James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“I don’t know where Max Coll is. What purpose would I have in concealing his whereabouts?” I said, although no one had spoken to me.

“See, he knows what we want. He don’t even wait to be asked the question. That shows us he’s a smart guy who can look into the minds of other people. That shows us he’s smart and we’re dumb,” said the voice of the man who had applied a pair of pliers to my thumb.

“How you want this to play out, ‘cause we got a flight to catch?” said the voice of the other man, who I now believed to be Tito Dellacroce, also known as the Heap. But he was speaking to someone else, and not to his brother, either.

Whoever he asked the question of did not respond. Instead, I heard the soft sound of a clothing zipper sliding on its track, followed by a pause, just before a warm stream of urine splashed in my face and ran down inside the tape that bound my eyes. I twisted my head from side to side, but the person urinating on me painted my mouth, hair, and neck and drenched my shirt before he zipped up his fly again.

“We’re naming this place Yellow Springs, Louisiana, in your honor, Robicheaux,” said the voice of the man with the pliers.

They left the room and closed the door behind them. I leaned forward and spit, then sucked saliva out of my jaws and spit again. I heard a car door slam and the car drive away. Two men reentered the room and one of them grabbed a corner of the tape and ripped it loose from my eyes and the back of my head.

“You’re shit out of luck,” said the man with the tape hanging from his fingers. He was short, with a pointed face, and small, energized, deep-set eyes, his hair scalped above his ears like bowl-cut animal fur.

Next to him was his brother, Tito the Heap. His hair was braided in dreadlocks that hung to his shoulders, which sloped away from his thick neck like the sides on a tent. One jawbone kept flexing like a roll of pennies.

The room was bare, except for a table on which a tool box and a camcorder rested. The walls and floor were constructed of rough planks, and through the screen window I could see a woods strung with air vines and dotted with palmettos and beyond the tree trunks a bay and the red sun low on the horizon. In the distance somebody was firing a shotgun, perhaps popping skeet over the water.

“Are you listening, asshole? The man says the whack goes down an inch at a time. You get to be in your own movie,” said the short man, whom I recognized from his mug shot as Caesar Dellacroce.

“Get it over with,” I said.

“I think if you knew what was coming, you wouldn’t say that,” Caesar said.

I looked into space, my eyes slightly out of focus with fatigue and hopelessness and now resignation.

“I’m talking to you,” Caesar said. He popped my cheek with his hand.

“I figure I’m done, so what I’m about to tell you is the truth. I didn’t smoke Frank Dellacroce, but I wish I had. He was a punk and a bully and somebody should have put the electrodes on him and blown out his grits a long time ago. When you get finished with me, Clete Purcel is going to turn over every rock in New Orleans and Fort Lauderdale until he finds you, then make you wish your mother had flushed you down the toilet with the afterbirth.”

Caesar stared at me, his mouth parted slightly, his jaws slack. “Say that again?”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

“You believe this guy?” Caesar said to his brother. But he was clearly distracted now, not quite in charge anymore.

“We wasted too much time on this,” Tito said reflectively. His eyes, like his brother’s, were inset deeply in the skull, his nostrils flaring when he breathed, as though the plates of muscle on his chest and shoulders were squeezing the air from his lungs. “Here’s what it is, ace. You rolled the dice with the wrong guy and lost. We ain’t responsible for this. So take your medicine like a man. I’ll make it short and sweet as possible. You want to say anything?”

“No,” I replied, and fixed my gaze out the window on a watery, red sunset barely showing behind the thin trunks of trees that had already turned dark with the gloaming of the day. Tito Dellacroce pushed a sponge into my mouth with the heel of his hand, then began winding tape around my head.

“Hang on,” Caesar said, staring out the same window but at a different angle.

“What?” Tito said.

“There’s a priest out there,” Caesar said.

“Where?”

“Walking down off the levee. He’s carrying a briefcase. Look for yourself. He’s got a bandage around his throat,” Caesar said.

Tito went to the window, then pulled a curtain across it. “You ever seen a priest around here?” he asked.

“Yeah, lots of priests hung out at Frank’s old fuck pad.”

“His fuck pad was up the road. Our father used to take us fishing here. It ain’t a fuck pad,” Tito said.

“Enough, already. It’s a priest carrying a pro-life petition around or something. It ain’t a big deal,” Caesar said.

“Get outside.”

“Do it yourself. The mosquitoes out there eat cows for lunch.” Caesar peeked through the side of the curtain. “See, he’s gone.”

Just as he dropped the curtain back in place someone in heavy shoes walked up on the porch and banged hard on the door. Tito and Caesar looked at each other. Then the visitor on the porch banged even harder, shaking the entire cabin. “I’ll get rid of him. Stay with asshole,” Caesar said.

He removed a .25 caliber automatic from his side pocket, snicked a round into the chamber, set the safety, and replaced the gun in his pocket. He opened the door and stepped into the front room. Tito Dellacroce stood behind me, one huge hand resting on my shoulder, the lower portion of his stomach touching the back of the chair. I could hear him breathing and smell the food he had eaten for supper on his skin. Caesar had left the door between the rooms ajar so Tito could listen.

“What can I do for you, Father?” I heard Caesar say.

The reply was muffled, a wheezing sound, like a man speaking through a rusty clot in his windpipe.

“What’s that?” Caesar said.

The priest tried again, his voice barely a whisper.

“You’re signing up people for a retreat?” Caesar said. “No, we belong to a church in Florida. We’re just doing some fishing. Here’s five bucks for your missions or whatever. No, I don’t need no holy card.”

The priest spoke again.

“We ain’t got a bathroom. Just a privy out back no white person would want to slap his keester on. Try the filling station up on the state road. Okay, vaya con dios . That’s Latin for ‘see you around,’ right?”

A moment later Caesar came back through the door that separated the two rooms of the cabin.

“So?” Tito said.

“So nothing. The guy had a tracheotomy or something. He sounded like all his gas was coming out the wrong end,” Caesar said.

“Check.”

“On what?”

“On where he is. I got to draw a picture on your forehead?”

“You worry too much,” Caesar said irritably, and jerked the window curtain aside again. Then he froze. “I told him not to go back there.”

“Go back where?” Tito said.

“To our privy. I told him not to do that.”

“Give me your piece. Get away from the window,” Tito said.

The wind gusted off the water, stressing the tin roof against the joists. Then someone stepped onto the back porch. Tito jerked the .25 caliber automatic from his brother’s hand and clicked the safety off with his thumb. “Is that you, Father? “Cause if it is this is getting to be a headache we don’t need—”

The door burst open and, framed against the light, dressed in a black suit and Roman collar and black rabat, was a compact, well-groomed man with a 1911 U.S. Army model .45 automatic in each hand.