Bring Him Back Dead by Day Keene Read Free Book Online Page B

that the case will never even go to trial and you’re out whatever you could have screwed out of Lant for a pass.” Mullen’s weather-beaten face softened. “Look, kid. Take a tip from an old hand in this business. Like I told you in the office, walk a little lighter. So it isn’t according to Hoyle. This isn’t the first town that’s been allowed to run wide open. It won’t be the last. Right now you don’t think much of the old man or me, do you?”
    Latour looked at the floor.
    “O.K.,” Mullen said. “I won’t put you on a spot. I’ll admit it. Belluche and I are a pair of dirty crooks. This can’t last. It won’t. But while it does, we’re going to have a good time and get what we can out of it. I’ll tell you why. We feel we have it coming. Belluche put in thirty years and I put in twenty-five trying to maintain order in a goddamn swamp with more alligators than people in it. We risked our lives, time and again, for field hands’ pay. Believe me, you’re just as dead if you’re shot tryingto arrest some back-country bastard for laying his own daughter as you are trying to fight your way up a hill in Korea. And, take it from me, I’ve been shot at a lot of times.”
    “But not recently.”
    “No, not recently. You’re how old, Andy? Twenty-seven?”
    “Twenty-eight.”
    “I’m fifty. And I’ve spent most of those years trying not to go nuts from listening to limpkins squawking and the wind whistling through the cane brakes. I like it this way. I like the music. I like the lights. I like the excitement. I like to have folding money in my pocket. I like to pat a cute little heinie that isn’t calloused from riding a plow horse. So we’re running the town wide open, in certain respects. Who are we hurting? Is it any worse than when Jean Lafitte and his boys put into the bayou to split up the loot from a prize they’d taken?”
    “No, I suppose not,” Latour admitted.
    Mullen continued to be frank. “Like I said before, it can’t last. I give it another year before the men in town like Jean Avart and Sam Tousard and Father Kelly and the churchpeople and women’s clubs vote us out of office and turn French Bayou back into a Sunday-school community where the bluenoses vote dry and drink wet and a young buck with a yen for a dame seduces some high-school girl instead of going to a house.
    “Have you ever known either the old man or me to give a dope-peddler a pass?”
    “No.”
    “What happens to kill-crazy punks?”
    “They’re jugged.”
    “What’s happened the few times a girl has been forced against her will?”
    “You and the old man and the other boys have gone all out.”
    “That’s right. Look at it this way. The hell-raising we’re allowing is as old as the world. You can’t legislate human nature. Men were going to bed with women they weren’t married to before Moses discovered how to make bricks by mixing straw with clay. The Roman soldiers shot diceat the foot of the Cross. One of the first things men did after they stopped living in caves, maybe even before, was to learn how to ferment whatever they had into drinking likker so they could take a swig now and then and things wouldn’t look so bad.
    “We aren’t doing a thing that isn’t being done in every other city and town and village in the country. The only difference is, we’re doing it openly. So smart up, Andy. Get wise. Get yours while the getting is good. There’s plenty for all of us. Make some dough for yourself and that good-looking wife of yours. She deserves a better break than you’re giving her. Forget that you’re a Latour. Forget that one of your ancestors was Andy Jackson’s chief engineer and that the Latours were once big people in this part of the delta. Times change and a man has to change with them. Get what I mean?”
    “Yes,” Latour said soberly.
    Mullen got up from the bed. “I don’t know what’s eating you. Your personal life is none of my business. But you’ve had a chip