DR10 - Sunset Limited (16 page)

Helen and I walked toward the car as Adrien Glazier and two
male FBI agents got out with Cool Breeze.

"What's happenin', Breeze?" I said.

"They give me a ride to my daddy's," he replied.

"Your business here needs to wait, Mr. Robicheaux," Adrien
Glazier said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the male agents touch
Cool Breeze on the arm with one finger and point for him to wait on the
gallery.

"What are you going to do with him?" I asked Adrien Glazier.

"Nothing."

"Breeze is operating out of his depth. You know that. Why are
you leaving the guy out there?" I said.

"Has he complained to you? Who appointed you his special
oversight person?" she replied.

"You ever hear of a guy named Harpo Scruggs?" I asked.

"No."

"I think he's got the contract on Breeze. Except he's supposed
to be dead."

"Then you've got something to work on. In the meantime, we'll
handle things here. Thanks for dropping by," the man who had uncuffed
Cool Breeze said.

He was olive-skinned, his dark blond hair cut short, his
opaque demeanor one that allowed him to be arrogant without ever being
accountable.

Helen stepped toward him, her feet slightly spread.

"Reality check, you pompous fuck, this is our jurisdiction. We
go where we want. You try to run us off an investigation, you're going
to be picking up the soap in our jail tonight," she said.

"She's the one busted up Boxleiter," the other male agent
said, his elbow hooked over the top of the driver's door, a smile at
the edge of his mouth.

"Yes?" she said.

"Impressive… Mean shit," he said.

"We're gone," Adrien Glazier said.

"Run this guy Scruggs. He was a gun bull at Angola. Maybe he's
hooked up with the Dixie Mafia," I said.

"A dead man?
Right
," she said, then got
in her car with her two colleagues and drove away.

Helen stared after them, her hands on her hips.

"Broussard's the bait tied down under the tree stand, isn't
he?" she said.

"That's the way I'd read it," I said.

Cool Breeze watched us from the swing on the gallery. His
brogans were caked with mud and he spun a cloth cap on the tip of his
index finger.

I sat down on the wood steps and looked out at the street.

"Where's Mout'?" I asked.

"Staying at his sister's."

"You're playing other people's game," I said.

"They gonna know when I'm in town."

"Bad way to think, podna."

I heard the swing creak behind me, then his brogans scuffing
the boards under him as the swing moved back and forth. A young woman
carrying a bag of groceries walked past the house and the sound of the
swing stopped.

"My dead wife Ida, I hear her in my sleep sometimes. Talking
to me from under the water, wit' that icy chain wrapped round her. I
want to lift her up, out of the silt, pick the ice out of her mout' and
eyes. But the chain just too heavy, I pull and pull and my arms is like
lead, and all the time they ain't no air getting down to her. You ever
have a dream like that?" he said.

I turned and looked at him, my ears ringing, my face suddenly
cold.

"I t'ought so. You blame me for what I do?" he said.

THAT AFTERNOON I MADE telephone calls
to Juarez, Mexico, and
to the sheriffs departments in three counties along the Tex-Mex border.
No one had any information about Harpo Scruggs or his death. Then an
FBI agent in El Paso referred me to a retired Texas Ranger by the name
of Lester Cobb. His accent was deep down in his breathing passages,
like
heated air breaking through the top of oatmeal.

"You knew him?" I said into the receiver.

"At a distance. Which was as close as I wanted to get."

"Why's that?"

"He was a pimp. He run Mexican girls up from Chihuahua."

"How'd he die?"

"They say he was in a hot pillow joint acrost the river. A
girl put one in his ear, then set fire to the place and done herself."

"They say?"

"He was wanted down there. Why would he go back into Juarez to
get laid? That story never did quite wash for me."

"If he's alive, where would I look for him?"

"Cockfights, cathouses, pigeon shoots. He's the meanest bucket
of shit with a badge I ever run acrost… Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I hope he's dead. He rope-drug a Mexican behind his Jeep, out
through the rocks and cactus. You get in a situation with
him… Oh, hell, I'm too damn old to tell another lawman his
business."

IT RAINED THAT EVENING, and from my
lighted gallery I watched
it fall on the trees and the dock and the tin roof of the bait shop and
on the wide, yellow, dimpled surface of the bayou itself.

I could not shake the images of Cool Breeze's recurring dream
from my mind. I stepped out into the rain and cut a half dozen roses
from the bushes in the front garden and walked down the slope with them
to the end of the dock.

Batist had pulled the tarp out on the guy wires and turned on
the string of electric lights. I stood at the railing, watching the
current drift southward toward West Cote Blanche Bay and eventually the
Gulf, where many years ago my father's drilling rig had punched into an
early pay sand, blowing the casing out of the hole. When the gas
ignited, a black-red inferno ballooned up through the tower, all the
way to the monkey board where my father worked as a derrick man. The
heat was so great the steel spars burned and collapsed like matchsticks.

He and my murdered wife Annie and the dead men from my platoon
used to speak to me through the rain. I found saloons by the water,
always by the water, where I could trap and control light and all
meaning inside three inches of Beam, with a Jax on the side, while the
rain ran down the windows and rippled the walls with neon shadows that
had no color.

Now, Annie and my father and dead soldiers no longer called me
up on the phone. But I never underestimated the power of the rain or
the potential of the dead, or denied them their presence in the world.

And for that reason I dropped the roses into the water and
watched them float toward the south, the green leaves beaded with water
as bright as crystal, the petals as darkly red as a woman's mouth
turned toward you on the pillow for the final time.

ON THE WAY BACK up to the house I saw
Clete Purcel's
chartreuse Cadillac come down the dirt road and turn into the drive.
The windows were streaked with mud, the convertible top as ragged as a
layer of chicken feathers. He rolled down the window and grinned, in
the same way that a mask grins.

"Got a minute?" he said.

I opened the passenger door and sat in the cracked leather
seat beside him.

"You doing okay, Cletus?" I asked.

"Sure. Thanks for calling the bondsman." He rubbed his face.
"Megan came by?"

"Yeah. Early this morning." I kept my eyes focused on the rain
blowing out of the trees onto my lighted gallery.

"She told you we were quits?"

"Not exactly."

"I got no bad feelings about it. That's how it shakes out
sometimes." He widened his eyes. "I need to take a shower and get some
sleep. I'll be okay with some sleep."

"Come in and eat with us."

"I'm keeping the security gig at the set. If you see this guy
Broussard, tell him not to set any more fires… Don't look at
me like that, Streak. The trailer he burned had propane tanks on it.
What if somebody had been in there?"

"He thinks the Terrebonnes are trying to have him killed."

"I hope they work it out. In the meantime, tell him to keep
his ass off the set."

"You don't want to eat?"

"No. I'm not feeling too good." He looked out into the shadows
and the water dripping out of the trees. "I got in over my head. It's
my fault. I'm not used to this crap."

"She's got strong feelings for you, Clete."

"Yeah, my temp loves her cat. See you tomorrow, Dave."

I watched him back out into the road, then shift into low, his
big head bent forward over the wheel, his expression as meaningless as
a jack-o'-lantern's.

AFTER BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR and I ate
dinner, I drove up the
Loreauville road to Cisco Flynn's house. When no one answered the bell,
I walked the length of the gallery, past the baskets of hanging ferns,
and looked through the side yard. In back, inside a screened pavilion,
Cisco and Megan were eating steaks at a linen-covered table with Swede
Boxleiter. I walked across the grass toward the yellow circle of light
made by an outside bug lamp. Their faces were warm, animated with their
conversation, their movements automatic when one or the other wanted a
dish passed or his silver wine goblet refilled. My loafer cracked a
small twig.

"Sorry to interrupt," I said.

"Is that you, Dave? Join us. We have plenty," Cisco said.

"I wanted to see Megan a minute. I'll wait out in my truck," I
said.

The three of them were looking out into the darkness, the
tossed salad and pink slices of steak on their plates like part of a
nineteenth-century French still life. In that instant I knew that
whatever differences defined them today, the three of them were held
together by a mutual experience that an outsider would never
understand. Then Boxleiter broke the moment by picking up a decanter
and pouring wine into his goblet, spilling it like drops of blood on
the linen.

Ten minutes later Megan found me in the front yard.

"This morning you told me I had Boxleiter all wrong," I said.

"That's right. He's not what he seems."

"He's a criminal."

"To some."

"I saw pictures of the dude he shanked in the Canon City pen."

"Probably courtesy of Adrien Glazier. By the way, the guy you
think he did? He was in the Mexican Mafia. He had Swede's cell partner
drowned in a toilet… This is why you came out here?"

"No, I wanted to tell you I'm going to leave y'all alone.
Y'all take your own fall, Megan."

"Who asked you to intercede on our behalf anyway? You're still
pissed off about Clete, aren't you?" she said.

I walked across the lawn toward my truck. The wind was loud in
the trees and made shadows on the grass. She caught up with me just as
I opened the door to the truck.

"The problem is you don't understand your own thinking," she
said. "You were raised in the church. You see my father's death as St.
Sebastian's martyrdom or something. You believe in forgiving people for
what's not yours to forgive. I'd like to take their eyes out."

"
Their
eyes. Who is
their
,
Megan?"

"Every hypocrite in this—" She stopped, stepping
back as though retreating from her own words.

"Ah, we finally got to it," I said.

I got in the truck and closed the door. I could hear her
heated breathing in the dark, see her chest rise and fall against her
shirt. Swede Boxleiter walked out of the side yard into the glow of
light from the front gallery, an empty plate in one hand, a meat fork
in the other.

THE TALL MAN WHO WORE yellow-tinted
glasses and cowboy boots
and a weathered, smoke-colored Stetson made a mistake. While the clerk
in a Lafayette pawnshop and gun store bagged up two boxes of .22 magnum
shells for him, the man in the Stetson happened to notice a bolt-action
military rifle up on the rack.

"That's an Italian 6.5 Carcano, ain't it? Hand it down here
and I'll show you something," he said.

He wrapped the leather sling over his left arm, opened the
bolt, and inserted his thumb in the chamber to make sure the gun was
not loaded.

"This is the same kind Oswald used. Now, here's the
mathematics. The shooter up in that book building had to get off three
shots in five and a half seconds. You got a stopwatch?" he said.

"No," the clerk said.

"Here, look at my wristwatch. Now, I'm gonna dry-fire it three
times. Remember, I ain't even aiming and Oswald was up six stories,
shooting at a moving target."

"That's not good for the firing pin," the clerk said.

"It ain't gonna hurt it. It's a piece of shit anyway, ain't
it?"

"I wish you wouldn't do that, sir."

The man in the Stetson set the rifle back on the glass counter
and pinched his thumb and two ringers inside his Red Man pouch and put
the tobacco in his jaw. The clerk's eyes broke when he tried to return
the man's stare.

"You ought to develop a historical curiosity. Then maybe you
wouldn't have to work the rest of your life at some little pissant
job," the man said, and picked up his sack and started for the front
door.

The clerk, out of shame and embarrassment, said to the man's
back, "How come you know so much about Dallas?"

"I was there, boy. That's a fact. The puff of smoke on the
grassy knoll?" He winked at the clerk and went out.

The clerk stood at the window, his face tingling, feeling
belittled, searching in his mind for words he could fling out the door
but knowing he would not have the courage to do so. He watched the man
in the Stetson drive down the street to an upholstery store in a red
pickup truck with Texas plates. The clerk wrote down the tag number and
called the sheriffs department.

ON FRIDAY MORNING FATHER James Mulcahy
rose just before dawn,
fixed two sandwiches and a thermos of coffee in the rectory kitchen,
and drove to Henderson Swamp, outside of the little town of Breaux
Bridge, where a parishioner had given him the use of a motorized
houseboat.

He drove along the hard-packed dirt track atop the levee,
above the long expanse of bays and channels and flooded cypress and
willows that comprised the swamp. He parked at the bottom of the levee,
walked across a board plank to the houseboat, released the mooring
ropes, and floated out from the willows into the current before he
started the engine.