Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 13 - The Diamonds of Ghost Bayou (13 page)

Through half a dozen missing teeth, he bellowed, “What for
you come out here and insult one of our ladies?”

“That be right!” shouted his partner, who was standing at his
side. “We don’t need no strangers coming in here and helping
make fools of us.”

The young woman looked up at him angrily. “What do you
mean by that?”

Before I could reply, Lester, exhibiting the hot temper of every
peeshwank I’ve ever known, stood up and put his hand in the first
one’s chest. “Easy there, Hulin. Easy. This one, he don’t offend
Ruth.” In a half joking, half-serious tone, he said, “Me, I don’t
know of nobody what can offend that girl, you know?”

Angrily, Hulin slapped Lester’s hand away. “You stay out of
this, Percher. This be between me and this one.” The incensed
crabber turned back to me. By now, I had pushed to my feet.

That’s all Lester needed. Once again, before I could reply, Lester stepped in and swung his full bottle of beer at Hulin’s head.

The wiry Cajun threw his arm up taking the major impact on his forearm, but the bottle slid off and whopped him on the
forehead, cutting a slice in his skin and sending him stumbling
backward. With a wild shout, he threw out his arms for balance, knocking both his partner and Ruth back into the oversized shrimper.

Someone grabbed my arm and spun me around. By then his
partner, I’d had enough of the manhandling. I cocked my right
fist but then saw it was Dolzin.

“Quick. Out of here.”

I didn’t argue. Half a dozen shrimpers and fisherman were
heading in our direction.

August and Valsin stepped in to stop them. In the blink of an
eye, the fight erupted.

Chairs whizzed through the air. Bottles and cans smashed and
clattered against the clapboard walls. Men cursed and grunted.
Even a couple of tables took to the air. All through the melee,
the fiddler and accordion player never missed a beat.

Valsin shouted at Dolzin, “Get Boudreaux out of here!”

Dolzin dragged me after him, but before we made it to the
door, two crabbers jumped in front of us. “You boys ain’t going
nowhere,” one of them said. The other one leered at us.

Dolzin said, “Look, Paul. Us, we didn’t come over here for
trouble. My friend here, he just needed to talk to Lester a few
minutes. He sure didn’t mean no offense to Ruth there.”

We all glanced back at the young woman who was trying, without success, to gracefully extricate herself from the tangle
of chairs into which she had fallen.

With a lecherous gleam in his eye, Paul remarked, “That Ruth,
she be something else, don’t that be right, Dolzin?”

The young man’s response was a sharp kick in the groin.
When Paul jerked forward to grab at the pain, Dolzin caught
him with a right uppercut, sending the crabber to the floor unconscious.

Just as Dolzin hit Paul, I charged Hulin’s partner, smashing
my shoulder into his oversized belly and slamming him through
the door and out onto the walkway. I backed away a step and
threw a straight right, catching the unprepared crabber on the
point of the chin and knocking him over the rail into the neck
deep water below.

A knotty fist caught me on the back of my head, sending me
stumbling to the walkway. I rolled over just as a rubber boot
stomped into the weathered wood beside my head. Instinctively, I rolled up into a sitting position and threw a left hook,
catching my assailant in the same spot Dolzin had struck his.

With a wild scream, my assailant doubled over. I leaped to
my feet and, grabbing him by the collar and the seat of his overalls, ran him off the walkway into the water.

A weight hit me on the back, sending me stumbling forward.
I threw up my arms for protection and tried to turn and face the
blows raining down on me. My assailant was a young man in
his late teens or early twenties, the prime of his life, with muscles
he’d never used.

He caught me with a roundhouse right that exploded stars in
my head and made my ears ring. In the eerie shadows cast by the
red and green Christmas lights, blows had a way of sneaking up
on you.

I caught one of his wild lefts on my right forearm, then jabbed
his sneering face a couple of times, knocking him back a step.
Stepping forward, I threw a straight right that smashed his nose
over his beardless face. He staggered back, clutching his hands
to his face. When he pulled them away and saw the amount of blood on them, his eyes grew wild, and he charged me, swinging wildly.

He was stronger than me, younger than me, meaner than me.
All I had going for me was fear and experience. At the last minute, I sidestepped and caught him in the side of his head with a
sizzling left that sent him face-first to the wooden walk. “Don’t
get up, kid. Please don’t get up.”

My head exploded, and I fell back against the railing, fumbling
at the chair someone had thrown at me.

“Boudreaux!” I threw up my fists and looked around. Valsin
was waving for me to follow. He sprinted down the wooden
walkway. Dolzin appeared at my side. We raced for the boat.

Four more shrimpers poured from the honky-tonk, chasing us.

Valsin had already pulled the Mako away from the pier. Dolzin
and I did the only thing left to do. We leaped into the water and
swam to the boat.

Back up on the walkway, several drunken shrimpers called out,
“Hey there, Valsin. That be fun. You old boys come back, you
hear?”

August shouted back at them, telling them good-naturedly
where they could go. He turned to face us, a nice little mouse
under his right eye.

Dolzin, sporting a small cut over his left eye, exclaimed, “I
tell you, mes amis, that be one good fight.”

Valsin looked over his shoulder. “You got that right, Dolzin.
Now, where be that jug? This calls for a drink.”

All I could do was shake my head in wonder.

By the time we reached the cypress swamp, I was feeling no
pain. Cajun moonshine, the good stuff, was not just alcohol; it
was a smooth elixir that would drive any connoisseur of wine
or whiskey to the point of envy. My Grand-pere Moise had had
a still in his barn that Grand-mere Ola was always fussing about.
He was an artist when it came to the distillation of good shine,
and I swear, the Naquin shine was every bit as smooth and potent as Grand-pere’s.

We relived the fight, passing the jar from one to the other with
practiced regularity. Valsin took a long drink, then drew the back
of his hand across his swollen lips. “What do you suppose old
T-Ball was doing over there?”

August shrugged. “Who knows?”

I frowned. “T-Ball?”

August snorted. “That be the big ox what come in just before
the fight start. The one with the big black beard. He from Charenton. I can’t figure what he was doing over there.”

“Yeah, me, at first I wonder that too,” Dolzin replied. “I figure
he too busy tending his horses.”

“He got family over there,” Valsin replied.

Dolzin shrugged. “Maybe so, but I heard him ask Pete where
Boudreaux was. Pete told him, and he looked at Boudreaux
here real angry like. I was going to tell you about it when the
fight started”

“Me?”

The younger man shrugged. “I couldn’t hear what they was
saying, but he was looking for you.”

Valsin looked around from the wheel and snorted. “Tony
be a stranger, that why.”

Dolzin shook his head. “Maybe so, but it don’t sound like that
to me. He asked Pete to point out Boudreaux.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes, the purring of the engine and the hissing of the bow cutting through the dark water
the only sounds in the night.

I looked around at August. “You said this T-Ball has horses?”

“Oui. Quarter horses. He races them at the track,” Dolzin answered.

“At the Golden Crystal?”

“Oui.”

Valsin called over his shoulder, “Him and the sheriff, they still
be copains?”

I looked at Dolzin. “Copains?”

“You know, buddies. The sheriff, he like to bet on the horses.
T-Ball, he got some he race from time to time.”

August took a deep swallow of moonshine. “Oui, and there be
some what say Thertule, he owe a bunch of money to the wrong
ones too.”

Valsin snorted. “You, you don’t know nothing. The sheriff,
he don’t owe nobody nothing. Next thing you going to tell me is
that the sheriff, he be the loup-garou old Rouly claims done
killed Benoit and the others.”

August grew somber and quickly made the sign of the cross.
“Don’t joke about nothing like that. Me, I done see the sign about
Benoit. It be the loup-garou.”

About that time, we entered the swamp, and the moonlight
filtering through the canopy of cypress needles cast eerie shadows over the youngest Naquin’s face.

The alcohol had numbed my bruises, warmed my belly, and
dulled my thoughts. After a few moments, his words soaked
in. I looked around at August. “What do you mean, you saw the
sign?”

Dolzin rolled his eyes. “Please, dear Virgin Mother, not again.
This be the hundredth time he tell us”

August shoved him on the shoulder. “You shut up” He looked around. “Me, I was going to town when Rouly, he stopped me.
He was standing by the side of the road. In the ditch, there was
Benoit, and all around him was tracks of the loup-garou.”

“What kind of tracks?”

He shrugged. With his thumb and forefinger, he made a half
circle a few inches in diameter. “Big round tracks, like this.
Tracks of the horse.”

The same thing old Rouly had said. Next time the jar came my
way, I passed it up. I had to get the boat back down the bayou,
and the last thing I wanted to do was run upon a cypress knee
and fight off alligators the rest of the night.

By eleven o’clock, I was home. I noticed the thread was still between the door and the jamb. Nevertheless, I checked the house
for snakes, after which I took a hot shower and whipped up a
sandwich to put something in my stomach. During the hour or
so since my last drink, I had metabolized some of the alcohol,
and now my stomach was growling. I carried the sandwich and
a glass of milk into the living room.

Sitting next to the window, I looked out over the moonsplashed bayou and swamp, listening to the night sounds. The
scene brought back memories of my youth, of the mysterious
and haunting bayous.

To my relief, I saw no flickering lights in the uninviting shadows of the swamp.

I had planned to drive out to the Sparkle Paradise the next
morning and see what I could learn about Guzik, but I decided
instead to pay Jimmy Ramsey a visit over in New Orleans. See
what he could tell me about K. D. Dople.

But first, I had to visit Jack in the hospital and make some
arrangements for Diane.

I padded toward the bedroom. The blinking red light on the
telephone indicated voice mail. I picked up the receiver and
punched in the numbers Diane had given me.

The message was from Sheriff Lacoutrue. “Boudreaux, here
be the information you asked for. During Benoit’s time in prison,
he had four cell mates. One was Billy Arsenault from Alexandria; Donald Carson from New Orleans; Paul Foret from Monroe; and
John Boneau from Branch.”

Disappointed, I jotted down the names. I was hoping Benoit
had spent time with one of the Judices or even Theriot. Then I
reminded myself that the latter had been wasted long before
Benoit became a guest of the state.

I booted up my laptop, but to my disappointment, Eddie had
not responded to my e-mail. I couldn’t blame him. Less than
forty-eight hours had passed, although so much had happened
that it seemed like four hundred and eighty hours.

I climbed between clean, fresh sheets. All I remember was
my face touching the pillow.

On the way to the hospital the next morning, I tried to sort my
thoughts and put together a logical plan, but all I had were half
a dozen ideas, none of which seemed to connect to one another.

I still didn’t have any notion who had worked Jack over. I
was well aware of the mentality of mob soldiers. Unless they
have a death wish, they’ll never lie to their bosses. That’s why I
couldn’t believe Carl and Patsy were responsible for Jack.

If not those two, who?

Parking in front of the hospital, I leaned on the steering
wheel and stared blankly through the windshield. I could eliminate Lester. He’d been fishing out in the Gulf for three weeks.
Then I thought about T-Ball. From the way the Naquins talked,
he seldom found his way to Cocodrie Slough.

And I reminded myself, the fight had started within minutes
after he arrived. Could he have some connection with Theriot or
the diamonds? I leaned back and closed my eyes. I had never felt
so confused in all my life. With a drawn out sigh, I climbed from
the Chevy pickup and headed up the sidewalk into the hospital.

Diane was lying in the La-Z-Boy recliner, and Jack was sitting up in bed, a thick chocolate milkshake on the table beside
him. His face brightened when I entered. “Hey, Tony,” he mumbled between clenched teeth, the old animation back in his voice
and eyes.