Robert Crais - Voodoo River

She hissed out a little breath, then dropped her foot from the desk and leaned forward. "Is that bullshit?"

"It's the truth."

"Will you show me the bodies?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because to do so might compromise my clients."

"Maybe this issue is larger than your clients."

"Then I'll have to live with it."

She frowned at me some more, then got up, and went to the window to see if Pike was still there. She came back to her desk. "Maybe I know someone. His name is Ramon del Reyo, and he could probably help you out. He wouldn't speak over the phone, though. He's helped a lot of people into the country and the feds just about live up his ass."

"Okay."

She let out another long breath. "I want you to know how much I'm putting at risk, here. I believe in what Ramon's doing. He's a tough little sonofabitch, and everybody's after him, all the way from the feds to the goddamned hoods down in Nicaragua, and I'd hate like hell for anything to happen to him. Do you understand that?"

"I just want Prima, Ms. Henried. Will your guy speak with me?"

She said, "I have to make a call, and I won't do it from here. You can wait, or you can come along." She stood again. "Which is it?"

We walked up the street to a pay phone outside of a Subway Sandwich shop, and Sela Henried placed one call, using her body to block the phone so that I could not see the number she dialed. She spoke for maybe two minutes, then she hung up, keeping her hand on the receiver. "Someone will call back."

I nodded.

Nine minutes later the pay phone rang, and Sela Henried picked up before the first ring had finished. She spoke for a few minutes, this time writing something in a small reporter's notepad. When she hung up she gave me what she had written. "This is in New Orleans, okay? It's a storefront. You have to be there at one o'clock, but you've got plenty of time."

"Thanks, Sela. I appreciate it."

She put the pad in her pocket, then looked at Pike. You could see him sitting in the car down the block, but you couldn't tell where he was looking or what he was thinking. She said, "Ramon will be there, and he'll be with people who can protect him. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"Sure. Don't do anything stupid."

She nodded. "I wouldn't bring the gun. It will only make them nervous, and they will probably take it away from you, anyway."

"Okay."

She nodded again, then looked in my eyes the way you do when you want to make sure the person you're talking to doesn't just understand you, but actually gets it. She said, "I'm trusting you with a very great deal, Mr. Cole. Ramon is a good man, but these are dangerous people with a very great deal to lose. If they think you pose a threat to them, they will kill you. If they think that I set them up, they very well might kill me. I hope that matters to you."

I looked at the pay phone, and then I looked back at the offices of the Bayou State Sentinel . "If the feds want you enough to tap the phones in your office, they'll tap all of the nearby pay phones, too."

She nodded, and now she looked tired, as if all the years of paranoia and fear were getting to be a little too heavy to bear. "Like you, we do the best we can. I hope this helps, Mr. Cole."

Sela Henried walked back to the Sentinel , and Joe Pike and I drove to New Orleans. The drive took a little less than an hour and a half, through forests and swamps so thick they looked like jungle. As we drove I told Pike what Sela Henried had said about Ramon del Reyo and the people around him. Pike listened quietly, then said, "I know guys from down south. They're dangerous people, Elvis. They've grown up with war. To them, war is a way of life."

"Maybe we should split up. Maybe I should meet Ramon, and you should hang back and walk slack for me." Slack was having someone there to pull your ass out of the fire if things went bad. Joe Pike was the best slack man in the business.

Pike nodded. "Sounds good."

The freeway rose the last twenty miles or so, elevated above swamp and cypress knees and hunched men in flat-bottomed boats. Lake Pontchartrain appeared on our left like a great inland sea, and then the swamps fell behind us and we were driving through a dense collar of bedroom communities, and then we were in New Orleans. We took the I-10 through the heart of the city past the Louisiana Superdome, which looked, from the freeway, like some kind of Michael Rennie The Day the Earth Stood Still spaceship plunked down amid the high-rises. We exited at Canal Street and drove south toward the river and the Vieux Carré.

At twenty minutes before one, we parked the car in a public garage on Chartres Street and split up, Pike leaving first. I put the Dan Wesson under the front seat, waited ten minutes, and then I followed.

I walked west on Magazine into an area of seedy, rundown storefronts well away from Bourbon Street,and Jackson Square and the tour buses. The buildings were crummy and old, with cheesy shops and Nearly-Nu stores and the kinds of things that tourists chose to avoid. I found the address I'd been given, but it was empty and locked. A For Lease sign was in the door, and the door was streaked with grime as if nobody had been in the place for the past couple of centuries. I said, "Well, well."

I knocked and waited, but no one answered. I looked both ways along the street, but I couldn't see Joe Pike. I was knocking for the second time when a pale gray Acura pulled to the curb and a thin Hispanic guy wearing Ray-Bans stared out at me. A black guy was sitting in the passenger seat beside him. The black guy looked Haitian. I said, "Ramon?"

The Hispanic guy made a little head move indicating the backseat. "Get in."

I looked up and down the street again, and again I saw no one. I took a step back from the Acura. "Sorry, guys. I'm waiting for someone else."

The Haitian pointed a fully automatic Tec-9 machine pistol at me across the driver. "Get in, mon, or I'll stitch you up good."

I got in, and we drove away. Maybe splitting up hadn't been so smart, after all.

We drove four blocks to the big World Trade Center at the levee, then swung around to Decatur and the southern edge of the French Quarter. We parked across from the old Jackson Brewing Company, then walked east toward Jackson Square past souvenir shops and restaurants and a street musician working his way through "St. Vitus Day March." He was wearing a top hat, and I pretended to look at him to try to find Joe Pike. Pike might have seen our turn; he might have cut the short blocks over and seen us creeping through the French Quarter traffic as we looked for a place to park. The Haitian pulled my arm, "Le's go, mon."

The air was hot and salty with the smell of oysters on half shell and Zatarain's Crab Boil. We walked beneath the covered banquette of a three-story building ringed with lacy ironwork, passing souvenir shops and seafood restaurants with huge outdoor boilers, wire nets of bright red crawfish draining for the tourists. Midday during the week, and people jammed the walk and the streets and the great square around the statue of Andrew Jackson. Sketch artists worked in the lazy shade of magnolia trees and mules pulled old-fashioned carriages along narrow streets. It looked like Disneyland on a Sunday afternoon, but hotter, and more than a few of the tourists looked flushed from the heat and shot glances at the bars and restaurants, working up fantasies about escaping into the AC to sip cold Dixie.

I followed the guy with the Ray-Bans and the Haitian across the Washington Artillery Park to a long cement promenade overlooking the river, and then to a wide circular fountain where another Hispanic guy waited by a Popsicle cart. He had a rugged bantamweight's face, and he was slurping at a grape Popsicle. I said, "You Ramon?"