“Hang up and call back. I’m going to move my truck.”
“I’ll… landline,” he said.
“Hello?”
The transmission went dead. I started the engine and began to drive down to the trees by the river so I could get under some cover that would deaden the sound of the rain and hail on my cab. Before I had driven ten yards, the cell phone rang again.
“It’s Marvin. I’m on the store phone now. Can you hear me, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yeah, but please repeat everything you said. Very little of it came through.”
“My cousin came into the store and said some guys in a white car with a Florida tag got into it with a guy driving a beat-up blue pickup. Behind the old creamery about two miles south of me. My cousin said he thought they were just talking, but when he looked in his rearview mirror, he could see they were arguing. It was starting to rain, and he didn’t see everything real good, but he thought a guy from the white car shoved the guy driving the pickup. My cousin thinks maybe the guy in the pickup was in deep shit. I don’t know if this is any help to you or not.”
“The guy in deep shit was driving a blue pickup truck?”
“That’s what my cousin said. The guy had black hair that was combed up on his head in a square. That’s how my cousin described it. He sounds like the guy you were looking for, doesn’t he?”
“You bet he does. Does your cousin know where any of these guys went?”
“No, sir. He felt it wasn’t his business, but then he got bothered about it. You know, two against one?”
“You did the right thing, and so did your cousin. Call me back if y’all see any of these guys again.”
“One other thing. My cousin said there was a van parked close by. He didn’t know if anybody was in it.”
“A cargo van?”
“He said a delivery van. Same thing, huh?”
“What color van?”
“He didn’t say. Sir, can you tell us what’s going on here?”
“When I figure it out, I’ll get back to you,” I replied.
“Where are you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because to tell you the truth, I think you might be messing with some bad dudes. This place isn’t like the place I grew up in, Mr. Robicheaux.”
I closed my cell phone and drove in a wide arc behind the Acadian cottage, watching the rain swirl across the grass in the field and on the gum trees and on the surface of the river. I had lowered my windows a half inch and could smell the odor of the Gulf and feel the power the storm seemed to draw from both the sky and the land. The river was already running high and wide, the water way over its banks, a yellow froth scudding through the flooded tree trunks. Then out of nowhere, overhead, I saw the same red airplane I had seen earlier, except this time it was fighting hard against the wind, its wings buffeting, its landing lights sparking whitely. What was a crop duster-if that’s what it was-doing up in weather like this? I asked myself.
When I turned back toward the paved road, trying to stay on the high ground as I passed the Acadian cottage, I stared through my windshield and realized I wasn’t alone.
A dented, paint-skinned blue pickup truck had come to a stop in the grassy field midway between the Acadian cottage and the road, its headlights on high beam and its windshield wipers flying. I pressed down on the brake and slipped my transmission into neutral and waited. But the blue pickup, the same one I had seen parked at Vidor Perkins’s house, did not move. The sky was completely black now, the airplane gone, the entirety of the landscape so devoid of light that the pale grass in the fields seemed luminous by comparison. In the background the rain was blowing in gray sheets, smudging out the paved road and the farmhouses in the distance.
I took my pair of Russian field glasses from the glove box and focused them on the windshield of Perkins’s truck. I could see a solitary figure inside, but I couldn’t make out the features. I unsnapped the strap on my.45 and lifted it from its leather holster and set it beside me on the seat. The driver of the blue pickup remained motionless behind the steering wheel, the headlights smoking in the rain.
What’s it going to be, Vidor? You just want to prove how crazy you are? Are you trying to impress someone? Is this your chance to take me off the board?
Or was the driver Vidor Perkins? The former soldier at the crossroads store had said a man who was probably Vidor Perkins had gotten into it with two men who had been driving a white car with a Florida tag. Had they commandeered his truck and perhaps weighted Vidor with a cinder block and dumped him in a pond?
But as though he had read my mind, the driver got out of the pickup and walked in front of his headlights and lifted his arms out from his sides. I refocused my field glasses on his face. There was no question whom I was looking at. There was also no doubt what he was trying to tell me: Vidor Perkins was unarmed and not a source of danger to me or anyone else. To emphasize that fact, he pulled off his shirt and dropped it in the weeds, the rain melting the grease in his hair, glazing his bare shoulders and arms against the beams of his headlights.
But there was a problem with Perkins’s dramatic display of his innocuousness. Perkins had been jailing most of his life. He knew every ritual associated with every aspect of arrest at a crime scene. He knew what the cost could be for pulling a cell phone from his pocket or tucking the tail of his shirt into his trousers at the wrong moment. He knew how to keep both hands outside a car window if he was pulled to a stop on a road. He knew never to fumble in his glove box for his registration or reach into his coat for ID unless told to do so. He knew what to do on the yard if a warning shot was fired from a gun tower. He knew how to turn into a non-seeing, non-hearing piece of stone after somebody was shanked in a corner and the shank was passed hand to hand before it was thrown at someone’s feet. Vidor was a walking encyclopedia of criminal knowledge. If he had wanted to demonstrate convincingly that he was unarmed, he would have turned his trouser pockets inside out and rotated in a full circle, his arms straight out at his sides, to show me that he did not have a pistol stuffed in his pockets or behind the back of his belt. Inexplicably, he was not doing what he knew I expected.
I turned my truck at an angle to him and rolled down my window. “On your face, Mr. Perkins,” I said.
But he gave no reply.
“Guys like us are old school. Don’t disappoint me,” I said.
His gaze was riveted on me, the rain separating his hair on his scalp. I thought I could see his lips moving, but I wasn’t sure. “Want to tell me something?” I said.
He started walking toward me, his hands out by his sides, his face twitching.
“That’s far enough, Mr. Perkins.”
He was close enough now for me to see him swallow. “I been trying to he’p,” he said.
“I got that impression. You want to tell me what you’re doing here?”
“Nothing. I saw your truck is all.”
“Put your hands on your head.”
“Sir?”
“Do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now turn in a circle.”
“I’m gonna get down on my face.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m just trying to come into compliance here. I was doing my research. I went to the black lady’s house-”
“You place your hands on the crown of your head and turn around, Mr. Perkins.”
“Yes, sir, whatever you say.” He knitted his fingers on top of his head and rotated in a circle. When he looked at me again, his chest was rising and falling, his mouth shaping and reshaping itself, like rubber, as though he wanted to speak words that he didn’t know how to form. The skin around his eyes was bloodless, like that of a man who was seasick. There was a red knot on his collarbone, with two punctures in it, as though he had been bitten by a snake.
“Who was in that airplane, Mr. Perkins?”
“I didn’t see no plane.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I got nothing to do with no plane.”
