James Burke: Dixie City Jam

'Where's your phone?'

'On the desk,' he said, exhaling the words like a man who knows the fury and intensity of the world is about to move past him.

I called 911 and asked for an ambulance and a sheriffs car.

'Here's how it shakes out, partner,' I said to the man on the floor. 'You're probably going down as an accessory to assault and battery, kidnapping, and anything else the locals can dream up. But no matter how you cut it, it's a serious bounce. You want to tell me where he is, I'll see what I can do for you later.'

'He knows how to get to people. Anywhere. Lock-down, isolation, Witness Protection Program. There's white guys even paid the Black Guerrillas to protect them. It didn't work.'

'Last chance.'

'Him and Marie, this morning, they got excited about something in a newspaper. Then they took off.'

'Where's the newspaper?'

'I burned it in the trash barrel. With her hair I swept up. I was trying to keep the place clean, and I go down on a kidnapping beef. You tell me that's fair, man.'

I heard sirens in the distance, outside the window, a black man was looking up the street.

'I don't want to be rough on you, but I'd reconsider my attitude about cooperating,' I said to the man in handcuffs. 'When we nail Buchalter, he's going to find out we talked to you first. Who do you think he's going to blame his problems on?'

His face turned ashen.

I rode in the ambulance with Martina to the hospital, then used the phone at the Harrison County Sheriff's Department to call home and Clete's office. I recorded a long message on his machine, assured him Martina was going to be all right, and left him the number of the hospital.

But I would soon discover that I wasn't thinking clearly. I called Ben Motley.

'It's Saturday afternoon. Believe it or not, Robicheaux, I'd like forty-eight hours without thinking about pus bags.'

'Buchalter doesn't take weekends off,' I said.

'You got the woman back. You traced Buchalter to his nest. Count your blessings. Ease up.'

'Now's the time to staple him to the wall, Ben. Call Fart, Barf, and Itch in New Orleans for me.'

'What else?'

'Nothing.' Then I happened to glance at a deputy across the room who was eating a sandwich with his feet on the desk and reading the sports page in the newspaper.

'Wait a minute. Do you have this morning's Times-Picayune?'

'What do you want?'

'Look in the personals for me.'

'That's what they do when they're bored over in Vice.'

'Come on, Ben.'

He put down the phone, then I heard newspaper pages rattling.

'Do you see anything in there that looks peculiar?' I said.

'That's like asking if there's any washroom graffiti that shouldn't be on a Hallmark card,' he said. 'Hold on… Here's one that's all numbers. No message, just numbers.'

'Read them.' I could hear my own breath in the phone. I wrote the numbers down as he read them off. 'Those are the coordinates for that Nazi sub, Ben. You check with The Times-Picayune , you'll find Clete ran that ad.'

'I don't get it.'

'Buchalter kidnapped Martina and forced Clete to find out where I'd seen the sub. I gave him the coordinates. But it took a couple of days for the ad to come out. Look, we need to get a boat or a chopper out there.'

'Call your own department.'

'We don't have anything available.'

'You think I can snap my fingers on Saturday afternoon and come up with a boat or a helicopter? We don't have jurisdiction out on the salt, anyway.'

'You don't understand. I left a message on Clete's machine. I told him Martina's all right. As soon as he retrieves the message, you know where he's headed.'

'So let him light up the fun house. It's what Purcel does best.'

'He might lose, too. I need a boat.'

'You won't get it from me this weekend.'

'Motley-'

'It's Motley now? Why don't you call Nate Baxter? See what kind of help you get.'

I started back home, It was getting dark now, and the palm trees along the highway were beating in the wind, the rain spinning in my headlights. It would take me at least four and a half hours to reach New Iberia, then another seven, maybe more, with the bad weather, to get my boat down Bayou Teche and into the gulf south of Grand Isle.

I pulled into a filling station by the Pearl River and called Lucinda Bergeron's house. The gum trees around the phone booth were green and brightly lit by the filling station's signs, and the leaves were ripping like paper in the wind.

'Zoot?'

'Hey, Mr. Dave, what's happenin'?'

'Where's your mom?'

'She ain't here. Something wrong?'

'I've got to get ahold of her. I need a boat.'

'She went to the grocery. What kind of boat you looking for?'

'A fast one,' I said.

'You ax the right man.'

'Oh?'

'I tole you at your house. But you wasn't listening real good, remember? I worked on all kinds of boats.'

'Who owns this boat, Zoot?'

'A man who don't mind lending it, I promise. When you coming?'

An hour and a half later I parked the truck at a boatyard way out in Jefferson Parish. It had quit raining; and the sky was dark, and water was dripping off the tin shed where Zoot waited in a cabin cruiser with the interior lights on. I took my Japanese field glasses from the glove compartment, then unlocked the iron box welded to the bed of my pickup and removed my old army field jacket and the AR-15 and my Remington twelve-gauge with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump that I had wrapped in a canvas duffel bag. I dropped a box of.223 rounds and a box of double-ought buckshot into the bag and pulled the drawstring. When I walked out onto the dock under the shed I saw that Zoot wasn't alone.

'Hello, Lucinda,' I said, stepping down into the boat.

She was dressed in jeans, a purple sweater, and a nylon NOPD windbreaker. Zoot fixed his attention on the clearing sky, tapping his palms on the wheel, whistling quietly.

'What would you like to hear from me first?' she said.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You call my house and ask a seventeen-year-old to provide a boat for you?' she said.

'Believe what you want, Lucinda. I'm not up to an argument tonight.'

'You were willing to bring a minor and civilian into a potentially dangerous situation? With no consultation with anyone else?'

'I couldn't get a boat from Motley. I don't have time to go back to New Iberia. You think it's right Purcel may be out there by himself?'

'I can't quite tell you how angry I am,' she said.

'Then why'd you let him come?'

She didn't answer. I lowered my voice. 'Maybe nobody's out there. Maybe I should have waited for you to come home. Maybe I should have gone back to New Iberia,' I said. 'I did what I thought was best.'

I waited. Her arms were folded across her chest, her hands cupped on her elbows. I looked at Zoot, and he turned over the engines and backed us out of the slip. The wind was cool and damp and smelled of salt and dead gars that had been hit by boat propellers. Lights flickered across the clouds in the south.

We headed down Bayou St. Denis. It was a beautiful boat, custom-built with teakwood and mahogany panels in the cabin, brightwork that had the soft glow of butter, wide beds down below, sonar, a pump toilet, a small galley, and twin two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude outboard engines that could hit fifty knots. When we entered Barataria Bay, Zoot tried to open her up.

'The chop's too heavy. You're going to beat us to death, partner,' I said.

The glass was beaded with the spray off the bow. The moon had broken from behind the clouds, and our wake glistened behind us like a long brown and silver trough. Zoot wore a black knitted cap rolled up on top of his head and chewed on a matchstick. When he eased back on the throttle, I saw the two ignition wires wrapped together and swinging loose at the bottom of the instrument panel.