04 A Morning for Flamingos by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, Fiction, Psychological, Suspense, General
ISBN: 9780380713608
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1990-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Through my hospital room windows I could see the tops of oak trees, a pink two-story house with iron grillwork across the street, palm fronds on the esplanade, and, where the side street fed into St. Charles, the big green iron streetcar when it passed. My room was white, and the sunlight was bright above the oak trees outside.

My right eye was crimped partly shut by the tape that covered the stitches in my eyebrow. There were four stitches in my lip, and they felt like a large plastic insect when I moved my tongue across them. I slept through most of the morning, and at noon I ate a lunch of mashed potatoes, baked chicken, early peas, and Jell-O, and fell asleep again. Two hours later I was awakened by Minos’s phone call.

“What happened out there?” he said.

I told him.

“How’d you know which hospital I was in?” I asked.

“Your buddy Clete called me. Look, I’m sorry about this, Dave. I really am. There’s always risk in undercover work, but we usually do a better job of protecting our people.”

“How did New Orleans Vice get in on it?”

“I don’t know. I talked to this character Nate Baxter. He’s a nasty sonofabitch, isn’t he?”

“You got it.”

“He stonewalled me, said he couldn’t talk to me without clearance, said he wasn’t even sure who I was.”

“Did you mention my name?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t tell him anything about our operation. He’ll divulge it or use it in some way for his own ends. In the meantime call his superiors.”

“I already have a call in. But I appreciate you telling me how to do these things.”

“You sound a little irritable this afternoon.”

“Your busted head and the loss of your boat weren’t the only problems that developed out there.”

“Wait a minute. They got Boggs, didn’t they?”

“No.”

“What?”

“Boggs got away. With fifty keys of pure flake.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Evidently he went between two sandbars and they went over the top of one. At least that’s what the Coast Guard says. Our man Baxter has no comment.”

“You got the shrimper, didn’t you?”

“We got the shrimper. But no dope. No money, either. They dumped it all overboard.” I could almost hear him swallow when he said it.

“It all went for nothing?”

“That’s what a few people have been telling me today.”

“What about my boat?”

“We’ll see what we can do.”

“Listen, Minos, it’ll take me thirty thousand dollars to replace it.”

“People down here are not sympathetic to my point of view right now. A half-million dollars of DEA money is at this moment bouncing along the bottom of the Gulf.”

“Your friends have an interesting attitude about personal responsibility.”

“Nobody here wants to spend the rest of his career in western Nebraska. But it happens. Give me a little time.”

“I mean it, Minos. That’s a big part of my livelihood that went down out there. I want it back.”

“You made your point.”

“One other thing. Boggs said something about Cardo’s being history. Is there a whack out on him or something?”

“It’s funny you say that. We heard rumors like that from both Houston and Miami in just the last two days.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.