James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

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; 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 an Evinrude 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 the 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."

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."