Crescent City Connection

any idea what it is until you actually do it. Like sex. Or being a father. Or killing an animal.
    For some reason he hadn’t thought killing a person would feel like getting broadsided by a truck.
    It had happened so damn fast.
    His father had called him into the office in a kind of excited rage, almost frothing at the mouth, furious but getting off somehow. Daniel could see he was getting off.
    “The bitch is out there again, son. The bitch is on the move. It’s like God sent her to torment me.” He grinned all of a sudden. “But we’re gonna get her, Daniel. We are going to get her.”
    Daniel sighed, sitting down without waiting for an invitation. His dad ran a formal office even though it was in the living room of an apartment. He sat at a desk and if you were called there, you sat across from him. “What’s up, Daddy?” He had his dossier to do.
    “Listen, we have to do another one.” His dad’s mouth was tight, but his muscles fairly rippled under his polyester shirt. His body was a coiled spring.
    His dad had done Billy Hutchison, yes. Daniel knew it in some part of his brain, but he hadn’t been in on it—it was a California operation, and Jacomine had used California people, loyalists from his Blood of the Lamb days. Half the cops in the country might be looking for Errol Jacomine, but he still had quite a little underground following.
    His dad had told him how he did it, too. He had picked only the most loyal lieutenants. He had been sure that the people at the top were absolutely trustworthy. And those people now formed the network that had become the Jury.
    Daniel knew all that perfectly well, but it still seemed rather abstract; kind of exciting, yet distant.
    Now they were going to do someone, and Daniel had proof they could—the Hutchison proof. His stomach fluttered.
    “You know that good police chief they almost got in New Orleans?” Lightning had shot out of his father’s eyes.
    “Yeah. I think so.” Daniel wasn’t all that sure what he meant—he’d been too busy with the Lovelace problem.
    “Some asshole killed him.” He pounded a fist on his desk. “I will not have that. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ I will not
have
it!”
    “Oh, shit.” He remembered now. An honest cop. You didn’t see that every day in Louisiana.
    “We are going to do the asshole that did him. We are going to get the bitch.”
    “Hold it, Daddy. Wait a minute. It was a woman?”
    “No. Where’d you get that idea?”
    “You said we’re gonna get the bitch.”
    His father chuckled. “I certainly did. Well, I certainly did say that. Because this time we are. Detective Skip Langdon’s who I meant. Mine enemy. Every time I turn around the bitch is out to get me. Always has been, right from the first time she laid eyes on me. Some kind of weird grudge, probably about something simple like sexual repression—nearly always is. Hell, I can’t figure it out. You ever have anybody hate you, Daniel? For no reason? It’s a baaad feeling. I never did a damn thing to piss her off, so I have to conclude she was sent by the forces of Satan to torment me.”
    “I thought you said God sent her.”
    “Why would I say that? She couldn’t have come from God. If she’d have come from God she’d have been on our side.” His father’s voice had the slight edge that Daniel was getting to know—it seemed familiar, as if he remembered it from childhood, but at first he hadn’t recognized it as a danger signal. He did now and he kept his mouth shut.
    “Detective Langdon made the arrest,” his father said. “Some peckerwood crazy who’s going to get off on an insanity defense.” He shook his head. “Worst thing that ever happened to justice in this country.”
    Daniel nodded. “Amen to that.”
    “So we’re just going to shoot her prisoner right out from under her, thereby savin’ the taxpayers the cost of a trial.”
    Daniel nodded again.
    “See, this is the way it’s gonna work. Later on today, when they finish beating him with rubber hoses, or whatever they do, they’re taking him on a Hollywood walk. That’s where they trot out their prize criminals on the way to be booked. So the media can get some nice footage and make the cops look good.” He sat back in his chair, hands folded in his lap, a contented, happy man, the fury and frothing only a memory. “And that’s when we’re gonna get him.”
    “How’re we gonna know when it is?”
    “We have contacts, son. We have some