Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke

feeling he wasn’t really interested in some little girl. You bother him for some reason.”
    “I gave him a bad time.”
    “I don’t know those federal people that well, but I don’t think they drive up from New Orleans just because a man with a fish dock gives them a bad time. What’s that fellow after, Dave?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do, but if you and Annie are helping out a little girl that doesn’t have any parents, why don’t you let other folks help you, too? People around here aren’t going to let anybody take her away.”
    “My father used to say that a catfish had whiskers so he’d never go into a hollow leg he couldn’t turn around in. I don’t trust those people at Immigration, Sheriff. Play on their terms and you’ll lose.”
    “I think maybe you got a dark view sometimes, Dave.”
    “You better believe it,” I said.
    I watched him drive away on the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees. I clicked my fingers on the warm board rail that edged my dock, then walked up to the house and had lunch with Annie and Alafair.
     
    An hour later I took the .45 automatic and the full clip of hollow-points from the dresser drawer and walked with them inside the folded towel to the pickup truck and put them in the glove box. Annie watched me from the front porch, her arm leaned against a paintless wood post. I could see her breasts rise and fall under her denim shirt.
    “I’m going to New Orleans. I’ll be back tonight,” I said.
    She didn’t answer.
    “It’s not going to take care of itself,” I said. “The sheriff is a nice guy who should be cleaning stains out of somebody’s sports coat. The feds don’t have jurisdiction in an assault case. The Lafayette cops don’t have time to solve crimes in Iberia Parish. That means we fall through the cracks. Screw that.”
    “I’m sure that somehow that makes sense. You know, rah, rah for the penis and all that. But I wonder if Dave is giving Dave a shuck so we can march off to the wars again.”
    Her face was cheerless and empty.
    I watched the wind flatten the leaves in the pecan trees, then I opened the door of the pickup.
    “I need to take some money out of savings to help somebody,” I said. “I’ll put it back next month.”
    “What can I say? Like your first wife told you, ‘Keep it high and hard, podjo,” she said, and went back inside the house.
    The sweep of wind in the pecan trees seemed deafening.
     
    I gassed up the truck at the dock, then as an afterthought I went inside the bait shop, sat at the wooden counter with a Dr. Pepper, and called Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette. While the phone rang I gazed out the window at the green leaves floating on the bayou.
    “I understand you want my ass in your office,” I said.
    “Yeah, what the fuck’s going on over there?”
    “Why don’t you drive over and find out?”
    “You sound funny.”
    “I have stitches in my mouth.”
    “They bounced you around pretty good, huh?”
    “What’s this about you wanting my ass in your office?”
    “I’m curious. Why are a bunch of farts who deal dope and whores so interested in you? I think maybe you’re on to something we don’t know about.”
    “I’m not.”
    “I think also you may have the delusion you’re still a police officer.”
    “You’ve got things turned around a little bit. When a guy gets his cojones and his face kicked in, he becomes the victim. The guys who kick in his cojones and face are the criminals. These are the guys you get mad at. The object is to put them in jail.”
    “The sheriff said you can’t identify Keats.”
    “I didn’t see his face.”
    “And you never saw the Zulu before?”
    “Keats, or whoever the white guy was, said he was one of Baby Doc’s tontons macoute .”
    “What do you want us to do, then?”
    “If I remember our earlier conversation right, y’all were going to handle it.”
    “It’s after the fact now. And I don’t have