Free Creole Belle by James Lee Burke Page B

intersection.
    Grimes picked up. “What do you want?” he asked.
    “Guess.”
    “Who is this?”
    “ Who is this? Who do you think, asshole?” Bix said.
    “In case it’s escaped your attention, I’m not feeling too good, and I’ve already told you what happened, and I don’t need any more of your bullshit, Bix.”
    “Did I hear right? You don’t need my bullshit. If an elephant is sleeping, you don’t take a dump on its head and wipe your ass with its trunk and stroll off down the street.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I think I just saw Purcel’s car go through the intersection.”
    “It was you who threatened Purcel’s family, not me.”
    “The point is, I wasn’t gonna do anything.”
    “How is Purcel supposed to know that? Most people around here think you got brain damage.”
    “Where are you?” Bix asked.
    “What do you care?”
    “I want to give you your cut on the Houston job. Are you at that fuck pad you got?”
    “You said the fence hadn’t paid you.”
    “He just did.”
    “It’s true you bit off the nose of the psychiatrist at Angola?”
    “No, it’s not true, you little bitch. My cellmate did. You want to know what I’m gonna do if you don’t clean up this mess?”
    “Speak slower, will you? I’m taking notes on this so I can send Purcel a kite and tell him what you got planned for his family.”
    Bix’s hand was opening and closing on the cell phone, his fingers sticking to the surface. “You got twenty large coming. You want it or not?”
    “Change your twenty large into nickels and shove them up your nose. While you’re at it, go fuck yourself, because no broad is gonna do it. I heard some guys in the AB say you were queer bait and on the stroll at Angola. Is that why you never get laid?”
    Before Bix could reply, the connection went dead, and he found himself squeezing the cell phone so tightly he almost cracked the screen. There was a pain behind his eyes as if someone had hammered a nail into his temple. He tried to concentrate and rid his head of all the energies that seemed to devour him from dawn to dusk. What was that word people were always using? Focus? Yeah, that was it. Focus. He heard the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the streetcar reversing itself for the return trip up St. Charles Avenue. Music was playing in a café over on Carrollton. Then a Hispanic guy who looked like a pile of frijoles came roaring around the side of the building on a mower that didn’t have a bag or muffler on it, the discharge chute firing a steady stream of grass clippings and ground-up palm fronds and dog turds against the walls. Screw focus , Bix thought.
    “Hey, you! The greaseball down there! Yeah, you!” Bix shouted. “Hey, I’m talking here!”
    The driver, who was wearing ear protectors, smiled stupidly at the balcony and kept going.
    “Think that’s funny?” Bix said. He waited until the mower had made a turn and was passing under the balcony again. The flowerpot he picked up was packed with dirt and a root-bound palm and felt as heavy as a cannonball. Bix gripped the pot solidly with both hands, judging distance and trajectory like a bombardier, and lobbed it into space.
    He couldn’t believe what happened next. He not only missed the gardener and the mower; just as he let fly, the neighbor’s poodle, whom Bix called the Barking Roach, ran out from the patio below and got knocked senseless by the pot. Then the driver swung the mower in a circle to cut another swath in the opposite direction and crunched over the broken pot and the compacted dirt and the palm plant and its exposed roots and shredded all of them without ever noticing that Bix had just tried to brain him. The only break Bix got was the fact that the Barking Roach ran back into its apartment and, unless it knew Morse code, wouldn’t be able to report him.
    Before Bix could reload for a second shot, he saw the maroon Caddy come around the corner and park in front of a refurbished