Lone Star Noir

wrapped-up box at the door.”

“Hot damn. Why didn’t she hand it to you?”

“Don’t know. Just heard her on the stairs. Want me to unwrap the box?”

“No time. ’Less it’s ticking, just hold on to it.”

“Got time for one question, Mr. Phelan?”

“Shoot.”

Throat clearing. “You think you might hire me?”

“Miss Wade, you were hired when you called me Bubba.” He hung up the silent phone and jogged for the doors.

3:15. The house with the orange mailbox, painfully described by Marvin, was a dingy white ranch. It was set deep in the lot, backed up to tall pines and oak and magnolia, pockets of brush. Rusty-brown pine needles and dried magnolia leaves, big brown tongues, littered the ground. With oil shot up to twelve dollars a barrel, somebody’d be out here soon, hammering up pasteboard apartments, but for now wildlife was renting this leftover patch of the Big Thicket.

No car, but ruts in the grass where one had parked.

Phelan knocked on the door. Waited. Tried the knob, no dice. He went around the back to a screen porch that looked to be an add-on. Or it had been a screen porch before plywood was nailed over its large windows. A two- by-four had been pounded across the door; the hammer lying there in the dirt suggested that Dave Deeterman might be recently away from his desk. Maybe. Phelan could hear something. He beat on the door. “Ricky. Ricky Toups, you in there?”

He put his ear to the door. Something. Phelan pounded again, louder. “I’m looking for Ricky Toups.”

A low creaking. Rhythmic. What was that sound? Like a rocking chair with serious rust.

He jogged back to his car, shoved a flashlight into his pocket, and snagged a pry bar. Ripped off the two-by- four. Opened the door. Directly across the porch was the door that led into the house. Phelan stepped over there,.38 drawn, and rattled it: locked. Already he was smelling piss in the hot, dead air. Then herb and cigarettes and some kind of dead-fish bayou stink. That creaky noise came from the far left, high up. He found a switch by the locked door and flipped it. Not a gleam.

He’d got the creaks figured now, and he shined the white circle up and left, to their source.

Christ Almighty.

Phelan’s jaw sagged. On the top of metal shelves was a naked gargoyle, perched there. No, clinging. Haunches with a smooth, sheened back folded over them, fingers clawed around the metal, head cut sharply toward Phelan. Blinking eyes protruded from sunken holes; the downturned mouth wheezed.

“Asthma, right?”

An indrawn, “Yeah.”

“Deeterman coming back?”

Ricky Toups’s head bobbed loosely, flapping sweat-dark hair that had been dishwater-blond in last year’s school photo.

“How long’s he been gone?”

“Hour or-” The kid flung out a hand, pointing.

Phelan zigzagged the light downward over matted orange shag littered with marijuana debris, the arm of a bamboo couch, beer cans. He pivoted. The shaft of light from the door revealed the round edge of a black pile that blended into the darkness. What? Shit? Most of him failed to make sense of what he saw. But not his skin-it was crawling off his belly, his nuts squeezing north of nutsack.

The pile of shit shifted until only a tip remained. Then the tip disappeared into blackness.

That it was heading toward him told Phelan enough. Most snakes light out for the hills; cottonmouths come at you.

Phelan strode to the shelves and hauled Ricky down, shined the light till it hit the bamboo couch, and dumped the boy on it. “Keep your feet off the floor.”

He scanned with the flashlight. Where the fuck was it?

Shag. Spilt ashtray. More shag.

Then the beam caught a section of sinuous black. He moved the light. There it was. Pouring toward him, triangular head outthrust.

Phelan fired.

The black snake convulsed but kept coming, tongue darting.

He fired again. Still the black form writhed in the orange grass. He blew its head off with the third round.

Phelan stepped wide of the quivering snake; wasn’t dead enough yet to keep the head from biting. Ears ringing, he tossed the flashlight, looped the boy’s arm around his neck, dragged him out of that room.

He saw the blue thumb-sized bruises on the boy’s shoulders, a streak of blood on the back of his thigh, as he draped him in his own jacket and a blanket from his trunk. “It’s the hospital, Ricky, ’less you got a full inhaler at home.”

“Home,” the kid panted, then turned the black tunnel of his eyes onto Phelan. “Book.”

“What book?”

But the kid folded, struggling for air.

Phelan laid on the horn when they gunned into the Toups’s driveway. In two seconds, Caroleen Toups busted out of the house, face lit up like stadium lights.

Phelan smoked in the Toups’s pine-paneled living room that opened onto a pine-paneled kitchen. Except for the mention of a book, he had hold of the thing: Deeterman slipped Ricky cash and dope, Ricky steered him boys. Too stupid to know the son of a bitch would turn on him. How many ran in a loop through Phelan’s brain. How many you bring him, Ricky?

After a while, wearing jeans and breathing, Ricky Toups stumbled out into the living room, trailed by his bewildered mother, her hands clasped at chest level. “There’s a book,” he said. “Told him I didn’t have it. He didn’t care, said he’d be back for me.”

“What kinda book?”

“Like a diary. You gotta help Georgia.” He hit his inhaler, and his jaw jittered sideways like his head was trying to screw off.

“She’s got the book. Her idea to take it?”

Ricky’s bluish chapped lips parted, like he was going to deny this point, but that was back when he had all the answers, before today. “She said we could get big money from him. That’s where he went. To her house.”

Phelan leapt up. “Call her.”

Ricky mumbled into a phone on the kitchen wall then hung his head listening. The receiver fell to his side. “It’s okay. He came to her house but she’d already took it to your office.”

Phelan’s stomach lurched.

Ricky slid down the wall, hunkered. Georgia’d told Deeterman he could go get the book where she’d left it, wrapped up outside this private eye’s office. The guy wouldn’t be there; he was out looking for Ricky. She’d talked fast, peeking through a latched screen door with Phelan’s card taped to the outside of it.

4:55. Phelan burned up I-10’s fast lane, swerving around truckers balling for New Orleans, cursing himself for wasting three rounds on a cottonmouth he could have outrun.

He took the stairs soft. Worked the doorknob soundlessly, hoping Deeterman was somewhere ahead of the truckers on I-10, not sitting in Delpha’s chair watching the knob turn. Phelan eased into the still office,.38 out.

Delpha Wade’s chair snugged to her desk. On top of it, the sheet with info on Client #2, typed on her release form. The door to his office stood ajar. Pressed against the jamb, Phelan pushed, swinging it open.

He stepped into a curtain of bourbon fume and quiet in the air, waves of it, wave on wave, quiet.

Until glass crunched under his shoe.

The client chair drifted around. Delpha said, “I put it away in your bottom drawer. Under the whiskey bottle.”

Phelan slid the gun on his desk next to a wad of brown paper, sank down to her.

Her right hand hung behind the chair arm but her left lay on a small, worn ledger in the middle of a shiny darkness on her skirt. Different-sized spots stained her white blouse, spray and spatter, one red channel.