2

I was drinking beer and eating Cajun shrimp with Manny Escobar and Bobby Montero when I heard about David Ogden. The shrimp joint was a shack off Route 90 outside of Houma, but there was a television set mounted on the wall and the word was on the eleven o'clock news. David Ogden, World War II hero, and number three man in the CIA, was dead. The news didn't move me much. The Agency owns me and my friends lock, stock, and barrel, but they don't own us body and soul. The relationship is love-hate, easy on the love. We do what they tell us to do, within reason, but that doesn't mean that we sleep in the same bed. Manny knew that, but he had to give me the needle.

"Bad news, Ben," he said. "Please accept my sincere condolences on the loss of your leader. I feel for you."

Bobby didn't know me that well, but he saw the way Manny was going, and he got into it. He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Mister Slade, maybe you should go back to the motel and change into something black."

"Black, tu culo," I told him.

"Oh, no, Mister Slade, not mine. Mine is pink; como una rosa en el mes de mayo. You gonna go to the funeral?"

"Not me. I might be tempted to piss on his grave."

Manny shook his head. "Bad luck to talk like that."

"Maybe you should just send flowers," said Bobby. He was big, and flabby, and his lips were greasy from the shrimp. "I heard about that guy, I heard he went crazy. I heard he had the brain cancer."

I nodded. "Tumors."

"Menos mal. In a job like that it helps to be a little crazy."

I didn't argue the point, it was too close to the truth. "You mean you don't have any crazies in your outfit? Is that what you mean?"

They looked at each other. They both were Cuban, and they worked for the DEA. They decided to laugh. Manny said, "You get crazies everywhere. Especially at the top."

"Shit floats," was Bobby's contribution. "Who gets this guy's job?"

"Man called Jessup."

"Is he crazy, too?"

"Give him time."

I pressed the icy beer bottle against my forehead. It was February, but the night was hot and moist, Louisiana muggy. The shrimp joint was five miles up the road from the 7-Eleven where the meet was supposed to go down at two in the morning. Tailgate party in the parking lot, fifty thousand in cash for a small barrel of China White. We had the money under the table in a carrying case that looked like the satchel your Aunt Edna left behind the last time she came to visit. Manny had it between his feet. He was slouched in his chair munching shrimp, relaxed and easy, but his feet were clamped on that case. He was out of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, while Bobby was local. I was there on loan, which was common enough. The Agency farmed us out like mules to places like the FBI and the DEA. I had worked with Manny before, and he knew what I did for a living. It was different with Bobby. He knew that I had some sort of connection with the Agency, but he didn't know what it was and he didn't know why I was there. I was happy to leave it that way. He probably wouldn't have believed the truth, and if he had it would have made him edgy. Normal people get that way when people like me are around. Even with Manny, who was a friend, there was a wall between us. It was thin, but it was there. He knew that I could look into his head and see what he was thinking, and nobody normal likes that.

Bobby grabbed a handful of shrimp, and called over his shoulder for another beer. He stuffed shrimp into his mouth, chewed, and spat the shells onto the floor. He had the table manners of an alligator. He grinned at me, and said, "Yeah, I know. I'm a slob."

"As long as you know it," I told him.

"That's nothing," said Manny. He looked amused. "You should see him eat ribs. The bones fly."

"I'll pass."

The girl who was working the tables came with the beer, and Bobby watched her walk back to the bar, her haunches rolling. She was chubby, and she wasn't wearing much. She was fifteen at the most, and the chub was baby fat.

Bobby said speculatively, "You know what I'm thinking?"

I knew exactly what he was thinking. I was inside his head, tapping him. He was thinking in crude and graphic terms about taking the girl back to the motel with him. He didn't have much imagination.

"Come off it," said Manny. "She's just a kid."

"I know it, I know it." Bobby made a show of licking his lips. "Around here she's legal."

"Christ, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You got a daughter that age."

"My daughter isn't bad for her age. You should try her sometimes."

"I already did. She's almost as good as your wife."

That was the level of the conversation. We sat at the table with the shrimp and the beer until after midnight, then we drove around until it was time to set up the meet. Bobby and Manny had been working on it for over a month, trying to make a buy from an organization that was flooding the lower parishes with quality coke. They were working without the local law, which Manny thought might be leaky. Bobby was working undercover, and it had taken him the month to set up the first buy. The buy was a teaser with no one due to get busted. If it went down smoothly then Bobby moved up the line to the next supplier, step-by-step, until they got to the people who were worth taking down. The meeting was one-on-one, only one of them with the merchandise and Bobby by himself with the satchel in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven at two in the morning. Manny would be there on a roof to back him up, and I would be there because Bobby couldn't wear a wire.

The trouble is television, too many drug agents wear wires. Well, the bad guys watch television, too, and now every time a major buy goes down the buyer gets a skin search. So it takes some balls to wear a wire these days, but there are times when it has to be done, mostly when recorded evidence is needed. That wasn't the case here. No one was getting busted, and the only need for a wire was to make sure that Bobby didn't get himself iced. He'd be sitting out in the open with a satchel full of cash, dealing with people he didn't know, and there had to be a way for him to call in the Marines. A wire back to Manny on the roof would have given him the protection, but they couldn't use a wire and so they had to use me. I do it without wires.

We split up at one o'clock. Manny and I left the car a half mile from the 7-Eleven, and Bobby went on alone, the satchel on the seat beside him. Manny and I went overland, down the embankment at the side of the road, and along a series of gullies, the sawtooth grass tearing at our ankles and knees. I was empty-handed, but Manny had his weapon in a gun bag over his shoulder. It was a sniper's rifle, a Dragunov with a telescopic sight. It wasn't heavy, but it was bulky, and it made the going difficult for him. The gullies were wet with runoff water, filled with slick rocks, and every time that Manny slipped he cursed softly.

We came out of the gully in back of the 7-Eleven, and climbed the emergency ladder up to the roof. The roof was flat and tarred, and with a waist-high façade at the front that gave plenty of cover. The parking lot below was dark and almost deserted. Only Bobby's car was there, parked directly in front of the store. I had picked the spot for him. My maximum range is one hundred and fifty feet, and the car was well within it. Manny set up the Dragunov on its tripod, zeroed it in on the driver's side of Bobby's car, and we settled in to wait.

I tuned into Bobby's head. Sitting down there in the car, staring out into the night, he was still thinking about that kid in the shrimp joint. He had her twisted into an impossible position. Or maybe it was possible, but not for anybody I knew. I told Manny, and he laughed.

"Bobby is okay," he said. "It's just that he's still growing up."