Big Easy Bonanza

might want.
    The sight of all that cash really upset her. She grabbed Darryl with both hands and tried to shake him, though he was too big to shake.
    “I need to know what we’re into here,” she shouted in his face. She wasn’t thinking when she said “we,” but Darryl picked up on it. He looked at her funny and sat on the bed. He took her hand.
    “It really was stupid for me to get you involved,” he said. He fumbled around for a cigarette, as usual.
    “I don’t care about that. I just want to know what’s really going on.” She took one of his hands in both of hers.
    He ran his fingers through his thick black hair. “I’m not sure what I can tell you, babe. Something definitely went wrong. I was supposed to be protected. It was arranged for the Terrebonne Parish deputies to be somewhere else. I’ve done this before, and there’s never been a problem. But all of a sudden the place is full of federal men, I don’t know how they found out about it, but it was just them at first.
    “When the local law showed up later they were almost apologetic about the whole thing. But at the start it’s just these federal yo-yo’s, and they were so interested in me they lost the boat. It just backed up and gunned out of there as soon as the cars with the blue flashers rolled in. You’d have thought they could have stopped it down the bayou, but they didn’t. Maybe they were shorthanded. This one cop, he has on no uniform, he keeps pushing and shoving me, getting right in my face, going, ‘Where’s the money?’ He kept yanking me around saying, ‘Where’s the cash?’ He didn’t care at all about any drugs. ‘Give me the cash. It’s your ticket out of here,’ he was saying. And there was a guy in one of the cars who never did get out. I couldn’t see who he was. Him and the guy who was hassling me drove away while the DEA federales were still taking pictures of the pot.”
    “And all the time the money was with me,” Monique said.
    “Yeah, good thing.”
    “Who does it belong to?”
    “You don’t want to know. Hey, maybe it’s mine now.”

EIGHT
    Reggie Turntide was slightly built, had thinning hair, wore square, tinted wire rims, and maintained a good tan. The glasses were mostly for effect. He liked to polish them, or twirl them around, or suck on one of the earpieces while he was talking to a client. Reggie had a lot of hustle, but he was never seen in court. His favorite clients were local and state politicos, and the kind of people who hung around them, and he had made his reputation in zoning permits, municipal ordinances, and state construction regulations. He had a keen eye for the fine line dividing permitted public profiteering from out-right fraud, and he got paid to show it to his clients before they heard it from the state attorney general.
    Reggie liked to say he complemented Tubby. Rarely did their work overlap. They had started off as social friends, through their wives, before they had been law partners. What Tubby liked about Reggie was his gift for gab and his unshakable cynicism. Reggie could walk into any room full of people and find hands to shake. He would have been naturally suited to politics if he hadn’t thought it was beneath him. He liked to be the guy who put things together, and he was out for bigger game—bigger money—than public office offered, even in Louisiana, where it offered a lot.
    The only time Tubby had ever seen Reggie nonplussed was when they were both in moot court back in law school. The occasion was a trial—not a real one but a student enactment to learn from experience the feel of the courtroom—but the judge’s role was being played by an honest-to-God federal judge named Sealey, whose teaching method was to kick ass. Tubby was one of the jurors, and Reggie was the defense attorney. When time came for his opening statement, Reggie came from behind his counsel table and approached the jury. As the words, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” came out of his mouth, he lazily took off his jacket—with visions, no doubt, of a folksy William Jennings Bryan clouding his senses. Judge Sealey’s eyes bugged out. Reggie popped his suspenders and got no further than, “This case is about greed,” when the judge began pounding his gavel on the bench, like there was a rattlesnake he wanted dead, and bellowed, “Young man, turn around.”
    Reggie complied so swiftly that he almost tripped and had to brace himself against the jury box for