The Neon Rain Read Free

bare leg, a hand, a checkered shirt puffed with air.
    I set down my fly rod, rowed closer, and touched the body with my paddle. The body turned in the water, and I saw the face of a young black woman, the eyes wide, the mouth open with a watery prayer. She wore a man’s shirt tied under her breasts, cut-off blue jeans, and for just a second I saw a dime tied on a string around her ankle, a good-luck charm that some Acadian and black people wore to keep away the gris-gris , an evil spell. Her young face looked like a flower unexpectedly cut from its stem.
    I looped my anchor rope around her ankle, threw the anchor back into the trees on the bank, and tied my red handkerchief on an overhanging branch. Two hours later I watched the deputies from the parish sheriff’s office lift the body onto a stretcher and carry it to an ambulance that was parked in the canebrake.
    “Just a minute,” I said before they put her in. I lifted up the sheet to look again at something I’d seen when they had pulled her out of the water. There were tracks on the inside of her left arm, but only one needle hole that I could see inside the right.
    “Maybe she gives blood to the Red Cross,” one of the deputies said, grinning.
    “You’re a pretty entertaining guy,” I said.
    “It was just a joke, Lieutenant.”
    “Tell the sheriff I’m going to call him about the autopsy,” I said.
    “Yes, sir.”
    But the sheriff was never in when I called, and he didn’t return calls, either. So finally I telephoned the parish coroner’s office, and now I discovered that the sheriff didn’t believe an autopsy for a dead black girl was that important. Well, we’ll see about that, I thought.
    In the meantime, I was still curious as to why the Colombians, if Johnny Massina was right, were interested in Dave Robicheaux. I went through my case file and didn’t see any connection. I had a whole file drawer of misery to look at, too: a prostitute icepicked by a psychotic john; a seventeen-year-old runaway whose father wouldn’t bond him out of jail and who was hanged the next morning by his black cellmate; a murder witness beaten to death with a ball-peen hammer by the man she was scheduled to testify against; a Vietnamese boat refugee thrown off the roof of the welfare project; three small children shot in their beds by their unemployed father; a junkie strangled with baling wire during a satanic ritual; two homosexual men burned alive when a rejected lover drenched the stairwell of a gay nightclub with gasoline. My drawer was like a microcosm of an aberrant world populated by snipers, razor-wielding blacks, mindless nickel-and-dime boost artists who eventually panic and kill a convenience-store clerk for sixty dollars, and suicides who fill the apartment with gas and blow the whole building into a black and orange fireball.
    What a bunch to dedicate your life to.
    But there was no umbilical cord that led to the south-of-the-border account.
    Cletus was watching me.
    “I swear, Dave, I think your feelings are going to be hurt unless you find out the greasers got the hots for you,” he said.
    “We don’t have a lot of perks in this business.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you what. Let’s go to lunch early, you buy, and I’ll introduce you to Potts. The guy’s a delight. Your day is going to be filled with sunshine.”
    It was hazy and bright when we drove into the Quarter. There was no breeze, and the palm fronds and banana trees in the courtyards were green and motionless in the heat. As always, the Quarter smelled to me like the small Creole town on Bayou Teche where I was born: the watermelons, cantaloupes, and strawberries stacked in crates under the scrolled colonnades; the sour wine and beer and sawdust in the bars; the poor-boy sandwiches dripping with shrimp and oysters; the cool, dank smell of old brick in the alleyways.
    A few genuine bohemians, writers, and painters still lived in the Quarter, and some professional people paid exorbitant rents