million dollars of DEA money is at this moment bouncing along the bottom of the Gulf.”

  “Your friends have an interesting attitude about personal responsibility.”

  “Nobody here wants to spend the rest of his career in western Nebraska. But it happens. Give me a little time.”

  “I mean it, Minos. That’s a big part of my livelihood that went down out there. I want it back.”

  “You made your point.”

  “One other thing. Boggs said something about Cardo’s being history. Is there a whack out on him or something?”

  “It’s funny you say that. We heard rumors like that from both Houston and Miami in just the last two days.”

  A nurse came in to take my temperature, and I started to say good-bye to Minos.

  “How close did it get out there, Dave?” he said.

  “Down to the wire.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “It’s just a few stitches. They’re keeping me a day or so because I got some water in my lungs. Sometimes that can cause pneumonia.”

  “No. I mean are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” And I looked out at the sunlight on the trees and realized that I meant it.

  “I think we’re going to pull you out of the sting. It went out of control. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, it just happens. But you’ve done enough. I’ll be back with you tonight.”

  After he hung up and the nurse had taken my temperature, I used the bathroom, then walked to the window and looked down the side street toward St. Charles. The streetcar rattled down the esplanade under the massive canopy of oak trees, the wood seats filled with Negroes and working-class white people. Down below, the gutters were full of pink and blue camellias from the previous night’s rain, and the wet stone was streaked with color like dye washed out of paper flowers.

  Ten minutes later Clete walked through the door with a pizza in a flat box, a can of Jax in one coat pocket, and a Dr Pepper in the other. His porkpie hat was tilted down on his forehead. He sat on the side of my bed and flipped open the top of the box, his intelligent green eyes smiling at me.

  “Hospital food usually tastes like a cross between spit and baby pabulum,” he said. “So I brought you a dynamite combo of anchovies, sausage, pepperoni, and double cheese. How do you like it, my noble mon?”

  “How about some peanut brittle? It goes great with stitches in the mouth, too.”

  He ate a huge wedge and popped open the can of Jax, drank it half-empty, then picked up another wedge and started chewing, smiling all the time. There were flecks of pizza sauce on his mouth and shirt.

  “The next time, I cover your butt from Jump Street,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “The feds don’t send out my old partner on any more Lone Ranger jobs.”

  “Okay, Clete.”

  “Because you can’t depend on these white-collar dickheads.”

  “I got your drift.”

  “Did that pencil pusher call you yet?”

  “Minos?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About ten minutes ago.”

  “His sting has turned to shit. He’s not too happy. I told him they took a hell of a lot of risk with a guy they recruited from outside their agency. He didn’t seem to like that.”

  “Minos is all right. How do you think New Orleans got in on it?”

  “Maybe a wiretap, maybe a snitch. Who cares? They saved your tokus, didn’t they?”

  “Not intentionally. You remember what it was like when somebody opened up on you with an M-16?”

  “Maybe we ought to ’front Nate Baxter about it. Sometimes he comes into my club after work. I’ve always thought his head would make a good toilet brush.”

  He continued to study my face.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t a tap. The DEA would know about a tap. Somebody dropped the dime on the buy.”

  “Who knew about it?”

  “Cardo… Fontenot… Lionel… obviously Boggs…”

  “Why you got that big wrinkle between your eyes, Streak?”

  “I’m involved with somebody. She knew about it, too.”

  “That’s great. Why don’t you run an ad in the Times-Picayune the next time out?”

  “I didn’t tell her. She picked up on it somewhere else.”r />
  “What’s her name?”

  “Bootsie Giacano.”

  “Oh, man, I don’t believe it. You’re in the sack with one of the Giacanos?”

  “She’s an old friend from New Iberia. She married into the family.”

  “Probably like one of Charlie Manson’s people, just a casual member of the family.”

  “Knock it off, Clete.”

  He grinned and squinted at me.

  “The other one that bothers me is Kim Dollinger,” I said. “She was trying to tell me something in your club. I thought she was just bombed.”

  “She is one tough badass broad, isn’t she? I’d like to get to know her a lot better.”

  “I get the feeling you’re not too serious about any of this.”

  “Why should I be? This whole sting was put together by clowns, if you ask me. They almost got you killed out there. I don’t like federal farts doing that to my podjo.”

  “I think you need to broaden your attitudes, Clete.”

  He opened my can of Dr Pepper, poured it in a glass with ice, set a glass straw in it, and put it in my hand.

  “Drink your pop,” he said. “Hey, you know who I got the pizza from?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “You got it, mon. That strange, buglike colored kid. He works in that pizza joint right around the corner from the Pearl. Hey, mon, it’s time to get out of this G-man bullshit. Let them clean up their own mess for a while. If you still want to square the beef with Boggs, you and I’ll do it together. With no forms to fill out, either. You know what I mean?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Something happened out there, didn’t it?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The dragon went away.”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s a rush, isn’t it?”

  I nodded and looked out the window at the tops of the trees moving in the sunlight.

  “Yeah, a real high,” he said. “Maybe one a guy doesn’t always want to turn loose of. Almost as good as a glass of black Jack on ice with a Tuborg to chase it home. Think about it, Dave. The time to go is right after you hit the daily double.”