Dead Man Flying

by Chick Lang

You wouldn't think that Logan City would have much crime. No more than ten thousand people really live here; the rest, some twenty thousand, are transient oil field workers who come and go, most of them offshore for two weeks and then on the road back home. Sure, we've got the bar fights and all; rig hands drink up half their paychecks from the time they hit shore until they're on the way back to Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, wherever the wife and kiddies are waiting. And there's an occasional domestic case; some hot-blooded Cajun woman catches her husband in a compromising situation with a cocktail waitress and decides to rearrange his face with a beer bottle. About once a month we get the petty stuff: stolen hubcaps, some kid shoplifting, a drunk urinating in the downtown water fountain. Other than aggravating paper work, there's not much to it, right? Every time I think that, start packing my gear to go fishing down the bayou, some wise guy pulls the plug on my dream.

Take last Friday for instance. I'm sitting at my desk talking to my partner Tip Landry, nothing on my mind except bass fishing on the Teche , when I get a phone call from Popcorn Hebert. He's spitting Cajun French into the phone so fast that I lose track about two sentences in.

“Je ma saoule hier au soir. C'est de la crasse pure—”

“Whoa, Pop, slow down. Give it to me in English. You know I never paid attention when Grand-Mere tried to teach me that stuff.”

He was saying something about getting drunk the night before; somebody being nothing but trash.

“Vaut-rien...j'ai tombe—”

“I know that I'm a ‘good-for-nothing'. Just slow down, Pop.”

Finally, the old man took a deep breath and hissed it back out, one broken phrase at a time.

“Da man on de bayou, he's dead. I'm drunk as cochon-bete , and I'm poling da pirogue true da big trees when I bang into dis body. I fall in da pirogue. Reach out wid da pole and pull him closer—les cocodries—the gators been makin' breakfast. C'est defunt. Da man's dead—his face...tant qu'a—like la tataille...the monster.”

Popcorn Hebert liked to fish, to tell tall tales, and he liked his drink. But, he'd never been one to lie.

“Where is he now, Pop?”

“In da pirogue, what's left o' him.”

I told him to stay there, at the Texaco station where he was using the phone, and I'd be there in five minutes. I closed my tackle box and pushed it aside. The fishing trip would have to wait.

I'd seen a few dead bodies in my time, but none quite as gruesome as the man Popcorn Hebert fished out of the bayou. Gators, crabs, crawfish had tasted just about every part of him—there were even a couple of moccasin bites on what was left of his lower extremities. But, according to the medical examiner, it was a hollow-point slug from a .38 that killed him. Blew a hole in his heart big enough to stuff a baseball into. The laminated driver's license in his wallet said his name was Billy Fontenot.

The M.E. made an educated guess as to the time of death. According to him, young Fontenot had gone to meet his maker less than thirty-six hours before Popcorn found the body floating in the bayou—give or take a few hours to either side. Logan City didn't have much of a crime lab; most of the tissue samples were sent off to Baton Rouge for processing. I doubted that anything they could come up with would shed much light on who did it and why. I'd have to figure that out for myself.

There was an uncashed, waterlogged check in the victim's wallet from an offshore drilling rig outfit called Oceanic Group. It was dated two days before the body was discovered. By way of the city phone directory, I found that Billy had an apartment in Peterson, just across the bridge from Logan City , and he lived there by himself. The neighbors said that his closest relative was an uncle who lived in Golden Meadow. I made the call and informed the old man about his nephew. He said he had no idea that Billy could've had an enemy in the world, and went on about what a fine boy his nephew was—how he'd raised the boy after his parents died in a car wreck, how he'd brought him up in the church, how the boy had visited him on a regular basis. I listened patiently to the elder Fontenot while he poured out his anguish over the phone, and I grunted in sympathy in all the right places. I restrained myself from saying the obvious—Billy had at least one enemy: the guy who'd blown a hole in him and dumped him in the bayou.

I contacted the local office for Oceanic Group ; they informed me that Billy Fontenot had been a galley hand on the Oceanic Twelve, a jack-up rig about seventy-five miles offshore. He'd last been seen getting on a P.H.I. helicopter the previous Monday morning after he'd finished a two-week hitch. When I called on P.H.I., the dispatcher told me that the Vietnamese pilot on duty that day didn't show up for work the next morning, and that they hadn't seen him since he'd landed at the heliport, complaining of engine problems. They did see a passenger get off the chopper, but couldn't tell me who it was. It wasn't Billy; his late model Ford pickup was still parked in the P.H.I. parking lot. I called the crime scene boys; told them to get Billy's keys from the evidence room and come check out the truck. In the meantime, I'd have to go about finding Mr. Kwan Chi, former helo pilot for Petroleum Helicopters, Inc.

The address the pilot had given P.H.I. turned out to be a phony; it was a 24-hour laundromat down by the river. The phone number on record was that of a pay phone at the laundromat. Mr. Kwan Chi had just gone to the top of a very short list of suspects.

The next day, when I was poring over the lab reports and sifting through the paperwork that the crime boys had filled out, Popcorn Hebert walked into my office.

“J'ai le secheresse,” he grumbled.

I knew what he meant, but I played dumb and shrugged.

“I got dis big thirst, Jamie. Let's you and me go get a beer.”

“It's awful early, Pop. Besides, I'm busy trying to figure out what happened to that Fontenot kid.”

“I talked to Estilette last night—ma fren from Houma . He was settin' out traps across da bayou around da cypress trees. Da mornin' dat da boy ended up dead.”

I stopped shuffling papers and gave Pop my undivided attention.

“How do you know it was the same time? Did he see something?”

“Ma cher, I really need da beer. An' ah don't lak talkin' in da jailhouse. It makes me shaky.”

Popcorn was one of those rare people who could drink all night and not get drunk. A little more talkative, a little less coherent, but never drunk. I'd seen him go through a case of Dixie beer and five pounds of fresh crawfish in an afternoon—all the while telling Cajun tales, laughing, and catching more fish than I could in a weekend. He never had so much as a headache afterwards. He always said it was the crawfish.

“Where do you want to go?”

He smiled and rubbed the stubble on his dimpled chin.

“Let's just go by da curb store. I'll get a six-pack—I ain't had breakfas' yet. We can drive back down da bayou where I found da body.”

I was tired; hadn't slept much, thinking about this murder case, and I wasn't much in the mood for a lot of ‘beating around the bush'. If he'd been anyone else—not a longtime friend and fishing buddy—I would've come down hard; probably threatened him with obstructing justice. I just nodded and pushed back from the desk.

I let the lieutenant know where we were headed. I snatched a hand-held from the radio room, then Tip, Popcorn, and I set sail for the local 7-Eleven.

“Je me sens pas bien ce matin. Je crois que j'ai attrape une grippe.”

“Sorry, Pop. There's a lot of that going around—the flu I mean.”

He looked over at me and winked.

“See, you don't forget as much as you let on, Jamie. You lak de women. You remember jus' what you want to remember, huh?”

“I can make out a few things...as long as you don't talk too fast. And I'm sorry that you're not feeling well.”

“Dis will help,” he said, popping open a cold Dixie .

“So what's the scoop on Estilette?”

“Ma fren, I thought dat man was crazy, him. He tol' me dat he seen a man flyin' jus' above da cypress trees. Said dat he heard a noise, look up, an' here come dis fella true da treetops. He said da man crash somewhere ‘bout a hunnerd yards away, in da swamp.”

“Where did he come from?”

Popcorn stared at me as if I were lagging behind.

“Why, da sky, boy! He come out da sky. Estilette say he look back up and see dis helicopter circle and den pass off into da blue.”

“Why didn't he go see about—?”

“Estilette was trappin' gators, Jamie. He wuzn't zackly legal, if you know what ah mean. He didn't know what was goin' on. Coulda been da law—some fella fell out da copter while watching fo' poachers. He didn't know. He jus' load up his pirogue and got da hell out.”

We drove down a winding shell road, several miles off the main highway, and pulled into an opening between some thickets of scrubs and buttonbushes. There was a well-worn path leading down to the water from there. The mud was tracked and beaten down where pirogues had been dragged down the hill to the bayou.

“I'm going to have to talk to Estilette, you know.”

“He'll be comin' ‘round soon. He had to get rid of his skins and gator meat. But, he told me dat he'd come back from Houma . If you need him.”

Popcorn pulled his pirogue out of a stand of tall grass, and we put it into the water. He downed another Dixie and I climbed in beside him. There was no room for Tip Landry; I left him manning the radio. Popcorn maneuvered the boat out through the giant cypress trees.

He poled us out into the open water, then sat down and began plunging and stroking with a short paddle. It took less than fifteen minutes to get to the spot where he'd found the body. Then he paddled us toward a distant stand of trees where Estilette had been running his traps.

“Back over dere,” said Popcorn, pointing to a particular cypress that had several limbs broken and hanging down from the top.

We sculled around the tree; I saw only the algae-crusted ropes that Estilette must have used to tie off his traps.

“He said he waited two days ‘fore running these. Scared de law was watchin'. He found dis when he come back.”

Popcorn leaned over and handed me a scrap of cloth. It was torn and soaked with a dark stain.

“Same color as the boy's shirt,” I said, taking it and twisting it through my fingers.

All the way back, I had a picture in my mind of this Vietnamese flying around over the bayou looking for a good place to dump the body of Billy Fontenot. And I couldn't forget that there'd been another passenger—perhaps he was the murderer. I'd talked to Oceanic about that; they said that Billy was the only one to leave the rig that morning. P.H.I. had no record of service for any other rig for that pilot, that chopper, that day. As bad as I hated it, I was going to have to bring the Feds into it. Technically, it was a crime on federal waters—I was no longer dealing with somebody who'd been shot on shore and tossed into the bayou—Billy Fontenot was in transit from an offshore drilling rig. I can't tell you how I hated the idea of calling in the big boys.

They have to run the show, even if it means running it into the ground. Look at what happened in Waco . There was one good thing that might come of their involvement: I could turn it all over to them and get my mind back on fishing the Teche.

Lieutenant Marquand put the call in to New Orleans ; the FBI would be in Logan City the next day. I sat down at my desk, picked up my tackle box, and started sharpening the hooks on my Rapalas . But, I couldn't keep my mind on the task. Once I got my teeth into something, I didn't like to let go. It was too rough on the digestion. I wanted to finish what I'd started, maybe make a few headlines in the process. When you're a career cop, it never hurts to have a few big cases on your resume—as long as they aren't unsolved. I riffled through the paperwork again; went over everything that I'd seen and heard, then started asking myself questions. The why's, the who's, even the what if's—no conclusion. There were still too many parts missing from the puzzle.

The ‘suits and shades', my favorite derogatory term for the FBI, arrived bright and early the next morning. They were still as obnoxious and overbearing as I'd remembered.

“So Detective Vining—Jamie didn't you say? Is this all that you've come up with?”

I nodded. “So far, anyway.”

“We're going to need Mr. Hebert's address, and that of his friend in Houma . What was his name?”

“Coony Estilette. And I've never met the man. You'll have to get all that from Popcorn.”

They pranced around the office, showing off their slicked back New Orleans haircuts and their top-dollar suits, took the Fontenot file from my desk, and spoke with Lieutenant Marquand for maybe ten minutes. Then they made the standard ‘this is our case now' statement, and warned us against interfering.

“We'll keep you updated on what we find out...so you can close your books,” said the tall one, as they turned to leave.

“Let us know if you stumble across anything else,” his short sidekick added.

They'd come and gone in less time than it takes to fill an order at the corner fast-food restaurant. I looked at Lieutenant Marquand.

“Did you hear anyone say thank you?”

“And you won't,” he said, as he walked back into his office.

I put the duplicate of the Fontenot file in a drawer marked ‘pending investigations', and informed the lieutenant that I was taking two days lost-time, if it was all right, so I could catch a few fish while the barometer was on the rise. After being reassured that all my other cases were either closed or otherwise taken care of, he wished me good luck and told me to take a hand-held with me, in case he needed to get in touch with me. I grabbed my tackle box and whistled my way out the door.

As I pulled up to my place, anxious to hook up to my custom aluminum bass boat, I saw Popcorn's old wreck of a pickup in my drive. It was blocking the way to the backyard where the boat was parked. I honked my horn and he came walking slowly from the back of the house. He wasn't alone. The man with him looked as if he'd been born old, then gotten progressively worse. His face was a series of deep crags and ridges, weatherworn and deeply tanned, with tributary wrinkles spreading out beneath his eyes and branching outward from his mouth. His nose looked like a gnarled finger, bent downward in a permanent crook. He had a fisherman's cap, one size too large, pulled down over the tops of his ears, with sprigs of matted gray hair poked out from under either side. Dark flinty eyes stared out at me from deep shadowed sockets.

“Dis is ma fren, Estilette,” Popcorn said, as he approached.

I got out and shook the old man's hand; it was like squeezing the leathered front claw of an alligator.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Estilette.”

“Coony. Ma frens call me Coony.”

When he smiled, his face broke open like dried mud in the hot sun. There was no question: the man had spent most of his life outdoors, much of it in the harshest kind of weather.

“So, fellas, what brings you here on such a good day for fishing?”

“Somebody broke into Coony's house las' night. Made a hell of a mess.”

Couldn't have been the federal boys; they didn't even know his name until this morning.

“Did you call the Houma police, Mr. Estilette?”

“He couldn't, Jamie. It wasn't jus' a break in. Dey was lookin' for somethin'.”

“And you're about to tell me what? ”

“Show him, Coony.”

The old man unbuttoned his flannel shirt and began to pull a vinyl pouch from inside his pants. It was one of those quart-sized freezer bags, and it was bulging with a white, floury substance.

“Where'd this come from, Mr. Estilette—Coony?”

“From da sky. It fell out da sky wit dat dead man.”

Coony's old hand was shaking as he handed the pouch to me. I knew without tasting it what the powder was. But, I put a little on the tip of my finger and stuck it to my tongue anyway. Cocaine—and there'd been many a man killed over less than a quart bag of it. All of a sudden, the Teche seemed far away, in another parish—as far as fishing was concerned.

“Come inside; we'll have a cold beer. I want to hear the whole story.”

The old man seemed glad to have the contraband out of his possession, and he gave me another crack-faced smile. We gathered around the kitchen table; I put a six-pack of Miller Lite in the center. Coony's hands were shaking, as he twisted off the top and took a swig of beer.

“Well,” he said, “Ah was dere on da bayou—you know why—Popcorn tol' you, ah know. Ah was fixin' to run ma traps. Da next ting ah see, dat man comes flyin'. Rat behind him comes dis metal suitcase, briefcase, whatevah. When ah goes to see what da hell's goin' on, ah sees da man floatin'. An' ‘bout fifty feet away, dis briefcase. Ah sees da helicopter fly off, an' ah checks everyting out. Ah takes da briefcase an' lights out for shore. When ah pried da ting open, dis was inside.”

“You know what it is, of course?”

The old man nodded.

“What were you going to do with it?”

“Hell, ah don't know, me. Maybe find someone to sell it to. All ah could tink about was how much money it might be worth.”

Plenty. The stuff was uncut, maybe a pound of it. The going rate, according to the latest statistics, was around four hundred seventy-five dollars a gram. This junk was worth over a quarter of a million.

“Did you tell anybody about this besides Popcorn?”

“Ah called around. Nobody wanted ta handle it fuh me. Said da word was out. Da mob lost a package on da bayou.”

I didn't have to tell him that it was too late to give it back now—now that he'd tried to sell it. Whoever owned the stuff would kill him for no other reason than to set an example. He was afraid to go to the Feds; they'd turn his life upside down, and eventually find out that he made his living poaching protected species. If there ever was a man caught between the devil and the bottom of the bayou, it was Coony Estilette.

“What do you want me to do, Coony?”

The old man ran the crooked fingers of one hand across his wrinkled face, as if he were trying to smooth out the problem.

“Jus' help me, boy. Ah don't know which way to turn.”

“As bad as I hate to say it, your best chance at staying alive is to turn the dope over to the Feds. Tell them you found it—which you did—and that you came to me not knowing what to do with it. Just leave out the part where you tried to sell it and hope they don't find out about your poaching. You didn't leave anything—gator hides, stuff like that lying around did you?”

“No, ma fren. Coony may not be so smart, but he ain't dumb.”

I could probably get five to one odds against that with the bookies.

“You can't stay here. The FBI is looking for both of you right now. Pop, don't you have an old cabin out in the swamp?”

“You know I do. On dat lil' island back in da—”

“Take Coony there, and hide the dope for the time being. The Feds will be looking for me soon—when they can't find you—and I've got to do some thinking if I want to keep all of us out of hot water.”

Popcorn had a concerned look on his face. “What you gone do, Jamie?”

“I've got a hunch—now that we know that drugs are in the mix. I'm going back over to P.H.I. and see if I can't solve this case before the FBI does. Maybe I'll make lieutenant before I turn forty.”

“How you gone get in touch?”

“I'll fire a flare from the Atchafalaya Bridge sometime this evening. When you see the flare, come on back in. I'll meet you in the alley, right over there, just in case someone's watching the house.”

“What if something happens and you?”

“If you don't see the flare, you're on your own.”

I watched them leave, then got back in the car and headed for the P.H.I. office. I turned off the hand-held radio; I knew that Lieutenant Marquand would be trying to get me, and I didn't have time to talk to him now.

It had come to me when Coony showed me the dope. What better way to smuggle in drugs than to use some outfit that made regular, scheduled trips between rigs, production platforms, and shore. Getting the stuff to the rigs would be the tricky thing. Probably came out on supply boats, mixed in with groceries, in specially marked packages that only some accomplice on the rig would know about. There would definitely have to be a network of some sort in place. The more I thought about it, I was convinced that somebody besides just a few Vietnamese pilots would have to be involved. It couldn't go smoothly if it were a haphazard thing; the drugs had to be moved quickly and efficiently. That would take planning, and someone who knew which rigs, which choppers, and which pilots were going where—and when. The dispatcher was my first choice.

When I walked into his office, he looked up, startled.

“Surprised to see me again?”

“Uh, no—yes,” he stammered, “I thought I answered all your questions last time.”

“Call someone to cover for you for a few minutes. We need to talk.”

He was a little man, slightly balding, with thick, dark-rimmed glasses and a prominent, jutting chin that made his face look like one of those caricatures that you see artists drawing in the French Quarter. He began picking at a scab on his lip until he drew blood.

“Okay,” he said, waving to a man at a file cabinet across the way. “Watch this for a second, will you, Sam?”

“The coffee room?” I asked.

“Yes, we can talk in there.”

I had decided the moment that I looked into his eyes, the way he shifted his feet and glanced down, that I would do something rash—put the full pressure on right off. It was a bold move, maybe even stupid, with nothing more to go on than a hunch, an educated guess. But, he was involved; I knew it somehow, and the worst-case scenario: he'd call my bluff. If that happened, I'd arrest him anyway, on suspicion of something, and then sweat the truth out of him at the station.

“Ed isn't it?”

“Yes,” he mumbled.

“Well, Ed, this is how I see it. You can take the heat as the brains behind this drug smuggling operation, or you can work out a deal right now, and maybe save yourself some prison time.”

The little man went rigid in his chair, then reached and picked the rest of the scab from his lip. Blood began to run down his chin.

“I don't know...what you're...talking about,” he said, haltingly. He wiped at the blood with his hand and smeared it on his pants.

“If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that line, I'd be a rich man, Ed. Save us both some grief. I know about the choppers bringing in the drugs. I know from your sign-in sheets that you were working the day that the Fontenot boy got killed. I've got the cocaine, Ed, metal briefcase, Glad bag, a witness who saw the boy come flying out of one of your choppers—along with the briefcase. The Feds will have a fix on your Vietnamese pilot before the sun goes down. Give it up, now, while you can still cut a deal.”

Ed clamped two trembling fingers over the wound on his lip and stared down at the floor. It was a long shot and I knew it, but I fired my last round.

“Look, Ed. They're going to go over your bank accounts, your history of purchases, your phone records, your tax payments. By the time the government gets through with you, you'll be an old man, learning a new trade up at Angola—one that you'll never get a chance to use outside prison.”

He sat there, shivering as if he'd just walked naked into a snowstorm. I walked over to the wall phone and picked up the receiver.

“I told them at the station that you'd clam up. That you'd outsmart yourself, make the stupid move and take all the blame. I bet those FBI agents a cool hundred that you'd do it. You must be getting a hell of lot of money to take the fall alone.”

I dialed the station.

“Not enough,” the little man blurted out.

He had his hands clenched in his lap; the blood started to trickle again.

“Well, what's it going to be, Ed?”

“What kind of deal are we talking about?”

I spoke loudly into the phone. “Lieutenant, I've got a man here who says he wants to talk about the Fontenot killing. Why don't you contact the Feds and tell them I'm bringing him in personally. I've got a couple of stops to make; then I'll be in. And, Lieutenant, how about calling the newspaper for me? Wouldn't want the FBI getting all our publicity, would we?”

I cuffed Ed, and told his boss that he'd be needing a new dispatcher for the day shift. Then I walked him out, put him in the car, and headed for the Atchafalaya Bridge. It was still daylight when we got there, but the flare burned bright—about as bright as the shine on a brand new lieutenant's badge—or the pearl finish on one of those new diving lures that catch the big bass.

Wishful thinking is at least fifty percent misnomer—‘wishful': full of hope—that fit my situation. I'd hoped to get a quick conviction, leading to more convictions, leading to a promotion. But ‘thinking'? That should involve logic; there was nothing logical about my presumption of success—in the face of the presence of the Mob.

‘Mister Ed', the talking dispatcher, suddenly got a case of laryngitis after he lawyered up. I didn't know the ‘mouthpiece', but I'd heard of him. Damien Lefleur, longtime legal magician for the Luchetti crime family—home base, New Orleans. Whatever advice he gave ‘Mister Ed', (my guess was something to do with a shortened life span), turned my snitch into a scared rabbit.

Ed recanted some of his story, and seemed suddenly willing to take the big fall. He'd come up with the idea by himself, he said. That was the story he was prepared to stick with and no amount of browbeating or threats would change his mind. That left me with Kwan Chi, the missing helo pilot. I would have to find him before the Feds or the Luchetti family did—if I wanted to bring down the rest of those involved.

It was inescapable then, that I had to listen to the FBI's slant on the sudden reversal in fortune.

“You local boys really know how to screw things up, don't you?”

The tall FBI agent, Milt Blake, was dressing me down for not turning Ed over to them.

“We would've given him immunity, provided him with protection...you knew that, and you went right ahead and butted in. Now we've got crap—a brainless robot who's willing to take the full rap, just to keep his throat from being cut.”

He pointed a long finger at me.

“And whatever pressure that I can bring to bear, I'll see what I can do about prosecuting you for obstruction. Maybe get you canned. You've stepped off into the Federal arena, boy, and it's a different ballgame.”

I was relearning an old lesson: that expectations don't always match outcome. Or, as Grand-Pere had often said, “Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l'ours avant de l'avoir tue.”—don't count your chickens before the rooster's been in the henhouse.

But I wasn't about to be intimidated—even if I'd let ambition obscure my judgment.

“You'd still be chasing your tails if I hadn't leaned on the dispatcher. And there's still the pilot—”

“You don't get it do you, Vining? It's our show. Any information you got, turn it over to the FBI, or you'll be wearing a number instead of a badge.”

“I'll find him. Then he's yours. How about that?”

Milt's gaunt face flushed pink; his dimples looked like fresh scars.

“No go. You tell us what you know, we'll take care of the rest.”

“All I've got is a hunch—and some contacts—longtime snitches who'd clam up at the first sign of the Feds.”

“What have they got to hide? You just give us their names; we'll see that they don't get burnt.”

Milt's dark brown eyes narrowed.

“You talking about that damn old fisherman, or maybe Estilette? They've disappeared on us, you know. But we'll find ‘em.”

“I can't compromise my sources; you should know that. I'll see what I can find out, then pass it on. That's the best that I can do.”

“You've got more brass than sense, detective.” His tone was noticeably less threatening, and he paused, as if he were weighing his options. Instinctively I knew that the man was clueless; the FBI had come up with nothing so far—and ‘nothing' was breeding nervous apprehension.

“We'll be watching you, detective. One more screwup, and I'll burn you beyond recognition.”

“Just give me twenty-four hours to turn something up.”

He spent five more minutes describing the possible consequences of any double-cross that I might have in mind—everything from an outhouse at Angola to emasculation. Then he agreed to my proposal, flashing me a condescending smile intended to show the power of his position.

“Quitting time tomorrow, detective.”

The American College Dictionary defines ‘bluff' two ways: a misleading, bold front—or a cliff with a steep face. I hoped that my attempt to placate the FBI wouldn't turn out to be a fatal precipice.

When Lieutenant Marquand threw his two cents worth into the pot, one thing became increasingly clear—the heavy players were betting against me.

I walked into the outer office, pulled Tip away from his Penthouse magazine, checked out a cruiser, and managed to get out of the parking lot with a modicum of my butt still intact.

Tip waited until we were on the four lane at the edge of town before he spoke.

“Mais, quoi ya, cher?”

“You have to ask me ‘what's the matter' after Ed did a flip-flop? The Feds want my badge and Marquand's ready to help them clean out my desk.”

“Oh. I thought it was somet'ing serious.”

I could see him smiling in the shadowy light from oncoming headlights.

“Go ahead and laugh. Then decide how you're going to like breaking in a new partner.”

“Mais non. I done got you trained, yeah. We jus' have to find dis pilot...dat's all.”

He glanced over his shoulder and shielded his eyes from the glare that shone through the back window.

“You know dey tailin' us, Jamie?”

“That'd be Milt the pencil-neck and his bubble-headed sidekick.”

I turned off at Buena Vista and cut through a side street

“I'm going to get out at the trailer park, borrow Broussard's car. They'll park and watch for me to come out of the trailer...only I'll go out the back window. He keeps the car under a tarp behind the doublewide next door. I'll take it out the back way and meet you at The Plantation in ten minutes.”

“Broussard's at home?”

“He's offshore for another week. He'll never have to know.”

“What if dey follow me instead?”

“Then you'll have to shake them. They don't know this area. Take them down the bayou—whatever—just get rid of them and meet me at the landing where Popcorn Hebert keeps his bass boat. We'll take a pirogue out to the island. They'll be hiding out there where I sent them before collaring the dispatcher.”

“Why you t'ink dey don't come in when you fire da flare?”

“Estilette probably didn't trust me when I said that the Feds wouldn't be worried about his poaching activities. He's counting on Popcorn to let him hole up there until things cool down.”

I slid to a halt at the shell drive that led into the trailer park. I left the car running, got out, and walked around to the passenger's side.

“Remember, no more than fifteen minutes. Be at—”

“Yeah, da Plantation .”

“If something happens and I don't show up, find Popcorn and Estilette. See what they know about the little nest of Vietnamese that rented the old Trahan place off the bayou below Peterson. I met one of them in a bar a few months ago. He thought he was Bruce Lee. Had to arrest him for assault. Just as the bouncer was about to clock him with a beer bottle. The kid was a pilot for P.H.I.”

The night clung muggy; the sudden breeze that sifted through the stand of willows at the edge of the trailer park smelled of spawning sac-o-lait and bream beds a hundred yards away.

I watched Tip slide his out-sized frame over the seat with some difficulty. He spat out the window, dropped the shifter into drive, and pulled out onto the highway, kicking up shards of shell and a thick dust fog. Fifty yards back down the road, in the direction we'd come, lights burned surreally through the mist that was rising from the pavement. The car wasn't moving.

The park was quiet; only one trailer showed signs of life. An old man was standing outside in his skivvies flipping hamburgers on a small grill. He had his back turned, his head rocked back, and was swigging from a tall beer. He didn't acknowledge me as I walked past him to Lannie Broussard's trailer. I watched him toss the empty on the ground and reach in an ice chest for another, as I picked the lock and went inside. I made my way down the narrow hallway in the dark. The back bedroom was open and I turned on the light to get my bearings, then flicked it off. I raised the window and squeezed through, ripping my zipper on the sill as I dropped to the ground.

I couldn't reach the window to close it; I'd have to tell Broussard about it later. I removed the chamois cover from his prize—a mint condition '57 Chevy with dual carbs and deep-throated exhausts. I had it open, hot-wired, and purring in less than two minutes. I eased it out the back way, lights off, and followed the levee until I was far enough away to turn on my headlamps. I was a mile from The Plantation and had a minute to get there. When I popped the accelerator, the Chevy classic came to life.

I saw Tip pacing as I swerved into the parking lot with squealing tires.

“What's da hurry?” he said, slamming the door behind him as he got in.

“It's the car...it won't let you go slow.”

“Did you lose ‘em?”

“As far as I know they're still back there watching some old man drinking his supper and barbecuing his dessert.”

The dual pipes roared again, as I goaded the Chevy onto the highway with a tap of the foot. Soon trees and bushes and road signs were flying by us—reminiscent of the blur of bystanders near a merry-go-round.

Not long after the war in Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese refugees blew into this country like so much flotsam before a storm. The unskilled found jobs anywhere they could—some cooked or bused tables in oriental restaurants; others blended into places like Little Saigon in New Orleans—as dope runners, pimps, and prostitutes. Some of the luckier ones, the ones with flying skills they'd learned from American service men, became chopper pilots for outfits like P.H.I. . They flew crews back and forth to the hundreds of oilrigs that dotted the gulf like giant mosquitoes, sucking rich, black blood from the bowels of the earth.

Similar to the Mexicans, the Vietnamese hung together, seldom if ever went anywhere alone, and often lived ten to a room—packed like smoked oysters.

I'd driven past the turnoff to the Trahan house many times since the Vietnamese moved in, but was never curious enough to check it out. It had been the home of a childhood friend, and the last time I'd seen it, the place was run down from neglect. Even when I'd figured that chopper pilots were involved in drug trafficking, I made the place a low priority—for at least a couple of reasons. One, logic said that Kwan Chi had hit the ground running the day that Billy Fontenot died and took a swan dive from his helicopter. Chi was probably out of St. Mary's Parish before nightfall. Another, I'd put the screws to Ed the dispatcher, and he'd folded like a man with a busted flush. His testimony would have gutted some big fish, as well as trapped most of the minnows. Now that Ed was crawfishing, I'd have to refocus.

I slowed the car just enough to keep from skidding off the highway, and turned down the cul-de-sac known since Civil War days as Sweet Benning Road. The slash pines that lined either side of the narrow roadway looked like sentinels, guarding a past that I recalled fondly—a recollection of half-truths and half-fabrications—that only memory could embellish over time.

The only sources of light were the Chevy's headlamps and the phosphorous sliver of moon that broke from behind a wispy ribbon of clouds. I stopped just short of the front gate, and stared at the bright yellow police banners that fluttered like flags of surrender from the rotting pillars that now barely supported a sagging gallery.

“What you t'ink you find here, boy?”

I looked off into gray shadows, where the porch buckled from untreated moisture and two rusted chains hung limply from the floor of the balcony. I remembered a chairback swing, and a young girl with a thousand blond curls and a smile that said ‘yes' but never lived up to its promise.

“Nothing,” I said, putting the car into reverse. “They're gone.”

Tip slapped a meaty hand against the dash.

“Yeah, as soon as da FBI came ‘round, dese boys scattered like roaches before da bug man.”

The first thing I saw when we reached the landing was Popcorn Hebert's rust-eaten, dent-dimpled pickup. The lone light at the end of the plank pier hardly illuminated anything more than a metal sink and cutting board where Popcorn and I had eviscerated and scaled many a fish in our time. In the shadows, just beyond the pickup, I could make out another vehicle. I turned the Chevy in that direction and clicked on the bright lights with my foot. It was a Volkswagen bus, one of the old ones that was difficult to tell which was front and which was back, but for the round headlamps secured on either side, just beneath the big, wrap-around windshield.

I turned off the ignition, got out, and swept the water's edge with the wide beam of my flashlight. Popcorn's heavy aluminum, all purpose boat was conspicuously absent from its mooring to the left of the dock. In its place was tethered a rough-cut pirogue fashioned from a huge blackgum log—complete with two long poles and a short steering paddle.

“One of Popcorn's?” Tip asked, swatting at an insect on his nose.

“Probably. He's got ‘em stashed all up and down the bayou...in case he gets a sudden urge to fish while he's riding down the highway. That looks like his handiwork.”

“You plannin' ta pole out to da island in dat?”

The skepticism in his tone was inescapable.

“The water, she look mighty high, yeah?” he added.

“If we have to, you can use some of that brawn to scull—”

“Ah got yo' scull hangin', boy,” he said, grabbing his crotch.

The small island, known as Bon Croissant to locals, had been formed by floodwaters at sometime in Louisiana's ancient past. It was barely a mile across and slightly less than that, tip to tip, and had once been used by Confederates to hide both arsenal and men from invading Federal armies. Occasionally, high water would turn up an algaed cannonball or broken saber as a reminder of a time when causes were fueled more by personal passion than anything else—and tyranny was the color of Union blue.

The place had little to offer anyone considering it for habitation. There were a few skeletal cypresses on the north side, some storm-stunted live oaks on the south, and acres of sawgrass and scrub bushes covering mostly sandy, sometimes rocky ground. There was a small inlet in the center, a half-mile into the crescent. Forty yards further up there was a deep, fan-shaped pool shaded by a lone oak—gigantic, gnarled from bouts with hurricanes, yet standing in defiance, like an angry fist thrust fifty feet into the sky. Popcorn Hebert had built a cabin there, for times when no other place could provide the solace, the quiet ambiance of man's relationship with nature, the refuge from daily defeats in a fevered world driven mad by self-toleration and compromise with evil.

After we'd been friends and fishing partners for years, Popcorn let me in on his secret. There were times when huge bass and sac-o-lait appeared in the deep pool—as if the occasional storms had blown them there unharmed. I suggested that there might be an underground stream that linked the pool with undiscovered, virginal waters, but I never had the courage to put on scuba gear and investigate. The pool was also home to a thirty-foot alligator that Popcorn had named Luke, and it would often sun on the beach, its head sometimes crowned with loose ribbons of water hyacinth. It was at those times that we sat and talked, drank beer, and discussed the past as if talking about it could bring it back. When Luke allowed, we fished, enjoyed the dream of every fisherman—catching lunkers on every cast.

In spite of Tip's protests, I decided on taking the pirogue to Bon Croissant . It was 11:30 and every minute counted in my quest for information that would lead to some sort of personal vindication. I hid the Chevy in a canebrake across the road, for fear that some jealous baby boomer would decide to mar the paint job—or worse.

“Who you t'ink belongs to dat ‘Wagen?” Tip asked, as he untied the rope from the pirogue.

“Thirty years ago I'd have said a colony of hippies. It's an old one.”

“T'irty years ago it would have been painted wit flowers, and you was still sleepin' wit you hands under da cover, you.”

I stood in the middle of the boat and waited for Tip to give it a shove. He almost tipped us over as he jumped in at the last second.

“You need to lighten up on the groceries, big'un,” I teased.

“You need ta have you head examined, boy. We turn over out dere in da swamp—we be food for les cocodries , yeah.”

I poled us out away from the bank and into a blanket of total darkness. I could hear the ruffled water kissing the sides of the boat, as I pulled back the pole, allowing the pirogue to glide forward. I handed the flashlight to Tip; he clicked it on and shined it out ahead, all the while steering with the paddle in his other hand.

Moths began to flit around the beam, their guidance systems disrupted by the artificial light; they seemed bent on crashing against the lens, as if it shielded the secret of life. I watched them smash themselves again and again, bounce off, fall to an addled death.

As we got out into the channel, the big cypress knees became fewer, the pads and other surface vegetation less obvious. In the distance I could see a light, like a hovering firefly, blinking in the mist. When he was on the island, Popcorn always hung a lantern on the broken mast of an ancient wreck that was half-buried in the sand near where he tied up his boat.

“Try to keep the beam low,” I whispered to Tip, “we'll have to go it blind when we get closer. Head for the lantern after that.”

When we were inside the crescent, within fifty yards of the inlet beach, I heard the unmistakable whuff-whuffing of copter blades overhead. As I looked up, the pilot switched on a searchlight that diffused light out over a hundred-foot stretch of sand—turning it suddenly as bright as a freshly whitewashed fence. Tip began paddling furiously, and I stabbed the water with the long pole, searching for purchase at the bottom of the channel. The chopper dropped lower and hovered two hundred feet above, slowly scanning the shore until it rested upon Popcorn's unpainted aluminum boat at the end of a long rope that ran to the water from the post that held the lantern.

I found bottom and dug into it with all my strength, and the pirogue shot forward, cutting the water in a wide V shape, like that of migrating geese. The next stroke was in harmony with Tip's frantic paddling, and we plowed into the shore with a thud, causing me to fall awkwardly across the bow.

“You alright, boy?”

“Hurry—get out—before—”

The amplified voice rang from above, as the searchlight exploded the darkness around us.

“This is the FBI. Put up your hands and move away from the boat. I repeat, this is the FBI.”

Suddenly, from just beyond the circle of light, I heard shouts, staccato bursts of what sounded at first like a child's gibberish, but reminded me of the tinny clang of Orientals, as they barked at each other at The China Wok restaurant.

“An khong ngoi roi.”

“An khong noi co.”

“Chua do ong nghe.”

Tip stood with his hands up, one foot out on the beach, the other still in the pirogue, his face turned back over his shoulder, in the direction of the clanging voices.

“Who da hell is dat?” he said, shielding his eyes from the bright searchlight.

The copter started to descend; the whirling blades showered us with dust and water and stinging sand. Then shots fractured the darkness, and the chopper stopped in midair, shifting the conical beam toward the spot where the guns had flashed.

Tip yelled and dived for the scant cover of a clump of sawgrass. “To hell wid dis!” he said, rolling forward with the hiss of a punctured tire.

I made for a dune that rose just beyond him and I landed hard, scraping skin from my face and palms as I slid across the ground.

“This is the FBI,” repeated the voice, “put your weapons down now.”

I raised my head to see three small men running away from the light, their slight bodies hunkered as they scrambled in three different directions. The searchlight focused on the two closest, and one stopped and fired a handgun at the helicopter. He fired twice more before someone on the chopper returned fire. The little man fell backward clutching at his thigh, then crabbed across the sand, dragging his injured leg behind.

“Ah hope da hell we gettin' overtime for dis, Jamie boy.”

I could see the shadowy outline of Tip crawling toward me, gun in hand.

“I'd settle for getting out of here in one piece,” I shouted above the thunder of the copter blades.

“Dat would be nice, too.”

Rat-tat, rat-tat, rat-tat!

An automatic weapon spit tracers out through the night; even with the loud thrashing of the chopper blades, I heard the bullets clank as they ripped through sheet metal.

Rat-tat, rat-tat, rat-tat!

The copter went into a violent spin, as if the pilot had lost the ability to maintain equilibrium, and it plummeted like a headshot dove, crashed half in and half out of a nearby slough, the blades still flailing, popping, flinging great sprays of water and engine oil with each revolution. When the shaft imploded, the blades went cartwheeling out across the surface of the water. Strangely, the searchlight continued to burn, casting a distracted eye toward the sky. In the shadows created by the beam, I could see two little men running toward the wreckage, as smoke and steam drifted yellow through the light.

I stood up and aimed just ahead of the runners; fired twice, then ran for the chopper.

“Cover me, Tip!” I yelled, firing once more.

The man in front whirled and squeezed off two shots at me, then pitched forward, as if in late reaction to one of my bullets finding its mark. The other one, the one with the AK-47, dropped to his knee and began firing from the hip. Sand kicked up all around me and I hit the ground, again feeling the grit bite into my face.

Tip emptied his clip at the man, and ripped his coat pocket retrieving another.

“Somebody gone pay, now. Dis damn suit cost me seventy-five dollar, yeah!”

“Get your head down!”

I craned my neck and looked back toward the smoldering copter. The gunman was standing on the edge of the cockpit, shouting and pointing the rifle toward someone inside.

“Bat ca hai tay! Bat ca hai tay!”

I rose to my knees, braced my gun hand with the other, and took a deep breath.

As I fired, the .38 belched a phosphorus flame that extended at least eighteen inches beyond the barrel. The man crumpled into a ball and tumbled sideways, hitting the ground like a sack of discarded oyster shells.

Tip barreled past me, puffing as he made his way up the hill toward the man with the wounded leg. I ran to the chopper, hoping against the odds to find someone alive in the smoking pile of crunched metal and broken glass that had moments before been a Logan City Police chopper.

The pilot was decapitated, and his body lay spread like a thief on a cross, half-in, half-out of the cockpit, his bloodied head, mouth and eyes open in surprise, rested at an angle, right ear buried in the sand. Milt Blake was pinned in what was left of his seat, a phalange of steel across his chest. His right eye was protruding unnaturally from its socket, and his left cheekbone was crushed, drawing his lips away from his teeth in a gruesome, gargoyle sneer. He was still breathing, and when I touched him, he spoke—more a hiss between his teeth.

“Wha' wazzat...bas'ard yellin'?”

The effort caused him to faint. I felt his pulse; it was thready and weak.

“I got dis sumbitch, yeah,” Tip yelled from the shadows.

When I turned around he was dragging the man with the leg wound across the ground toward me. I looked back into the wreckage, searching for the other agent. If he was there, he'd become part of the tangle, indistinguishable from steel and leather and plastic and glass.

Just as I was cursing the damaged radio, I heard the whirring of another chopper and it became two, and the lights blinked red and white not a hundred yards offshore. I raced up the hill to the cabin, kicked open the door, so afraid of what I'd find that I forgot to breathe.

There, in the middle of the floor, Popcorn and Coony sat back to back, ankles and wrists heavily wrapped with duct tape, with a big piece over their mouths for good measure.

I remembered to breathe, and let out a yelp of relief. I quickly cut them loose and left them cursing the fact that we hadn't dropped the ‘big one' on Hanoi, Saigon, the whole damned illegitimate country of Viet Nam.

When I got back to the beach, it was teeming with medics and blue uniforms. A police launch was pulling up to shore, its halogen searchlight turning the area into a scene of controlled chaos. Two men had what was left of Milt Blake on a stretcher and they were scurrying for a chopper.

I turned to Tip; gave him the good news about Popcorn and Coony, then glanced down at the Vietnamese who was being treated for a gunshot wound in the right thigh.

“What's his name?” I asked, as Tip flipped through the man's wallet.

“You livin' a charmed life, Jamie boy. Dis is none other than Mr. Kwan Chi Nguyen, formerly employed by da P.H.I. ”

It was days before we completely understood all that had happened. I pieced most of it together from excited conversations with Popcorn, Coony, and the interrogation of Kwan Chi. The rest I had to wait for—until Milt Blake got out of intensive care, and could speak without extreme pain.

The day that Billy Fontenot got killed, the nest of Vietnamese pilots, who were all involved in the drug trafficking, panicked and took off for safer venues. All, that is, except Kwan Chi, the man who'd thrown Billy out of the chopper for double-crossing him.

He had no intention of losing the drugs that had accidentally fallen out with Billy—primarily because his bosses would hold him responsible. He instinctively knew that there was nowhere he could hide from the Mob. He took his bearings by flying over the area a couple of times, got himself an aerial map of the place where he tossed Billy, and methodically began to explore the swamp. With the help of two of his friends whom he'd promised to pay handsomely.

They spent days in abandoned shacks or rent houses that were empty, patronizing different curb stores for food, trying to stay ahead of the FBI and the Mob. When they needed a car, they'd steal one. The last one was the old Volkswagen bus I'd seen at the landing.

Anyway, as Fate would have it—Kwan Chi's words, not mine—he met up with Popcorn Hebert and Coony Estilette when they were on the way in from Bon Croissant island after they'd seen the flare that I fired from the Atchafalaya Bridge. When the old men landed, Coony was carrying the brief case that had had the dope in it, only now he was using it for a lunch box. Kwan Chi recognized the box because it had oil company stickers on it. He and his buddies confronted Coony, and when he tried to coldcock one of them with the metal case, they subdued the old men and forced Popcorn, at gunpoint, to take them out to the island.

The Vietnamese slapped Coony around some, then started on Popcorn. This after having turned the cabin upside down looking for the contraband. They began to argue about how to torture the old men into telling them what they wanted to know, and yet keep from killing them before getting the information. They found Popcorn's whisky jug, began drinking, and decided to put off a decision until they could come up with the best way. In the meantime, Kwan Chi kept thumping Coony in the genitals with a towel wrapped around a bar of soap. They bound their prisoners and drank themselves into a stupor. According to Coony, they didn't wake up until midday—after he'd pissed his pants, vomited several times when his aching genitals brought on nausea, and cursed the whole morning.

The Vietnamese spent most the afternoon chunking their guts from the effects of Popcorn's green moonshine, then eating everything in sight to give them something to throw up. By late that evening, Kwan Chi had pretty much decided to rip off Coony's toenails, then his fingernails. Then start on his eyebrows and nose hair. After the first toenail, Coony told them about burying the dope in its plastic bag, in the sand near the deep pool. When Kwan Chi sent one of the men out to see if Coony was lying, Luke was waiting for him. The little man crapped his pants and came running back to the cabin, yelling in his native tongue, and gesturing with his arms about something big being after him.

It was getting dark by then, and Kwan Chi wanted no part of the ‘dragon', as he called it, and slapped the old men around while he was thinking what to do. Finally, he decided to wait until daylight. He would shoot the ‘dragon', dig up the dope, (if it was actually there), and then leave the old men bound together for someone to find. If the dope wasn't there, then he'd go back to torturing Coony. Just before we got there, he pulled the nail off Coony's other big toe, just to see if he'd tell the same story about the cocaine.

When Milt got well enough to talk, he told me that the old coot at the trailer park had seen me go into the trailer, heard me crank up Broussard's Chevy, and had walked around back and seen the window open. He phoned the cops.

Milt had grown suspicious about what I might be doing at the trailer park, and decided to get a closer look. When they drove up, the old man had thought they were the cops and told them what had happened—giving them a description of the ' 5 7 Chevy . Milt got on the horn and commandeered a police chopper and they headed off down the bayou looking for me. By then, he'd gotten word that our cruiser was parked at The Plantation and Tip and I weren't anywhere in sight.

They discovered the landing, found the car in the canebrake, and took off again—this time searching the bayou, the channel, and anywhere out over the water where they saw lights. They hailed two fisherman, scared the hell out them with the searchlight and amplified speakerphone, then headed further out toward an island that the chopper pilot had heard about—a place called Bon Croissant.

They spotted Popcorn's kerosene lamp from a distance, then Milt noticed an occasional small flash of light down below. He couldn't make it out from so high up, but suspected what it was, who it was, and didn't want to turn the searchlight on us until the last minute. When the chopper was fired upon, Milt called in reinforcements.

The rest, as they say—well, the writeup was in all the papers. How I made a big bust, under the expert direction of one Milt Blake of the FBI. How I'd saved his life by wasting one of Kwan Chi's buddies, and how the testimony of the Vietnamese, coupled with ‘Mr. Ed's' re-recanted statement, would lead to a domino effect in the drug business—put a substantial dent in South Louisiana distribution, the paper said.

Milt's partner, Clint Aucoin—they never found his body, even though they spent three days trying. It just disappeared somewhere out there in the waters off Bon Croissant. Gators, Tip said. Maybe it was Luke. Who knows? We never saw the big gator again after that, and strangely, the fishing was never quite the same on the island. Sightseers visited it most every day, and the place was often overrun with amateur photographers. Popcorn burned the cabin down six months later , and began looking for another hermitage.

Too damn many people know about it now, he said. What good's a refuge that everyone knows about.

Cooney, after turning over the dope to the Feds, went back to his illegal trapping, wearing specially-padded, hightop tennis shoes while his toenails grew back. Popcorn and I still went fishing every chance we got, and I made restitution to Lannie Broussard for breaking into his house and for stealing his prize '57 Chevy—I cleaned off the bird shit, waxed the finish to a mirror luster, and bought him a tank of gas to boot. The Feds had forgiven me (due in no small part to Milt's appreciation for his life, such as it would be now—one-eyed and disfigured); Lieutenant Marquand was talking promotion again.

Like Tip said, I was living a charmed life—at least for the time being. I still thought of old Luke and the giant bass now and then—and how man can screw up even the smallest measure of grace, if he really puts his mind to it.

End