Read In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel for Free Online Page B

laughed.
          "Yeah, the old man lost his interest in garden hoses after that," he said.
          "Everybody likes to come back to his hometown once in a while. That's a perfectly natural thing to do. No one's worried about that, Julie." I looked at his eyes. Under his sweaty brows, they were as shiny and full of light as obsidian.
          He shook a cigarette out of a package on the cement and lit it. He blew smoke out into the sunlight and looked around the swimming-pool area.
          "Except I've only got a visa, right?" he said. "I'm supposed to spread a little money around, stay on the back streets, tell my crew not to spit on the sidewalks or blow their noses on their napkins in the restaurants. Does that kind of cover it for you, Dave?"
          "It's a small town with small-town problems."
          "Fuck." He took a deep breath, then twisted his neck as though there were a crick in it. "Margot—" he said to the woman playing cards under the umbrella. She got up from her chair and stood behind him, her narrow face expressionless behind her sunglasses, and began kneading his neck with her fingers. He filled his mouth with ice, orange slices, and cherries from his glass and studied my face while he chewed.
          "I get a little upset at these kind of attitudes, Dave. You got to forgive me," he said, and pointed into his breastbone with his fingertips. "But it don't seem to matter sometimes what a guy does now. It's always yesterday that's in people's minds. Like Cholo here. He made a mistake fifteen years ago and we're still hearing about it. What the fuck is that? You think that's fair?"
          "He threw his brother-in-law off the roof of the Jax's brewery on top of a Mardi Gras float. That was a first even for New Orleans."
          "Hey, lieutenant, there was a lot of other things involved there. The guy beat up my sister. He was a fucking animal."
          "Look, Dave, you been gone from New Orleans for a long time," Baby Feet said. "The city ain't anything like it used to be. Black kids with shit for brains are provoking everybody in the fucking town. People get killed in Audubon Park, for God's sake. You try to get on the St. Charles streetcar and there's either niggers or Japs hanging out the doors and windows. We used to have understandings with the city. Everybody knew the rules, nobody got hurt. Take a walk past the Desire or St. Thomas project and see what happens."
          "What's the point, Julie?"
          "The point is who the fuck needs it? I own a recording studio, the same place Jimmy Clanton cut his first record. I'm in the entertainment business. I talk on the phone every day to people in California you read about in People magazine. I come home to this shithole, they ought to have 'Welcome Back Balboni Day.' Instead, I get told maybe I'm like a bad smell in the air. You understand what I'm saying, that hurts me."
          I rubbed one palm against the other.
          "I'm just a messenger," I said.
          "That laundry man you work for send you?"
          "He has his concerns."
          He waved the woman away and sat up in his chair.
          "Give me five minutes to get dressed. Then I want you to drive me somewhere," he said.
          "I'm a little tied up on time right now."
          "I'm asking fifteen minutes of you, max. You think you can give me that much of your day, Dave?" He got up and started past me to his room. There were tufts of black hair like pig bristles on his love handles. He cocked his index finger at me. "Be here when I get back. You won't regret it."
          The woman with the bleached hair sat back down at the table. She took off her glasses, parted her legs a moment, and looked into my face, her eyes neither flirtatious nor hostile, simply dead. Cholo invited me to play gin rummy with them.
          "Thanks, I never took it up," I said.
          "You sure took it up with horses, lieutenant,"