Every Dead Thing

He placed some tomatoes, lettuce, and cold rice mixed with peppers beside the chicken and handed the plate to a woman seated nearby. She was older than Joe, I guessed, probably in her early or mid-forties. There was no darkness at her blond roots and she wore little or no makeup, although her eyes were obscured by a pair of Wayfarers. She wore a short-sleeved silk robe over a white blouse and white shorts. Like Joe Bones, she was barefoot. To one side of them stood two more men in shirts and chinos, each armed with a machine pistol. I counted two more on the balcony and one sitting beside the main door to the house.

“You want something to eat?” asked Joe Bones. His voice was low, with only a faint trace of Louisiana in it. He looked at me until I responded.

“No, thanks,” I said. I noticed that he didn’t offer any to Louis. I think Louis noticed too.

Joe Bones helped himself to some shrimp and salad, then motioned to the two guards to help themselves to what was left. They took turns to do so, each eating a breast of chicken with his fingers.

“Those Aguillard murders. A terrible thing,” said Joe Bones. He waved me toward the only empty seat left after he sat down. I exchanged a look with Louis, shrugged, and sat.

“Excuse me for presuming on an intimacy with you,” he continued, “but I hear that the same man may have been responsible for the deaths of your family.” He smiled almost sympathetically. “A terrible thing,” he repeated. “A terrible thing.”

I held his gaze. “You’re well informed about my past.”

“When someone new comes to town and starts finding bodies in trees, I like to make it my business to find out about them. They might be good company.” He picked a piece of shrimp from his plate and examined it briefly before starting to eat.

“I understand you had an interest in purchasing the Aguillards’ land,” I said.

Joe Bones sucked at the shrimp and placed the tail carefully to one side of his plate before responding. “I have a lot of interests, and that wasn’t Aguillard land. Just because some senile fuck decides to make up for a bad life by slipping land to the niggers doesn’t make it nigger land.” He spat the word “nigger” each time. His shell of courtesy had proved remarkably fragile and he seemed intent upon deliberately provoking Louis. It was an unwise course of action, even with guns around him.

“It seems that one of your men, Tony Remarr, may have been in the house the night that the Aguillards died. We’d be interested in talking to him.”

“Tony Remarr is no longer part of my operation,” said Joe Bones, returning to his formal mode of speech after the burst of profanity. “We agreed a mutual parting of the ways and I haven’t seen him in weeks. I had no idea he was in the Aguillard house until the police told me.”

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“Did Remarr have anything to do with David Fontenot’s death?”

Joe Bones’s jaw tensed but he kept smiling. “I have no idea. I heard about David Fontenot on the news this morning.”

“Another terrible thing?” I suggested.

“The loss of a young life is always terrible,” he responded. “Look, I’m sorry about your wife and kid, I truly am, but I can’t help you. And frankly, now you’re getting rude, so I’d like you to take your nigger and get the fuck off my property.”

The muscles in Louis’s neck rippled, the only sign he gave that he had heard Joe Bones. Joe Bones leered at him, picked up a piece of chicken, and tossed it toward the beast on the chain. It ignored the tidbit until his owner snapped his fingers, when it fell on the chicken and devoured it in a single bite.

“You know what that is?” asked Joe Bones. He spoke to me, but his body language was directed at Louis. It expressed utter contempt. When I didn’t respond, he continued.

“It’s called a boerbul. A man named Peter Geertschen, a German, developed it for the army and antiriot squads in South Africa by crossing a Russian wolf with an Alsatian. It’s a white man’s watchdog. It sniffs out niggers.” He turned his gaze on Louis and smiled.

“Careful,” I said. “He might get confused and turn on you.” Joe Bones jerked in his chair as if he had been hit by a jolt of electricity. His eyes narrowed and searched my face for any indication that I was aware of a double meaning in what I had said. I stared right back at him.

“You better leave now,” said Joe Bones, with quiet, obvious menace. I shrugged and stood up, Louis moving close to me as I did so. We exchanged a look.

“Man got us on the run,” said Louis.

“Maybe, but if we leave like this he won’t respect us.”

“Without respect, a man got nothing,” agreed Louis.

He picked a plate from the stack on the table and held it above his head. It exploded in a shower of china fragments as the.300 Winchester cartridge impacted and buried itself in the wood of the house behind. The woman in the chair dived to the grass, the two goons moved to cover Joe Bones, and three men appeared running from the side of the house as the shot echoed in the air.