said.
The milk truck was parked deep in the shade of the live oaks. The rear doors opened, flapping back on their hinges, and revealed a prone man in a yellow T-shirt and dark blue jeans. His long body was stretched out behind a sandbag, the sling of the scoped rifle twisted around his left forearm, the right side of his face notched into the rifle's stock.
When he squeezed off, the rifle recoiled hard against his shoulder and a flash leaped off the muzzle, like an electrical short, but there was no report.
The bullet tore through the center of Ricky's throat. A purple stream of burgundy flowed from both corners of his mouth, then he began to make coughing sounds, like a man who can neither swallow nor expel a chicken bone, while blood spigoted from his wound and spiderwebbed his chest and white polo pants. His eyes stared impotently into his new girlfriend's face. She pushed herself away from the table, her hands held out in front of her, her knees close together, like someone who did not want to be splashed by a passing car.
The shooter slammed the back doors of the milk truck and the driver drove the truck through the trees and over the curb onto the boulevard. Benny Grogan ran down the street after it, his.38 held in the air, automobiles veering to each side of him, their horns blaring.
IT WAS MONDAY WHEN Adrien Glazier gave me all the details of Scarlotti's death over the phone.
'NOPD found the truck out by Lake Pontchartrain. It was clean,' she said.
'You got anything on the shooter?'
'Nothing. It looks like we've lost our biggest potential witness against the boys from Hong Kong,' she said.
'I'm afraid people in New Orleans won't mourn that fact,' I said.
'You can't tell. Greaseball wakes are quite an event. Anyway, we'll be there.'
'Tell the band to play 'My Funny Valentine,'' I said.
TWENTY-NINE
THAT EVENING I DROVE DOWN to Clete's cottage outside Jeanerette. He was washing his car in the side yard, rubbing a soapy sponge over the hood.
'I think I'm going to get it restored, drive it around like a classic instead of a junk heap,' he said. He wore a pair of rubber boots and oversized swimming trunks, and the hair on his stomach was wet and plastered to his skin.
'Megan thinks the guys who did Ricky Scar might try to hurt Holtzner by going through his daughter. She thinks you shouldn't let her drive your car around,' I said.
'When those guys want to pop somebody, they don't do it with car bombs. It's one on one, like Ricky Scar got it.'
'Have you ever listened to me once in your life about anything?'
'On the perfecta that time at Hialeah. I lost three hundred bucks.'
'Archer Terrebonne killed Cisco Flynn's father. I told Cisco that.'
'Yeah, I know. He says he doesn't believe you.' Clete moved the sponge slowly back and forth on the car hood, his thoughts sealed behind his face, the water from the garden hose sluicing down on his legs.
'What's bothering you?' I asked.
'Terrebonne's a major investor in Cisco's film. If Cisco walks out, his career's a skid mark on the bowl. I just thought he might have more guts. I bet a lot of wrong horses.'
He threw the bucket of soapy water into a drainage ditch. The sun looked like a smoldering fire through the pine trees.
'You want to tell me what's really bothering you?' I said.
'I thought Megan and me might put it back together. That's why I scrambled Ricky Scar's eggs, to look like big shit, that simple, mon. Megan's life is international, I mean, all this local stuff is an asterisk in her career.' He blew his breath out. 'I got to stop drinking. I've got a buzz like a bad neon sign in my head.'
'Let's put a line in the water,' I said.
'Dave, those pictures Harpo Scruggs buried in the ground? That dude's got backup material somewhere. Something that can put a thumb in Terrebonne's eye.'
'Yeah, but I can't find Scruggs. The guy's a master at going in and out of the woodwork,' I said.
'Remember what that retired Texas Ranger in El Paso told you? About looking for him in cathouses and at pigeon shoots and dogfights?'
His skin was pink in the fading light, the hair on his shoulders ruffling in the breeze.
'Dogfights? No, it was something else,' I said.
THE COCKFIGHTS WERE HELD in St. Landry Parish, in a huge, rambling wood-frame nightclub, painted bright yellow and set back against a stand of green hardwoods. The shell parking lot could accommodate hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks, and the patrons (blue-collar people, college students, lawyers, professional gamblers) who came to watch the birds blind and kill each other with metal spurs and slashers did so with glad, seemingly innocent hearts.
The pit was railed, enclosed with chicken wire, the dirt hard-packed and sprinkled with sawdust. The rail, which afforded the best view, was always occupied by the gamblers, who passed thousands of dollars in wagers from hand to hand, with neither elation nor resentment, as though the matter of exchanging currency were impersonal and separate from the blood sport taking place below.
It was all legal. In Louisiana fighting cocks are classified as fowl and hence are not protected by the laws that govern the treatment of most animals. In the glow of the scrolled neon on the lacquered yellow pine walls, under the layers of floating cigarette smoke, in the roar of noise that raided windows, you could smell the raw odor of blood and feces and testosterone and dried sweat and exhaled alcohol that I suspect was very close to the mix of odors that rose on a hot day from the Roman arena.
Clete and I sat at the end of the bar. The bartender, who was a Korean War veteran named Harold who wore black slacks and a short-sleeve white shirt and combed his few strands of black hair across his pate, served Clete a vodka collins and me a Dr Pepper in a glass filled with cracked ice. Harold leaned down toward me and put a napkin under my glass.
'Maybe he's just late. He's always been in by seven-thirty,' he said.
'Don't worry about it, Harold,' I said.
'We gonna have a public situation here?' he said.
'Not a chance,' Clete said.
We didn't have long to wait. Harpo Scruggs came in the side door from the parking lot and walked to the rail around the cockpit. He wore navy blue western-cut pants with his cowboy boots and hat, and a silver shirt that tucked into his Indian-bead belt as tightly as tin. He made a bet with a well-known cockfighter from Lafayette, a man who when younger was both a pimp and a famous barroom dancer.
The cocks rose into the air, their slashers tearing feathers and blood from each other's bodies, while the crowd's roar lifted to the ceiling. A few minutes later one of the cocks was dead and Scruggs gently pulled a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills from between the fingers of the ex-pimp he had made his wager with.
'I think I'm experiencing Delayed Stress Syndrome. There was a place just like this in Saigon. The bar girls were VC whores,' Clete said.
'Has he made us?' I asked.
'I think so. He doesn't rattle easy, does he? Oh-oh, here he comes.'
Scruggs put one hand on the bar, his foot on the brass rail, not three feet from us.
'Has that worm talked to you yet?' he said to Harold.
'He's waiting right here for you,' Harold said, and lifted a brown bottle of mescal from under the bar and set it before Scruggs, with a shot glass and a saucer of chicken wings and a bottle of Tabasco.
Scruggs took a twenty-dollar bill from a hand-tooled wallet and inserted it under the saucer, then poured into the glass and drank from it. His eyes never looked directly as us but registered our presence in the same flat,
