"You can talk, I'll listen," he said, and smiled at me from behind his glasses.
"These guys want to give me another fifty or sixty thou if I can buy into some quick action."
"So?"
"Can I get in on the score?"
"Dave, the score you're talking about is all going right into the projects. It involves a lot of colored dealers and some guys out in Metairie I don't like to mess with too much."
"You don't do business with the projects?"
"It's hot right now. Everybody's pissed because these kids are killing each other all over town and scaring off the tourists. Another thing, I never deliberately sold product to kids. I know they get hold of it, but I didn't sell it to them. Big fucking deal. But if you want me to connect you, I can do it."
"I'd appreciate it, Tony. I figure this is my last score, though. I'm not cut out for it."
"Like I am?" he said. His face was flat and expressionless when he looked at me.
"I didn't mean anything by that."
"Yeah, nobody does. I tell you what, Dave, go into Copeland's up on St. Charles some Wednesday night. Wednesday is yuppie night in New Orleans. These are people who wouldn't spit on an Italian who grew up in a funeral home. But they got crystal bowls full offtake on their coffee tables. They carry it in their compacts, they chop up lines when they ball each other. In my opinion a lot of them are degenerates. But what the fuck do I know? These are people with law degrees and M.B.A.s. I went to a fucking juco in Miami. You know why? Because it had the best mortuary school in the United States. Except I studied English and journalism. I was on the fucking college newspaper, man. Just before I joined the crotch."
"I'm not judging you, Tony."
"The fuck you're not," he said.
I didn't try to answer him again. He drove for almost a mile without speaking, his tan face as flat as a shingle, the wind puffing his flannel shirt, the sunlight clicking on his dark glasses. Then I saw him take a breath through his nose.
"I'm sorry," he said. "When you try to get off crank, it puts boards in your head."
"It's all right."
"Let's stop up here and buy some crabs. If I don't feed those guys behind us, they'll eat the leather out of the seats. You're not pissed?"
"No, of course not."
"You really want me to connect you?"
"It's what my people need."
"Maybe you should let those white-collar cocksuckers make their own score."
I had a feeling Clete would agree with him.
We ate outside Covington, then took a two-lane road toward Mississippi and the Pearl River country. Finally we turned onto a dirt road, crossed the river on a narrow bridge, and snaked along the river's edge through a thick woods. The water in the river was low, and the sides were steep and covered with brush and dried river trash.
"It's weird-looking country, isn't it?" Tony said. "Have you ever been around here before?"
"No, not really. Just on the main highway," I said.
But I could never hear the name of the Pearl River without remembering the lynchings that took place in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s and the bodies that had been dredged out of the Peal with steel grappling hooks. "Why do you keep your plane over here?"
"A beaver's always got a back door," he said. "Besides, nobody over here pays any attention to me."
We wound our way down toward the coast, splashing yellow water out of the puddles in the road. Then the pines thinned and I could see the river again. It was wider here, and the water was higher, and sunk at an angle on the near bank was an old seismographic drill barge. It was orange with rust, and its deck and rails and four hydraulic pilings were strung with gray webs of dried algae.
"What are you looking at?" Tony said.
"I used to work on a drill barge like that. Back in the fifties," I said. "They were called doodlebug rigs because they moved from drill hole to drill hole."
"Huh," he said, not really interested.
I turned and looked at the drill barge again. All the glass was broken out of the iron pilothouse, and leaves drifted from the tree branches through the windows.
"You want to stop and take a look?" Tony said.
"No."
"We got plenty of time."
"No, that's all right."
"It makes you remember your youth or something?"
"Yeah, I guess," I said.
But that wasn't it. The drill barge disturbed me, as though I were looking at something from my future rather than my past.
"You see that hangar and airstrip?" Tony said.
The woods ended, and up ahead was a cow pasture with a mowed area through the center of it, and a solitary tin hangar with closed doors and a wind sock on the roof.
"That's where you keep your plane?" I said.
"No, I keep my plane a mile down the road. Just remember this place."
"What for?"
"Just remember it, that's all."
"All right."
We drove past the pasture and clumps of cows grazing among the egrets, then entered a pine and hack-berry woods again. At the end of the shaded road I could see more sunny pastureland.
"I want to tell you something, something I haven't been honest about. Then I want to ask you a question," Tony said.
"Go ahead."
"I got a bad feeling, the kind you used to get sometimes in 'Nam. You know what I mean? Like maybe it was really going to happen this time, you were riding back on the dustoff in a body bag. I got that feeling now."
"It's the withdrawal from the speed."
"No, this is different. I feel like it's five minutes to twelve and my clock's ticking."
"They didn't get you over there, did they? Blow it off. Guys like us have a long way to run."
"Look, like I told you, the only guy working for me I can trust is Jess. But Jess couldn't think his way through wet Kleenex. So I'm going to ask you, if I get clipped, will you look after Paul, make sure that bitch takes care of him, keeps him in good schools, buys him everything he needs?"
"I appreciate the compliment, but-"
"Fuck the compliment. I want an answer."
"Start thinking about a divorce, Tony, and get these other thoughts out of your head."
"Yes or no?"
He looked at me, one hand tight on the steering wheel, and we bounced through a deep puddle that splashed water across the windshield.
"I'd do my best for him," I said.
"I know you will. You're my main man. Right?" And he pointed one finger at me and cocked his thumb, as though he were aiming a pistol, and popped his mouth with his tongue. Then he laughed loudly.
Late that afternoon I told Tony I was going to have the oil in my truck changed. I drove to a filling station by the shopping center and used the outside pay phone while the attendant put my truck on the rack. I caught Minos at his office and told him of the trip over to Mississippi.
"When do you think this shipment's coming in?" he said:
"Any day."
"All right, we'll get the money in the bus locker for you. Now, let's talk about getting you wired."
"Minos, I think there might be a problem here with entrapment. This isn't Tony's deal. I'm leading him into it."
"Anywhere there's dope in Orleans or Jefferson Parish, he's getting a cut out of it."
"I don't think that's true. He talked about some guys in Metairie running this deal."
"I don't care what he says. Cardo's dirty when he gets up in the morning. Stop pretending otherwise. Look, if somebody hollers later about entrapment, that's our problem, not yours."
"I think we're shaving the dice."
"It's not entrapment if this guy has foreknowledge of a narcotics buy and he takes you into it." He paused to let the exasperation go out of his voice. "You've only got one thing to worry about, Dave-getting close to him with a wire. Now, we can do it two ways, with a microphone or a miniaturized tape recorder."
"He's not going to do business in the house."
"Which do you want to use?"
"How far can the microphone send?"
"Under the best conditions, without electronic interference or buildings in the way, maybe up to a quarter of a mile."