Free The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell Page B

watching the kettle not boil. “It’s just an expression. A bad one, maybe.”
    “ Maybe? ”
    Nicole rolled the panties tight, then squeezed them into the watchpocket of her cutoffs. She walked to the back door and opened it. The river roiled just beyond the railroad tracks and formed the background for her dramatic pose in the doorway.
    “You have some things to think about,” she said. “Me, too.”
    “You want a key, you can have a key.”
    “Rene,” she said, a sonorous rebuke in her intonation. “That’s not it. This is not about a key.”
    “Oh, I see,” Shade said. He raised the now boiling water and poured it into the steeping chamber of the coffee pot.
    “I’ll get a copy knocked off over at the hardware store and leave it in your mailbox for you.”
    Nicole shrugged, looked down, then up.
    “If you really want to,” she said.
    “I do.”
    She eased inside then, and pulled the door closed behind her.
    “Today?”

7
    J EWEL C OBB had long conjured scenarios of murder during his nighttime fantasies, but when he was finally prepared to make the big step up in his midnight world, he found himself in a premature nocturne, the sun still walking its watchful beat, and the sidewalks becoming hectic as five o’clock neared.
    He dripped potato chips as he slouched in the front of an alley between three stories of soot-bricked warehouse and two stories of Teejay Crane’s retrospectively opulent theater, his hand on a string between a Kitty Clover bag and the vicinity of his mouth. There were glass chunks on the asphalt and he pushed at them with his boots until they crunched and gave way. A quart of Falstaff beer in a paper bag sat near his feet, and he occasionally crouched to it for a swig.
    The shotgun was in the second of four trash cans outside the fire exit of the theater. He’d brought it in a grocery sack, the piece broken into two components, both the barrel and the stock shortened by a hacksaw. He’d huddled over the trash can like a retching drunk while he reassembled the shotgun, loaded it, then eased it along the edge of the garbage, careful not to clog the barrel, stock up for easy grabbing.
    The instructions Duncan and Ledoux had given him played over and over in his mind. In the alley, wait, whack him, head shot, drop the piece and walk down Seventh Street, turn left, and escape will be waiting there in a car. Jewel had it all memorized but that failed to plump up his confidence.
    The chips were all gone. He kicked at the empty bag, then squatted to the Falstaff.
    He was within twenty feet of Seventh Street but no one paid much attention to him. He blended into the surroundings, just another down-and-outer, although younger than most, and somewhat of a pacesetter sartorially. Whenever there was accidental eye contact he dropped his head and began to rock it on his neck as if shaking off one of those famous drinking companions who are mammoth and pink but very rarely seen by more than one drunken witness.
    He was telling time by the clock in the window of Shevlin’s Fair Deal Pawnshop and Rentals across the street. Crane was said to be as predictable as misery and Jewel could see that he was due in five minutes.
    All he could do was wait, and watch. He did not like the area. It was like all the cracked-shingle scruffy houses he’d ever lived in, but pushed all together in one spot, then stacked up to make a city.
    The marquee of the theater announced that Candy and the Eighth Dwarf was “Now Playing.” Jewel wondered what it was that cities put over on folks that made them want to spend money to watch strangers have real good times.
    At almost straight-up five a wino with a bald head laced by what looked like scuff marks, and with fermenting clothes and white gloves, pulled out of the ambling herd on Seventh and into the alley. He carried a large grocery bag that clearly contained a gallon-sized bottle.
    Jewel looked down as the wino passed, his nose wrinkling in disgust. He looked up