The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke Page A

found buried at the bottom of her panty drawer.
    Bertrand shined the light into the top of the closet. “Look what we got here, man,” he said.
    Eddy paused in his work and stared upward at the panel his brother was prying loose from the closet wall. Both brothers were thick-bodied men, the muscles in their shoulders swollen and hard as iron from shrug-lifting sixty-pound dumbbells in each hand. Both were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely in the superheated interior of the house, Bertrand with a red bandana knotted tightly around his head.
    Bertrand reached inside the wall and lifted out a short-barreled blue-black revolver with checkered walnut grips and a Ziploc bag fat with white granular crystals. “Oh mama, Whitey’s private stash and a thirty-eight snub. This is gonna be one pissed-off dude,” he said. “Wait a minute. That ain’t all.”
    Bertrand stuck the bag of cocaine down the front of his trousers and handed the revolver to his brother. He reached back inside the wall and lifted out five bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills, each of them wrapped with a wide rubber band. He whistled. “Do you believe this shit? This motherfucker’s in the life.”
    “Maybe this ain’t the place to take down,” Eddy said.
    “Hey, man, ain’t nobody know we here. This is our night. We ain’t blowing it.”
    “You’re right, man. The dagos ain’t running things no more, nohow. What you doing?”
    Bertrand stuck the bundled bills in the bag, his eyes dancing in the glow of the flashlight. “Don’t worry about it.”
    A third man entered the room. He had pulled off a gold-and-purple T-shirt and wadded it up and was using it to mop the sweat off his chest and out of his armpits. He wore paint-splattered slacks and tennis shoes without socks. Whiskers grew on his chin like strands of black wire. “Kevin thinks he saw a guy out in the street,” he said.
    “That kid’s been wetting his pants all night. I told you not to bring him,” Bertrand said.
    “He’s just saying what he saw, man,” the third man said. His eyes dropped to Bertrand’s waistline and the Ziploc bag that protruded from his trousers. “Where’d you get the blow?”
    “Same place we got the thirty-eight. Now go take care of Kevin. We gonna be right there. I don’t want to be hearing about nobody out in the street, either. It’s Michael Jackson and Thriller out there. This city is a graveyard and we own the shovels and the headstones. Motherfucker come in here, he gonna eat one of these thirty-eights. You hear me, Andre? Get your ass downstairs and bring up the boat. And don’t be cranking it till we there.”
    “What y’all got in the laundry bag?” the third man said.
    “Andre, what it take for you to understand?” Bertrand said.
    “I’m just axing,” the third man replied. “We in this together, ain’t we?”
    “That’s right. So go do what he say,” Eddy said.
    Andre huffed air out his nostrils and disappeared down the stairway. Bertrand tapped one fist on top of the other, his gaze roving around the room. “There’s more. I can feel it. I can smell money in the walls,” he said.
    “What you smell is them flowers all over the place. What kind of people put flower vases in every room in the house right before a hurricane?” Eddy said.
    The question was a legitimate one. Who could afford to place fresh bowls of roses and orchids and carnations in a dozen rooms every three or four days? Who would want to? Bertrand stared at the water stains in the wallpaper and pushed against the softness of the lathwork underneath, his stomach on fire, rivulets of sweat running out of his bandana. “These walls is busting wit’ it, Eddy. It’s a drop or something,” he said.
    “Give it up, man,” Eddy said. “It’s burning up in here. It must be a hundred and twenty degrees.”
    Bertrand looked hard at his brother and grimaced as his ulcers flared again. This could be the perfect score. Why did his insides have to betray