Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke Page B

plugged in a cassette of Krupa or Jo Jones or Louie Bellson on his boom box, simultaneously recording himself on a blank tape while he flailed at his set of drums.
    Witnesses later said the white man who parked a pickup truck out front wore Levi’s low on his hips, without a belt, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, cowboy boots, and combed his hair like a 1950s greaser. One witness said he was a teenager; two others described him as a man in his thirties. But when they talked to the police artist, they all agreed he had white skin, a mouth like a girl’s, and that he looked harmless. He smiled and said hello to an elderly woman who was sitting under an awning, fanning herself.
    The bell tinkled over the front door and Zipper turned down the boom box and shouted from the back, “My cousin’s next door.”
    But some crackers just don’t listen.
    “Hey, don’t come around that counter, man,” Zipper said. “Say, you not hearing me or something? The man who own this store ain’t here right now.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Yeah, just stay out there in front. Everything gonna be cool.”
    “When’s he gonna be back?”
    “Maybe two or three minutes, like the sign on the door say.”
    “You play drums?”
    There was a pause. “What you want in here, cracker?” Zipper asked.
    “Your cousin’s got a big tab with Jimmy Fig. He’s got to pay the vig to the Fig.”
    Zipper got up from the stool he was sitting on and walked to the service counter. The counter was lined with secondhand garden tools that had been wire-brushed on a machine, sharpened, oiled, and repainted.
    “Jimmy Fig don’t lend money. He sells cooze,” Zipper said.
    “If you say so. I just go where they tell me.”
    “Don’t grin at me, man.”
    “No problem.”
    “Hey, take your hand out where I can see it,” Zipper said.
    “I delivered the message. I’m going now. Have a good day.”
    “No, I want to show you something. This is a twenty-dollar gold piece. Bet you fifty dollars I can roll it across the top of my fingers three times without dropping it. I lose, I put in the gold piece, too. Damn, I just dropped it. You on, my man?”
    “Fifty dollars? “Without touching it with the other hand?”
    “You got it, bo.”
    “You give me the gold piece, too?”
    “My word’s solid, bo. Ask anybody about Zipper Clum.”
    “All right, there’s my fifty bucks. This isn’t a hustle, is it?”
    Zipper smiled to himself and began working the gold piece across the tops of his fingers, the edges of the coin tucking into the crevices of skin and flipping over like magic. At the same time his left hand moved under the counter, where his cousin had nailed a leather holster containing a .38 revolver. Zipper felt his palm curve around the checkered wood handles and the smooth taper of the steel.
    “Oops, I dropped it again. I done made you rich, cracker,” he said, and slipped the .38 from the leather.
    It was a good plan. It had always worked before, hadn’t it? What was wrong?
    His mind could not assimilate what had just happened. The gold piece had dropped off the tops of his fingers and bounced on the counter and rolled dryly across the wood. But the cracker had not been watching the coin. He had just stood there with that stupid grin on his face, that same, arrogant, denigrating white grin Zipper had seen all his life, the one that told him he was a dancing monkey, the unwanted child of a Jane’s Alley whore.
    He wanted to snap off a big one, right in the cracker’s mouth, and blow the back of his head out like an exploding muskmelon.
    But something was wrong in a way he couldn’t focus on, like a dream that should illuminate all the dark corners of your consciousness but in daylight eludes your memory. His left hand wouldn’t function. The coldness of the steel, the checkering on the grips had separated themselves from his palm. One side of him was lighter than the other, and he was off balance, as though the floor had tilted under his feet. He