Wallace had gotten there ahead of us somehow, and was opening the trunk of the Galaxie — it was my rental, all right, lifted from the Roosevelt parking garage. My buddy Mac was tossing something in, something green and coiled like a snake, and a plump wad of cloth. Then he came over and grabbed me by an arm and yanked, and while I was off-balance, the Cuban swung the revolver, holding it by the barrel and cylinder I guess, because what caught the side of my head felt like the gun butt.
I went limp, though I wasn’t out — Rodriguez had seen too many episodes of Peter Gunn maybe, figuring all it took was a blow on the head to guarantee unconsciousness. Had his blow landed right, I’d more likely been dead, but really it glanced off, leaving a wet bloody gouge. I knew I was better off in that trunk than in the Galaxie’s backseat and I played like I really was knocked cold as Wallace dumped me in there and slammed the lid.
They hadn’t bothered to tie my hands — Royal wasn’t a busy street but it wasn’t deserted. So they’d moved fast, and now we were moving, not so fast. Closed inside that trunk, I got as comfortable as I could, which meant positioning myself on my side, playing fetus. Traffic and other city noise lasted maybe fifteen minutes, and when the sound of the wheels changed to something smooth and humming, I knew where we were — going over the Huey P. Long Bridge.
My old buddy the Kingfish had spent upwards of thirteen mil on the thing — two lanes of US 90 on either side of double railroad tracks — but Huey hadn’t lived to see it, missing by three months. From levee to levee, including railroad approaches, the monster was over four miles long. We were heading west into Jefferson Parish.
I had spent a lot of time in Louisiana on my two trips here in the ’30s, but that had been over twenty-five years ago. Still, I didn’t imagine much had changed. As we exited the bridge, with its notoriously tight lanes, we’d be heading into a landscape of dense swamps, oak-wooded lowlands, treacherous bayous, scattered settlements of poor whites and blacks, and an occasional modern sugar factory, as well as the ruins of old sugar refineries. The deeper into this territory we drove, the more chance I would become a heaping serving of Yankee Gumbo after all.
My fingers found what Wallace had tossed into the trunk ahead of me — a length of garden hose, about nine feet of the stuff, and a bath towel. I knew at once what they had in store for me. The hose, which was three-quarters of an inch in diameter, would easily run from the exhaust pipe of the Galaxie up to a slightly rolled-down window of the vehicle, where the towel could be stuffed to make a tighter seal, so the carbon monoxide could do its stuff. Looked like Mac Wallace figured I’d be getting despondent in this trunk and soon be ready to commit suicide, though my despondency would be strictly optional.
The car made a right turn onto a crunchy surface, a gravel or even more likely (considering where we were) crushed-shell road. The lane must have extended back under the bridge approach because I heard a rolling sound that might have been a car above me on cement. We went perhaps a mile farther and the car swung over a little and came to an abrupt stop, though the driver did not kill the engine. Car doors opened and closed.
When the trunk lid lifted, the Cuban in the straw fedora was smiling down at me and, with the nine millimeter tight in my hand — the one I’d tucked away behind the spare tire being unlicensed to carry in Louisiana — I fired three rounds into his face and each one found something to do, this one punching out an eye, that one dimpling his forehead, another shattering that smile like a brick through a window. He fell away fedora and all and I leapt out like a demented jack-in-the-box, and I could see Wallace, parked down a ways to the right on the other side of the road, leaning against the car he’d followed us here in, its motor running, his mouth hanging open with a cigarette in it so freshly lit he hadn’t waved the match out yet.
But I could also see the Oswald look-alike on my right, too, but much closer, going for a gun in his waistband, and I gave him two rounds in the head, taking his skull apart and spraying brains and blood and bone into the night, his head going back just like physics had demanded of Jack Kennedy, and he did a backward pratfall, landing half on the crushed-shell road, half on the shoulder, in memory of Rose Cheramie.
I spun, with eight rounds left in the mag for Wallace and happy to give him every one, but he was already behind the wheel of his car, a red Chevy Corvair, which he swung around, tires stirring shells, the vehicle’s nose toward me, rumbling right at me, headlights blinding, and I dove out of the way as he picked up speed, heading back toward the highway, spitting crushed shells, fishtailing.
With the Galaxie’s engine still running (they’d hot-wired it), I was able to take off right after him, blinking away the half-blindness those headlights had caused. He didn’t have much of a head start.
I tossed the nine millimeter temporarily on the rider’s seat, steered with my left hand as I reached across to roll down the window with my right, then passed the nine millimeter to myself, from my right hand to my left, and half-leaned out of the vehicle Wild West — style as I ripped a shot off into the night. The sound was thunderous, echoing off the nearby river, filling the dark cathedral of the outdoors with reverberations.
After my shot, which missed both him and the vehicle, he began to weave, making a target that though big was erratic, and even with my thirteen-shot magazine, I didn’t want to waste any more bullets. I would ram the son of a bitch. There, under a full moon that made spectral figures out of bordering cypress trees in their cloaks of Spanish moss, two vehicles sped down a narrow country road with the Mississippi an unseen but felt presence at our right, and the looming Huey P. Long Bridge up ahead.
I didn’t want him to make it to that bridge. I didn’t want him to make it back to New Orleans. I wanted him here, I wanted him now, in the swampy primeval darkness.
I was going a grinding one-hundred when I bumped his rear bumper and he tried to pick up speed but there wasn’t anything left in the Corvair, and he looked back at me, his handsome bespectacled face turned hideous with hysteria, as if to beg for mercy, and this time when I rammed him, he lost control and I immediately took my foot off the pedal and watched him take off over the left shoulder and crash into the cement pillar of the bridge approach, the right front of the vehicle crumpling like a paper cup in a fist, with a tinkling of headlight glass adding delicate high notes to the discordant low-pitched music of crunching metal.
I pulled over, left it running, got out with the gun in my right hand, and walked slowly over to the Corvair, which had its right wheels off the ground, spinning, the exhaust puffing mightily into the night on the car’s ride to nowhere. Night sounds were kicking back in, frogs, owls, nighthawks, crickets, a melancholy yet disinterested Greek chorus. I approached cautiously, though I could see him slumped behind the wheel, his head back, physics again, the windshield spiderwebbed where his skull had hit it, one lens of his black-framed glasses similarly veined.
He was breathing. Not quite unconscious. His face was smeared with blood and his forehead had a rip in it, showing bone. He looked at me with pain in his eyes. Somebody should do something to help him out.
I went back to the Galaxie and got the length of hose and the bath towel.
When I was rolling his window nearly (but not all) the way up, I noticed he had a package of Chesterfields in the breast pocket of his sport shirt. I relieved him of those. Then I rigged up the fake suicide. He seemed to be awake during the procedure, though he said nothing. I tried not to smile at him, but I just couldn’t help myself.