Nothing to say about that, except, “I want a lawyer.”
—
OKAY.
Seven months later.
Two dusty dark blue Chevy Tahoes turned off Louisiana 405, away from the Mississippi River and the levee, into the patchwork of black-earth cotton fields and woodlots. A quarter mile in, they slowed as they approached a dirt side road. Rae Givens, who was driving the lead vehicle, peered down the road and asked, “You sure this is right? Looks like a jungle back there.”
Her partner, Bob Matees, said, “Checks on mileage...” Helooked at his cell phone. “And on the GPS. It seems right, as far as I could tell from the satellite pictures.”
“Wouldn’t want to come out here at night,” Rae said, as she rolled off the highway and onto the dirt track. “The mosquitoes gotta be the size of crows.”
“Or at noon. It’s already hot as a bitch out there,” Bob said. Though it was only ten o’clock, and not yet summer, they could see waves of heat coming off the blacktop.
“Dependin’ on which bitch you be talking about,” Rae said, falling into her phony hip-hop accent. Rae was a six-foot-tall black woman with a degree in art history from UConn, where she’d been a starting guard on an NCAA championship basketball team.
“Have I mentioned snakes?” Bob asked. Bob was a short, wide white man with a soft Southern accent, a onetime wrestler at the University of Oklahoma.
“No, and you don’t have to,” Rae said. She took the turn onto the dirt road, a two-track with weeds growing up between the tracks. “Where’s that turnoff?”
“Maybe... another hundred yards.”
There was no particular reason that they could see for there being a turnoff when they got to it: a crescent of hard-packed dirt sliced back into the jungle, partially occupied by an aging Ford F-150 with a camper back.
A man had opened the back of the camper, and they could see a cot, and, on the wall opposite the cot, a small television set with rabbit ears. He turned toward them when they pulled in, looking doubtfully at the two oversized vehicles. He was slender, middle height, with close-cropped hair the color of wheat, wearing ashort-sleeved blue shirt with sweat stains at the armpits, wear-creased jeans, and boots.
Bob and Rae climbed out of the truck. They were both wearing blue T-shirts with “U.S. MARSHAL” emblazoned across both the chest and back, khaki fatigue pants, and combat boots. Both had marshal badges and guns clipped to their belts. Bob nodded to the man and asked, “How you doin’?”
“Doin’ fine, sir.”
“You live roundabouts?”
“Well, sir, I live right here,” the man said. He patted the side of his truck. “Come down looking for work in the oil,” he said, though he actually said “oll,” the way Texans do. The far side of the Mississippi was lined with chemical plants. “Sorta using this as my scoutin’ headquarters.”
“Best of luck with that, then,” Rae said. “You know the gentleman that lives down at the end of this road?”
“No, no, I don’t, ma’am. I been here three days, off and on, and never seen nobody comin’ or goin’, except one colored lady who goes down there every morning. She down there now.”
Another marshal got out of the trailing truck. He was wearing a tan marshal’s T-shirt and green tactical pants, razor-type sunglasses, a baseball hat with a black-and-white American flag on the front, and boots. A second man got out of the passenger side, tall, dark-haired and blue-eyed, with an olive complexion, who would have fit neatly into the local Cajun population. He was wearing pressed khaki slacks and a blue long-sleeved dress shirt, a “New Orleans Saints” ball cap, and high-polished cordovan loafers. He had a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses in his hand, which heput on as he climbed out onto the dirt track. They came up and the man in the dress shirt asked, “What are we doing?”
“This gentleman has been here for three days, off and on, and hasn’t seen anybody coming or going except one black woman,” Rae said. “So... let’s get it on.”
The third marshal said, “Oorah!” like they might have once done in the Big Army, and maybe still did, but he was a former Ranger and said it with a sarcastic overtone and trekked back to his truck and popped the back lid.
Rae did the same, and she and Bob and the other marshal pulled on heavy bulletproof vests and helmets with chinstraps. The man in the dress shirt got back in the trailing truck and closed the door, where he had some air-conditioning. Two of the marshals armed themselves with semiauto M15-style rifles, while Rae had a fully automatic M4. They went through a nearly unconscious series of checks—everybody loaded up and ready to go—and the man in the F-150 asked, tentatively, “You got a bad guy down there?”
“Pretty bad,” Rae said. “You stay here, you’ll be okay. Or you might want to drive out a ways.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” the man said.
As they pulled away from the turnoff, Rae saw the F-150 do a U-turn and head out to the blacktop road in a hurry. She said, “The oll man’s going out.”
Bob was contemplating his cell phone and muttered, “We pick up Deese’s ass, right? Or maybe he’s run and we don’t pick up Deese’s ass. Either way, we go on down to New Orleans and drop off Tremanty and then get outside some crawfish boil. Should be perfect right now. Mmm-mmm.”
Tremanty was the man in the blue dress shirt, an FBI agent who’d originally arrested Clayton Deese on charges of assault with a deadly weapon in aid of racketeering activities. The “in aid of racketeering activities” made it a federal crime. That is, Clayton Deese had beaten the living shit out of Howell Paine. When Deese had finished with him, Paine had been howling with pain indeed, the bones of his hands broken into pieces that, on an X-ray, looked like a sock full of golf tees.
Paine had owed a few thousand dollars to a loan shark named Roger (“Rog”) Smith and had been unwilling to pay it back, even when he could. He’d been known to say in public that Smith could suck on it. A lesson had to be taught, and was, and now Paine, seriously worse for the wear, was in the Marshals Service Witness Protection Program until Deese’s trial. Tremanty didn’t want Deese all that bad; the one he really wanted was Smith, and Deese could give him up. Nothing like looking at fifteen years in the federal prison system to loosen a man’s tongue.
