“Now!” yelled Ponytail. And when they didn’t move fast enough,
Blam!
A young Japanese man in a brown suit fell back, shot dead through his left eye. Bone thought he was going to faint or throw up, but he was too terrified to do anything but keep lying there on the pavement beside his bike, hoping he was invisible.
But he wasn’t. “Nigger!” Ponytail screamed. Bone surveyed the scene, moving his eyes without lifting his head. Yep, the white trash killer meant him, all right. There were no other black people around. “Get your little black ass over here before I count to three or…”
He didn’t need to finish the statement. Bone hustled.
“Yes, sir?”
“I need some help here. Get yourself over there in the middle of those Japs and relieve them of their valuables.”
“Yes, sir.” Bone hated to do it, but he didn’t see that he had any option other than dying
real
young.
“Japs!” Ponytail screamed. “Do you hear me? Just hand this little black boy your stuff, and there won’t be any problems. Keep anything back, and you’re dead. Do you understand?”
The tourists seemed to read him loud and clear. As Bone tiptoed among them, they handed him diamonds and pearls and cash and camcorders and gold chains and watches and cameras and one tiny lady even gave him her alligator loafers. For one brief moment Bone was tempted to slip them on, for she was about his size and he’d seen the same pair at Ralph Lauren for $550, but it just wouldn’t be right, and besides, Ponytail was stone crazy.
“Throw it all in the car!” Ponytail waved his silver pistol at a green Oldsmobile.
Bone hustled over to it, opened the passenger door, and had started tossing merchandise in when
Blam!
Ponytail blasted another Japanese tourist as a warning for them all to lie low and let him make his getaway. At the blast, Bone jumped and his body pitched forward into the Olds. He tried to back out, but it was too late. Ponytail had leaped in through the driver’s side, cranked up the engine, and they were flying down Prytania.
*
The man with the short haircut and the shoulder holster under his navy blue wool suit was named Special Agent Tom McGuire, and he was very pissed off. It wasn’t so much that he minded having to come in from Washington to consult with the local agent on a case that should have been closed weeks ago. He was always glad to visit the Big Easy. Except nobody told him the temperature in New Orleans was 85, and he was sweating like a pig in his navy serge. But what had really gotten his wind up was his early morning meeting in the office of Kendall Arthur Stanley, the president and CEO of New Orleans Cookin’, who was the subject of the case on which McGuire had been called in to consult.
“Sit down, McGuire,” Stanley had said, not so much issuing an invitation as an order when he pointed at one of the two red leather chairs on the other side of his antique mahogany desk. Stanley’s expensively appointed, book-lined office reminded you that he’d been a rich lawyer before he’d become an even richer packager of imitation Creole frozen TV dinners. “Now listen, McGuire, I know you’ve been sent down here to clean up the local agents’ mess, but I have to tell you that I am singularly unimpressed with y’all so far.”
“Well, Mr. Stanley, that’s—” McGuire had started, but Stanley, a tall, meaty, good-looking man with wings of wavy silver hair, McGuire’d put him at about fifty-five, went right on.
“It’s a simple matter, really. Some damned fool son-of-a-bitch gets it in his mind to mail me one of my frozen crawfish étouffée dinners that he’s sprinkled with razor blades and broken glass, and then writes me a semi-illiterate note demanding a half-million bucks or he says he’s going to randomly doctor my product the same way in grocery stores. You all tell me to make a down payment of a hundred grand in these two numbered accounts the blackmailer’s set up at the First National and the Whitney banks.”
“Mr. Stanley, I know—”
“You don’t know shit! None of you know the first goddamn thing! What I know is that I deposited the hundred grand, and the son-of-a-bitch has managed to withdraw $35,000 from automatic cash machines all over Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. He’s making a fool of you all, he’s robbing me blind, and I won’t have it, do you understand! I am
someone
in this community. My family has lived in the Garden District for ten generations. I have been president of the Boston Club. Furthermore, I’m captain of Zeus.” And with that, Kendall Arthur Stanley slammed his fist down on the antique mahogany so hard a silver-framed photograph of a bunch of fat guys in Mardi Gras costumes jumped off and the glass shattered.
Tom McGuire, who’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston and worked his way through school, hated Stanley’s kind of pompous bastard so much, he was tempted to let the damned case slide. Let the stuffed shirt bleed a little more cash. Except there was always the chance the blackmailer might carry through on his threat and some consumer might swallow a razor blade.
Nope, the blackmailer had to be stopped.
Though last night McGuire had tried a New Orleans Cookin’ jambalaya, and it was his opinion that the city ought to sue Stanley for using its name on this donkey doo-doo.
But what really frosted him was that the local agents had dropped the ball. They kept focusing on the fact that they could never catch the culprit in the banks’ surveillance cameras, a fact that had mystified and stymied them, and completely missed the obvious: there was a pattern to the withdrawals.
Today, unless McGuire missed his guess, was Garden District day. He didn’t know how the perpetrator had slipped past him at the Whitney. The silly blond lady in the pink-and-green golf clothes he’d nabbed hadn’t known dick and furthermore, had been one transaction after the one he was looking for, but by God, he was going to be ready at the First National. He had already radioed the local cops for backup.
*
“Excuse me, sir,” Bone said to Ponytail as they roared down Prytania in the green Oldsmobile. “I don’t mean to bother you, but could you let me out?” Bone knew it was a long shot, but what the heck? The man might.
Ponytail just laughed. He had a really ugly laugh like all the bad guys in horror movies. The guys who liked to set people’s barns afire, torture cats.
Now they were coming up on Bone’s house. There was his ma, Clementine, stomping across the yard with that determined look on her face, headed toward Cutler’s front steps.
“Uh oh,” said Bone. He could feel it in his gut. Clementine was onto him.
“What?” Ponytail turned and looked at him, jerking the wheel so they almost crashed into old Miz Guste’s front yard and her yardman, Henry.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you nothing me, boy. I’ve been nothinged all my life, and I’m sick of it, do you understand?” And with that, Ponytail jammed the silver revolver hard in Bone’s left ear.
It seemed to Bone that if there were ever a time to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help him, God, this was it.
So he did. He told Ponytail all about doing Cutler’s banking and his mama not knowing about it, and how she’d say he ought to do favors for neighbors and friends like Cutler without charging for it, and then she’d whip his butt and make him give back all the cash he’d earned, and he could kiss his blue-and-white seersucker suit goodbye, when Ponytail barked, “Which bank?”
“Well,” said Bone, “I already went to the Whitney, but if you take a right on Louisiana and cross over St. Charles to that office building on the corner, there’s the First National….”
“If you’re lying to me, you’re dead. Do you understand?” said Ponytail minutes later as they climbed out of the Olds and walked past a wall of hot pink bougainvillea toward the bank.
“I understand,” Bone said solemnly, thinking he was probably going to be dead anyway before this whole thing was over with. But, on the other hand, he was a Sagittarius, and his was a lucky sign. “What you want me to do is walk up to the machine the way I always do and deduct the five hundred dollars and hand it to you and you’ll let me go. Right?”
“Right.”
The honky son of a bitch is going to shoot me dead, is what Bone thought. And he was right. That was exactly what Gordon Armbruster, aka Ponytail, was going to do—because why would he want a smart little kid who could ID him running around—except just before they went through the door to the lobby and the cash machines, Gordon turned around and grabbed the plastic bank card out of Bone’s hand.
“What’s the code?” he said.
“M-A-M-E.”
“Mame?”
“Uh-huh, it’s Cutler’s favorite musical,” said Bone, but before he could finish, Gordon had marched over to the machine and punched in the code, and the silent beeper on Special Agent McGuire’s belt was activated by the bank’s computer, and McGuire stepped forward from just inside the bank’s main door. Bone could feel the blast of air-conditioning on his skinny arms.
“Sir?” Special Agent McGuire said to Gordon.
Gordon whirled with a mad dog snarl on his face. He reached for his .38, and McGuire yelled
Freeze!
which Gordon didn’t do, of course. So McGuire shot him in the shin. Gordon’s Smith & Wesson made that now-familiar
Blam!
that Bone thought he would hear forever in his dreams, but Gordon’s shot missed and ricocheted around the small lobby, at which Bone decided to get the hell out of there. He slipped toward the glass door and was almost through it when a volley of gunshots rang out, and Gordon Armbruster’s body did a weird jerky dance as the bullets of New Orleans’s finest punched his liver, his lungs, his gut. Bone ran.
*
Later that afternoon, looking both ways before he left the cottage, Bone crept over to Cutler’s. “I withdrew the five hundred from the Whitney, and then—” he started, but never finished as Cutler swept him to his sequined chest. “You poor sweetheart. You dear thing. You could have
died
, and all because of me. You could have been
shot
.”
Blam!
Bone had been lying in the tub since he’d gotten home trying to erase that sound.
Blam! Blami Blam!
Those poor tourists and that redhead, splattered all over First Street. So far, Clementine’s lemon bubble bath hadn’t made him feel a bit better. He didn’t know what ever would. For a while there, he’d been high on adrenaline, but now he felt sick to his stomach.
And scared.
“Look, it’s all over the TV,” said Cutler, pointing. A woman newscaster with big blond hair and lots of teeth was standing right there under that live oak tree where the Rising Sun/Big Easy tour bus had parked.
“…a woman who seemed to be an accomplice of Gordon Armbruster,” she was saying, “and two tourists from Osaka, Japan, were shot here,” she pointed, “and here, and here.”
“And you were there.” Cutler buried his face in his hands and sobbed. “They said there was this little black boy on a bike that bastard snatched up and drove to the First National. I knew it was you! Oh, Bone!”
Bone couldn’t stand seeing a grown man cry, even if he was wearing a dress. He changed the subject to get Cutler’s mind off the shooting. “So, tell me, Cut, what was the real deal with the banks?”
Cutler explained the New Orleans Cookin’ scam.
“Jesus, man, how’d you think that up?”
“I didn’t. I read about it in the
Picayune.
A Scotland Yard detective did the exact same thing in London, except,” Cutler picked at his gown, “
he
was man enough to gather his own money from the cash machines. He wore a motorcycle crash helmet with one of those dark face guards so the security cameras at the banks couldn’t photograph him.”
“And I was too short, right? Cool, Cutler, very cool.”
“You’re not mad at me? I put your life on the line, not to mention your freedom. Of course, I’ll do at least twenty years. That’s what they gave the Scotland Yard detective. But I’m sure I can talk them into letting you walk. You’re only a kid, and you didn’t know what I was up to.”
“Wait, Cutler, hush,” said Bone. He pointed at the TV. “Who’s that they’re interviewing now?”
“Oh, Jesus. It’s Kendall Arthur Stanley, that ass who owns New Orleans Cookin’.”
“Shhhhh.”
“…appreciate the wonderful cooperation of the FBI and the New Orleans Police Department in stopping this terrible Armbruster man who not only killed our unfortunate Japanese visitors but extorted thousands from New Orleans Cookin’. But you can be assured that New Orleans Cookin’s jambalaya and crawfish étouffée and blackened redfish are not only of the highest quality but completely free of….”
“He’s doing a commercial,” said Cutler. “A fucking commercial. I can’t believe it.”
“We’re home free!” Bone was jumping up and down on Cutler’s purple taffeta sofa. “Don’t you get it, Cut? They think the shooter was the extortionist!”
On the television, Kendall Arthur Stanley was still talking. “And New Orleans Cookin’ is offering a reward of five hundred dollars as a token of our appreciation to the little boy who was kidnapped by Armbruster at the shooting on First Street and dragged to the bank.”
Five hundred dollars! Bone forgot the shooting, the blood, the guts, the screaming. All he could see was his seersucker suit flying out of the store, softshell crab piled high on fancy china, alligator loafers, a new dress for Clementine….