Bring Him Back Dead Read Online Free PDF

since he and Olga had been married.
    He almost wished he’d gone straight home after he’d locked up Lant Turner. He wished he hadn’t walked up Lafitte Street.

Chapter Five
    T HERE WAS a light in the sheriff’s office but no deputy in back of the duty desk. As far as Latour could tell, the five-gallon demijohn of whisky he’d labeled in evidence was gone.
    He walked down the hall to the cell block.
    A middle-aged prostitute screamed obscenities at him from the women’s section. There were the usual drunks in the tank. George Villere had got into another fight. His face and shirt matted with blood, he was lying on his back on the floor of one of the cells. But Lant Turner was as nonexistent as the missing demijohn.
    I should have taken his money, Latour said to himself.
    Jack Pringle was in the office when he returned to the front of the jail. “What happened to Turner?” Latour asked him.
    The night deputy glanced at the docket. “It says here he made bail.”
    “I’ll bet. Who was on the desk?”
    “Mullen, I imagine. Right after I came on duty I had to go over to Amy’s and put the arm on a drunk who got into a brawl with one of the girls.”
    “George Villere?”
    Pringle adjusted his gun belt. “If he’s the lad with theblood all over him. He was too drunk to give me his name and he wasn’t carrying any identification.”
    “He looks like he could stand some patching.”
    Pringle shrugged. “I’ve been trying to locate Doc Walker. That’s where I was just now.”
    “You have to work him over?”
    Pringle shook his head. “No. He was that way when I got there. The way I get the story, he bit one of the cats, you’d be surprised where, and she let him have it with a pair of four-inch heels.” The night deputy in charge looked out the open window of the office at the men milling on the walks on both sides of Lafitte Street. “Some fun, eh, Andy?”
    “Yeah,” Latour agreed. “Fun.”
    “All for two hundred and fifty bucks a month.”
    Latour wondered whom Pringle thought he was fooling. Pringle was one of the boys who were getting rich, along with Tom Mullen and Sheriff Belluche. They didn’t need to own oil wells. They had their own private gold mine.
    It had been a long day. He was tired. He had to go home sometime. “Well, I guess I’ll shove on.”
    Pringle’s voice, sly and oily, stopped him in the doorway of the office. “How was she?”
    “How was who?”
    The night deputy grinned. “Stop being so modest. The story is all over town.”
    Latour realized what Pringle was talking about. “Oh. You mean me driving Lacosta home.”
    “That and his crying in his beer the way he did. A man that old is a fool to marry a young girl. The boys tell me she’s cute.”
    “She is.”
    “Red-haired?”
    “Red-haired.”
    “And young?”
    “I’d say about seventeen.”
    Pringle had a front gold tooth. He sucked it. “I don’t know what it is. Some guys have all the luck. Now me, when I want quail I have to settle for a professional.” He added, “On the house, of course.”
    Beyond the square oasis of comparative darkness containingthe whitewashed-brick city hall and the municipal court and fire station and jail, a clarinet player in one of the all-night clubs hit a hot lick on his licorice stick and held it. It was a high, thin, reedy sound, more of a wail than a musical note.
    Latour was suddenly sick of the whole business. He felt dirty. He wished he hadn’t come home. He wished he hadn’t brought Olga to French Bayou. He wished he’d stayed in the Army.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told Pringle, and walked down the back steps of the jail and across the unlighted parking lot to his car.
    The heavy gun in his holster sagged comfortingly against his thigh. The more he thought about the two attempts on his life, the less sense they made. True, he’d pushed around a lot of petty punks during his two years as a deputy sheriff. But if any of them wanted to