'Don't go up against Gouza on your own. An Iberia sheriff's badge is puppy shit to these guys.'
'What do you want me to bring you?'
'My piece. It's in a little sock drawer under my bed.' He took his keys off the nightstand and dropped them in my palm. 'There's also a fifth of vodka and a carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter.'
'I'll be back in a little while.'
'Dave?'
'Yes?'
'Gouza's a weird combo. He's got an ice cube in the center of his head when it comes to business, but he's also a sadistic paranoid. A lot of the greaseballs in this town are scared shitless of him.'
I drove to Clete's apartment on Dumaine in the Quarter, put his.38 revolver and shoulder holster, his vodka and cigarettes in a paper bag and was walking back down the balcony when I saw the apartment manager sweeping dust out his doorway through the railing into the courtyard below.
He was a dark-skinned, black-haired man with bad teeth and turquoise eyes. I opened my badge and asked him if he had seen the men who had beaten Clete.
'Yeah, sho' I seen them. I seen them run down the stairs,' he said. He had a heavy Cajun accent.
I asked him what they looked like.
'One man, I didn't see him too good, no, he walked on down Dumaine. I didn't pay him no mind 'cause I didn't know nothing was wrong, me. But there was a little one, a blond-haired fella, he pushed by me on the stair and run out on the street and got on a motorcycle wit' another fella.'
'What did this fellow on the motorcycle look like?'
'Big,' he said. Then he tapped on his biceps with one finger. 'He had a tattoo. A tiger. It was yellow and red. I seen it real good 'cause I didn't like that little fella pushing me on the stair.'
'Who'd you tell this to?'
'I ain't said nothing to nobody.'
'Why not?'
'Ain't nobody ax me.'
After I dropped off the paper sack with Clete's gun, cigarettes, and vodka at the hospital, the sun was low in the sky, red through the oak trees on St. Charles Avenue, and swallows were circling in the dusk. I checked into an inexpensive guesthouse on Prytania, just two blocks off St. Charles, and called Bootsie and told her that I would have to stay over and that I would be home tomorrow afternoon.
'What is it?' she asked.
'I have to run down a couple of things. It's grunt work mostly. Will you be all right?'
'Yes. Of course.'
'Are you all right, Boots?'
'Yes. Everything's fine this evening. It was hot today, but it's cooling off this evening. It might rain tonight. There's lightning out over the marsh.'
I could feel the day's fatigue in my body. I closed and widened my eyes. The long-distance hum in the telephone receiver was like wet sand in my ear.
'Would you call the dispatcher for me?' I said.
'All right. Don't worry about anything, Dave. We're just fine.'
After I hung up I said a prayer to my Higher Power to watch over my home in my absence, then I called Clarise, an elderly mulatto woman who had worked for my family since I was a child, and asked her to look in on Bootsie that evening and to return in the morning to do house chores.
I showered in a tin stall with water that was so cold it left me breathless, put back on the same clothes I had worn all day, ate a plate of rice, red beans, and sausage at Fat Al bert's on St. Charles, then began a neon-lit odyssey through the biker bars of Jefferson and Orleans parishes.
It's a strange, atavistic, and tribal world to visit. Individually its members are usually hapless, bumbling creatures who were born out of luck and whose largest successes usually consist of staying out of jail, paying off their bondsmen, and keeping their appointments with their probation officers and welfare workers. It's probably not coincidence that most of them are ugly and stupid. But collectively they are both frightening and a source of fascination for those who wonder what it might be like if they traded off their routine and predictable lives for a real fling out on the ragged edge.
The first bar I hit was one out on Airline Highway. Think of a shale parking lot covered with chopped-down Harleys whose chrome and lacquered-black surfaces seem to glow with a nocturrial iridescence; a leather jackboot stomping down on a starter pedal, the ear-splitting roar of straight exhaust pipes, the tinkle of a beer bottle flung through the limbs of an oak tree, a man urinating loudly on the shale in front of a pickup truck's headlights, his muscular, blue-jeanclad legs spread with the visceral self-satisfaction of a gladiator; the inside of a clapboard building crowded with men in sleeveless Levi jackets, boots sheathed with metal plates, black leather cutouts that etch the genitals and flap on the legs like a gunfighter's chaps; bodies strung with chains and iron crosses, covered with hair and tattoos of swastikas and snakes with human skulls inserted between the fangs; an odor of chewing tobacco, snuff, cigarette smoke rubbed like wet nicotine into the clothes, grease and motor oil, reefer, and a faint hint of testosterone and dried semen.
I was sure that the man with the tiger tattoo who had ridden away from Clete's apartment was Eddy Raintree, but he was not the same biker who had put the bribe money in my mailbox. Which meant that in all probability there was a connection between bikers, the Aryan Brotherhood, exconvicts, and Bobby Earl or Joey Gouza. It made sense.
Most outlaw bikers I had known were sexual fascists, and they were always seeking new and defenseless targets for the anger and dark blood that were trapped in their loins like throbbing birds.
But I got virtually nowhere at the bar on Airline Highway or at any of the other bars I cruised until 3 A.M. No one knew Eddy Raintree, had ever heard of him, or even thought his photograph vaguely familiar. But at the last place I visited, a narrow brick poolroom that used to be run by blacks between two warehouses across the river in Algiers, a drunk woman at the bar let me buy her a bowl of chili, and in her sad way she tried to be helpful.
Her hair was platinum, dark at the scalp, and the number 69 was tattooed on her arm. She wore a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with no bra, and a pair of Clorox-faded Levi's that hung as low as a bikini on her hips. (I had never been able to understand the women who hung with outlaw bikers, because with some regularity they were gang- raped, chainwhipped, and had their hands nailed to trees, but they came back for more, obedient, anesthetized, and bored, like spectators at their own dismemberment.)
She kept lifting spoonfuls of chili to her mouth, then forgetting to eat them, her eyes trying to focus on my face and the photograph of Eddy Raintree I held in my palm.
'What do you want with that dumb shit?' she asked. Her words were phlegmatic, like dialogue in a slow- motion film.
'Could you tell me where he is?'
'In jail, probably. Or out fucking goats or something.'
'When did you see him last?'
She drew in on her cigarette and held the smoke down like she was taking a hit off a reefer.
'You don't want to waste your time with a dumb shit like that,' she said.
'I'd really like to talk with Eddy. I'd really appreciate it if you could help me.'
'He's into astronomy or something. He's weird. I've got enough weirdness in my life without a dumb fuck like that.'
Then her boyfriend came back from the men's room. He was huge, with a wild beard, and he wore striped overalls with no shirt. His massive shoulders were ridged with hair; his odor was incredible.
'What do you think you're doing, man?' he said.
'Just finishing my conversation with this lady.'
'It's finished. Good-bye.'
I left two dollars on the bar for the chili and walked back out into the night. The heat of the day had finally lifted from the streets and the cement buildings, the wind was cool blowing from across the river, and I could see the red and green running lights of the oil barges on the water, and the glow of New Orleans against the clouds.
I slept until nine the next morning, had coffee and beignets at a cool table under the pavilion at the Cafe du
