Voodoo River Read online

  At twenty minutes before one, we parked the car in a public garage on Chartres Street and split up, Pike leaving first. I put the Dan Wesson under the front seat, waited ten minutes, and then I followed.

  I walked west on Magazine into an area of seedy, rundown storefronts well away from Bourbon Street and Jackson Square and the tour buses. The buildings were crummy and old, with cheesy shops and Nearly-Nu stores and the kinds of things that tourists chose to avoid. I found the address I’d been given, but it was empty and locked. A For Lease sign was in the door, and the door was streaked with grime as if nobody had been in the place for the past couple of centuries. I said, “Well, well.”

  I knocked and waited, but no one answered. I looked both ways along the street, but I couldn’t see Joe Pike. I was knocking for the second time when a pale gray Acura pulled to the curb and a thin Hispanic guy wearing Ray-Bans stared out at me. A black guy was sitting in the passenger seat beside him. The black guy looked Haitian. I said, “Ramon?”

  The Hispanic guy made a little head move indicating the backseat. “Get in.”

  I looked up and down the street again, and again I saw no one. I took a step back from the Acura. “Sorry, guys. I’m waiting for someone else.”

  The Haitian pointed a fully automatic Tec-9 machine pistol at me across the driver. “Get in, mon, or I’ll stitch you up good.”

  I got in, and we drove away. Maybe splitting up hadn’t been so smart, after all.

  28

  We drove four blocks to the big World Trade Center at the levee, then swung around to Decatur and the southern edge of the French Quarter. We parked across from the old Jackson Brewing Company, then walked east toward Jackson Square past souvenir shops and restaurants and a street musician working his way through “St. Vitus Day March.” He was wearing a top hat, and I pretended to look at him to try to find Joe Pike. Pike might have seen our turn; he might have cut the short blocks over and seen us creeping through the French Quarter traffic as we looked for a place to park. The Haitian pulled my arm, “Le’s go, mon.”

  The air was hot and salty with the smell of oysters on half shell and Zatarain’s Crab Boil. We walked beneath the covered banquette of a three-story building ringed with lacy ironwork, passing souvenir shops and seafood restaurants with huge outdoor boilers, wire nets of bright red crawfish draining for the tourists. Midday during the week, and people jammed the walk and the streets and the great square around the statue of Andrew Jackson. Sketch artists worked in the lazy shade of magnolia trees and mules pulled old-fashioned carriages along narrow streets. It looked like Disneyland on a Sunday afternoon, but hotter, and more than a few of the tourists looked flushed from the heat and shot glances at the bars and restaurants, working up fantasies about escaping into the AC to sip cold Dixie.

  I followed the guy with the Ray-Bans and the Haitian across the Washington Artillery Park to a long cement promenade overlooking the river, and then to a wide circular fountain where another Hispanic guy waited by a Popsicle cart. He had a rugged bantamweight’s face, and he was slurping at a grape Popsicle. I said, “You Ramon?”

  He shook his head once, smiling. “Not yet, podnuh.” No accent. “You carrying anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “We gonna have to check.” First the red-haired guy, now this.

  “Sure.”

  “Just do what I tell you, and everything’ll be fine. Ramon’s nearby.”

  “I’m Mr. Cooperation.”

  “Piece a’ cake, then.” He sounded like he was from Brooklyn.

  He told me to stand there like we were having a grand little time, and I did. Ray-Ban and the Haitian laughed it up and patted me on the shoulders like we were sharing a laugh, their fingers dancing lightly beneath my arms and down along my ribs. The new guy yukked it up, too, but while he was yukking he dropped his Popsicle, then felt my calves and ankles as he picked it up. Like the red-haired guy, they had done it before. He tossed the Popsicle away and smiled. “Okay. We’re fine. Let’s see the man.”

  We walked to the other side of the fountain where Ramon del Reyo sat on a little bench beside a couple of sculpted azalea bushes. The azaleas were in profuse bloom, their hot pink flowers so dense and pure that they glowed in the blinding sun and cast a pink light. Ramon stood as we approached and offered his hand. He was about my height, but thin and scholarly, with little round spectacles and neat hair. Academic. He was smoking, and his thin cotton shirt was damp with sweat. He said, “My name is Ramon del Reyo, Mr. Cole. Let’s walk along, shall we?”

  He started off and I went with him, the others following alongside, some closer, some farther, and everybody keeping an eye out. I had seen presidential Secret Service bodyguards work public places, but I’d never seen anyone work a place better than these guys. You’d think we were in the middle of the cold war someplace, but then, maybe we were. Del Reyo said, “Sela Henried is my friend and so I will speak with you, but I want you to know that there is a man near here with a rifle in the seven millimeter Magnum. He is very good with this thing, you see? He can hit the running deer cleanly at five hundred meters.”

  I nodded. “How far away is he now?”

  “Less than two hundred.” Del Reyo looked at me with a studied air. “If anything happens to me, you will be dead in that instant.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen, Mr. del Reyo.”

  He nodded. “Please look here. On your chest.”

  He gestured to the center of my chest, and I looked. A red dot floated there, hard and brilliant even in the bright sun. It flickered, then was gone. I looked up, but could not find the rifleman. I said, “Laser sight.”

  “Just so you know.” He made a dismissive wave. “Please call me Ramon.” A guy tells you you’re a trigger pull from dead, then says please call me Ramon.

  “Who is Donaldo Prima?”

  Ramon took a deep pull on the cigarette, then let the smoke curl out of his mouth and nostrils. “He is dog shit.”

  “Seriously, Ramon. Tell me what you really think.”

  Ramon del Reyo smiled gently and ticked ash from the cigarette with his thumb. A couple of beat cops strolled by, grinning at some college girls from Ole Miss. The cops were wearing shorts like the tourists, and short-sleeved shirts with epaulets and knee socks like they were on safari. Del Reyo said, “He is trying to be the big gangster, you see? El coyote. Someone to whom people go when they wish to enter our country.”

  “Like you.”

  Ramon del Reyo stopped smiling and looked at me the way he’d look at a disappointing student. “Donaldo Prima is a smuggler. Automobiles, cocaine, farm equipment, people is all the same, to be bought and sold, you see? To be taken advantage of if possible. I am a political activist. What I do I do for free, because I care about these immigrants and their struggle to reach our country.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged, letting it go. “It is a nasty business. He is having problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “He used to work for a man named Frank Escobar. You know Escobar?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know any of this, Ramon. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

  “Escobar is the big criminal, the one who controls most of what is smuggled into and out of the port of New Orleans. El coyote grande. He, too, is very bad. From the military in El Salvador. The truth squads.” Great.

  “A nut.”

  Del Reyo smiled slightly. “Yes. A killer, you see? He make much money sending stolen American automobiles to Central America when the boat go south, then bringing drugs and refugees here for even more money when the boat comes north. You see?”

  “How much profit can there be in smuggling poor people across the border?”

  “It is not just the poor who wish to come here, Mr. Cole. The poor crawl under the fence at Brownsville and work as day laborers picking vegetables. The upper classes and the educated wish to come here, also, and they wish to bring their lives and professions with them. That is
much more difficult than crawling under a fence.”

  “They want to buy an identity.”

  “Si. Yes. The coyote, he tells them that they are buying citizenship, you see? They will be given birth certificates, a driver’s license, the social security card, all in their own names and usually with their actual birth dates. This is what they pay for, and they pay a very great deal. With these things they can bring the medical degree, the engineering degree, like that.”

  “And do they get what they pay for?”

  “Almost never.” We walked to the edge of the promenade. The river was below us, cutting a great brown swath through the city, flat and wide and somehow alive. The river’s edge was prickly with loading cranes and wharfs and warehouses. He glanced at the Haitian and lowered his voice. “Four months after he came, seven members of his family also bought passage through Frank Escobar. They were put in a barge out in the Gulf, fifty-four people put into a little space ten feet by eight feet, with no food and water, and the barge was set adrift. It was an old barge, and Escobar never intended to bring them ashore. He already have his money, you see, paid in full? A tanker reported the abandoned barge, and the Coast Guard investigated. All fifty-four men, women, and children had died. It got very hot in the hold of the barge with no openings for the ventilation and no water to drink. The hatch had been dogged shut, you see?” The Haitian’s skin was a deep coal black, greasy with sweat. “His father was a dentist. He wishes to be a dentist, also, but we see.” He let the thought trail away and looked back at me. “That is the way it is with men like Escobar and Prima, you see? They get the money, then fft. Life means nothing. This is why I have so much protection, you see? I try to stop these men. I try to stop their murder.”

  Neither of us spoke for a time. “So what about Prima?”

  “I hear that he has gone into business for himself, undercutting Escobar’s price.”

  I said, “Ah.”

  Del Reyo nodded.

  I said, “If Prima has set up a competing business, Escobar can’t like it.”

  He sucked on the cigarette. “Si. There is trouble between them. There is always trouble between men like this.” The smoke drifted up over his eyes, making him squint. “You say you know nothing about the coyotes, yet you ask about Donaldo Prima. You say you know that he is a bad man. How do you know these things?”

  “I saw his people bring a dead child off a barge sometime around eleven-thirty last night. There were other people, but only the child was dead. An old man was making a deal about it, and I saw Prima shoot the old man in the head.”

  Ramon del Reyo did not move. “You saw this thing?”

  I nodded.

  “You have proof?”

  “May I reach into my pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  I showed him the old man’s picture. He held it carefully, then took a deep breath, dropped the cigarette, and stepped on it. “May I keep this?”

  “The cops might need it for the identification.”

  He stared at it another moment, then slipped the picture into his pocket. “I will return it to you, Mr. Cole. You have my word.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I tell you something, and if you are smart you will listen. These men come from places of war where life has no value. They have executed hundreds, perhaps thousands. This man Frank Escobar, he has murdered many and he murders more every day. Prima himself is such a man.” He seemed to have to think about how to say it. “There is so much murder in the air it is what we breathe. The taking of life has lost all meaning.” He shook his head. “The gun.” He shook his head again, as if in saying those two words he had summed up all he was about, or ever could be about.

  I said, “What about the feds?”

  Ramon del Reyo rubbed his thumb across his fingertips and said nothing.

  I said, “If I wanted to take down Donaldo Prima, how could I do it?”

  He looked at me with steady, soft brown eyes, then made a little shrug. “I think that by asking these things, you are looking to do good, but you will not find good here, Mr. Cole. This is a Godless place.”

  “I don’t think you are without God, Mr. Del Reyo.”

  “I am afraid I will not know that until the afterlife, no?” We reached the little bench by the azaleas. Ramon del Reyo sat, and I sat with him. “We have talked enough, now. I will leave, and you will sit here for exactly ten minutes. If you leave before then, it will be taken the wrong way and you will be killed. I am sorry to be rude in this way, but there we are.”

  “Of course.” I imagined the man with the rifle. I imagined him watching for the sign, and I wondered what the sign might’ve been. A yawn, perhaps. Perhaps wiping the brow. The sign, the trigger, history.

  Ramon del Reyo said, “If the man who is with you approaches, have him sit beside you and he will not be harmed.”

  I said, “What man?”

  Ramon del Reyo laughed, then patted my leg and moved away, del Reyo and the guy with the Ray-Bans, then the others, and finally the Haitian. The Haitian made a pistol of his right hand, pointed it at me, and dropped the hammer. Then he smiled and disappeared into the crowd. What a way to live.

  I sat on the lip of the bench in the damp heat and waited. My shirt was wet and clinging, and my skin felt hot and beginning to burn. Joe Pike came through the crowd and sat beside me. He said, “Look across the square, corner building, third floor, third window in.”

  I didn’t bother looking. “Guy with a rifle.”

  “Not now, but was. Did you make him?”

  “They told me. They made you, Joe. They knew you were there.”

  Pike didn’t move for a while, but you could tell he didn’t like it, or didn’t believe it. Finally he made a little shrug. “Did we learn anything?”

  “I think.”

  “Is there a way out for the Boudreauxs?”

  I stared off at the river, at the steady brown water flowing toward the Gulf, at the great ships headed north, up into the heart of America. I said, “Yes. Yes, I think there is. They won’t like it, but I think there is.” I thought about it for a time, and then I looked back at Joe Pike. “These are dangerous people, Joe. These are very dangerous people.”

  Pike nodded and watched the river with me. “Yes,” he said. “But so are we.”

  29

  A hot wind blew in off Lake Pontchartrain. The last of the clouds had vanished, leaving the sky a great azure dome above us, the afternoon sun a disk of white and undeniable heat. We drove with the windows down, the hot air roaring over and around us, smelling not unlike an aquarium that has been too long un-cleaned. We reached Baton Rouge, but we did not stop; we crested the bridge and continued west toward the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Substation in Eunice, and Jo-el Boudreaux. He wouldn’t be happy to see us, but I wasn’t so happy about seeing him, either.

  It was late afternoon when Pike and I parked in the dappled shade of a black-trunked oak and walked into the substation. A thin African-American woman with very red lips and too much rouge sat at a desk and, behind her, a tall rawboned cop with leathery skin stood at a coffee machine. The cop looked over when we walked in and watched us cross to the receptionist. Staring. I gave the receptionist one of my business cards. “We’d like to see Sheriff Boudreaux, please. He knows what it’s about.”

  She looked at the card. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, ma’am. But he’ll see us.”

  The rawboned cop came closer, first looking at Pike and then looking at me, as if we had put in a couple of job applications and he was about to turn us down. “The sheriff’s a busy man. You got a problem, you can talk to me.” His name tag said WILLETS.

  “Thanks, but it’s business for the sheriff.”

  Willets didn’t let it go. “If you’re talkin’ crime, it’s my business, too.” He squinted. “You boys aren’t local, are you?”

  Pike said, “Does it matter?”

  Willets clicked the cop eyes on Pike. “You look fami
liar. I ever lock you down?”

  The receptionist said, “Oh, relax, Tommy,” and took the card down a short hall.

  Willets stood there with his fists on his hips, staring at us. The receptionist came back with Jo-el Boudreaux and returned to her desk. Boudreaux looked nervous. “I thought you were gone.”

  “There’s something we need to talk about.”

  Willets said, “They wouldn’t talk with me, Jo-el.”

  Boudreaux said, “I’ve got it now, Tommy. Thanks.”

  Willets went back to the coffee machine, but he wasn’t happy about it. Boudreaux was holding my business card and bending it back and forth. He looked at Joe. “Who’s that?”

  “Joe Pike. He works with me.”

  Boudreaux bent the card some more, then came closer and lowered his voice. “That woman is back and she’s been calling my wife. I don’t like it.”

  “Who?”

  He mouthed the words. “That woman. Jodi Taylor.” He glanced at Willets to make sure he hadn’t heard.

  “Sheriff, that’s just too damn bad. You want to talk out here?”

  Willets was still staring at us from the coffee machine. He couldn’t hear us, but he didn’t like all the talking. He called out, “Hey, Jo-el, you want me to take care of that?”

  “I’ve got it, Tommy. Thanks.”

  Boudreaux took us to his office. Like him, it was simple and functional. Uncluttered desk. Uncluttered cabinet with a little TV. A nice-looking largemouth bass mounted on the wall. Boudreaux was big and his face was red. A hundred years ago he would have looked like the town blacksmith. Now, he looked awkward in his short-sleeved uniform and Sam Browne. He said, “I want you to know I don’t appreciate your coming here like this. I don’t like that woman calling my wife. I told you I’d handle my troubles on my own, in my own way, and there’s nothing we got to say to each other.”