The Tin Roof Blowdown Read Online Free Page B

players are the Melancon brothers, full-time wiseasses with busts on both their sheets for strong-arm robbery, illegal possession of firearms, and intimidation of witnesses. Clete suspects that one or both of the Melancon brothers is about to show up at the shuttered cottage.
    But nothing seems to happen either outside or inside the cottage, and the man in the panel truck is becoming restless, turning his radio on and off, starting and restarting his engine.
    What to do? Clete asks himself. Take down Rochon as a penny-ante bail skip or gamble that the Melancon brothers will show up? When the storm makes landfall late tomorrow night or early Monday morning, the lowlifes will either go to work looting the city or be blown like flotsam in every direction. Either way, it will be almost impossible to get a net over Rochon and the Melancons.
    Clete decides it’s Showtime.
    He puts an unlit cigarette in his mouth, combs his hair in the mirror behind the bar, and fits on his porkpie hat. His cream-colored slacks are pressed, his oxblood loafers shined, his Hawaiian shirt taut on his massive shoulders. A hideaway .25 is Velcro-strapped to his ankle, a slapjack and penlight in one trouser pocket, a set of cuffs in the other. He wishes he were on a plane, lifting above highways that are clogged with automobiles, buses, and trucks, their headlights all pointing north. Or over in New Iberia, where he has a second office and a room he rents at an old motor court on East Main. But you don’t surrender the place of your birth either to evil men or natural calamity, he tells himself, and wonders if he will feel the same in twenty-four hours.
    “You decided to meet a lady friend after all?” Jimmy says.
    “No, I got an appointment in the street with a piece of shit that should have been a skid mark on the bowl a long time ago,” Clete says. “If it gets rough outside in the next few minutes, I don’t want NOPD in on it. You with me on that?”
    “At this bar, nine-one-one is a historical date.”
    “You’re a beaut, Jimmy. Put a couple of inner tubes on the roof.”
    “What about you?”
    “Ever hear of circus elephants drowning in New Orleans? See, no precedent.”
    Clete steps out on the sidewalk. The light has gone out of the sky, and clouds are rolling blackly over his head. He can feel the barometer dropping rapidly now and he smells an odor that is like sulfur or rotten eggs or water beetles that have washed into the sewer grates and died there. Andre Rochon stares straight ahead, his wrists resting idly on the steering wheel, but Clete knows that Rochon has either made him for a cop or a bondsman and is deciding whether to brass it out or fire up his truck and bag-ass for North Rampart.
    Clete crosses the street and opens his badge holder and hangs it in front of Rochon’s face. “Step out of the vehicle and keep your hands where I can see them,” he says. “That’s not a suggestion. You do it or you go to jail.”
    His words are all carefully chosen, indicating in advance to Rochon that he has viable choices, that with a little cooperation and finesse he can skate on the nonappearance and have another season to run.
    Rochon steps out onto the asphalt and closes the door behind him. He wears tennis shoes without socks and paint-splattered slacks and an LSU T-shirt scissored off at the midriff and armpits. His arms are scrolled with one-color tats. He smells of funk and the decayed food in his teeth. His face is narrow, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. He strokes the exposed skin of his stomach, as a narcissist might. He probes his navel with one finger. “You a PI, blood?” he says.
    Clete glances at the streetlight on the corner, his eyelashes fluttering. “See, people don’t give me nicknames, particularly when they’re racial,” he says. “Right now you’re standing up to your bottom lip in pig shit. In the next minute, one of two things will happen. You’ll either give up the Melancon brothers or