DR10 - Sunset Limited (28 page)

"You found this guy on your own?" I said.

"I started calling hospitals when you first contacted us. Wait
till you see his face. People tend to remember it."

"Can you get on the cell phone and make sure Breedlove isn't
allowed any phone calls in the next few minutes?" I said.

"I did that early this morning."

"You're a pretty good cop, Mr. Nash."

He grinned, then his eyes focused out the window on a snowshoe
rabbit that was hopping through grass by an irrigation ditch. "By the
way, I told you only what was on his sheet. About twenty years ago a
family camping back in the hills was killed in their tents. The man
done it was after the daughter. When I ran Jubal Breedlove in on a
drunk charge, I found the girl's high school picture in his billfold."

Less than an hour later we were at the clinic in Raton. Jubal
Breedlove lay in a narrow bed in a semi-private room that was divided
by a collapsible partition. His face was tentacled with a huge
purple-and-straw-berry birthmark, so that his eyes looked squeezed
inside a mask. Helen picked up his chart from the foot of the bed and
read it.

"Boxleiter put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, didn't he?" she
said.

"What?" he said.

"Swede slung your blood all over the apartment. He might as
well have written your name on the wall," I said.

"Swede who? I was robbed and stabbed behind a bar in Clayton,"
he said.

"That's why you waited until the wound was infected before you
got treatment," I said.

"I was drunk for three days. I didn't know what planet I was
on," he replied. His hair was curly, the color of metal shavings. He
tried to concentrate his vision on me and Helen, but his eyes kept
shifting to John Nash.

"Harpo wouldn't let you get medical help down in Louisiana,
would he? You going to take the bounce for a guy like that?" I asked.

"I want a lawyer in here," he said.

"No, you don't," Nash said, and fitted his hand on Breedlove's
jaws and gingerly moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as
though examining the function of Breedlove's neck. "Remember me?"

"No."

He moved his hand down on Breedlove's chest, flattening it on
the panels of gauze that were taped across Breedlove's knife wound.

"Mr. Nash," I said.

"Remember the girl in the tent? I sure do." John Nash felt the
dressing on Breedlove's chest with his fingertips, then worked the heel
of his hand in a slow circle, his eyes fixed on Breedlove's.
Breedlove's mouth opened as though his lower Up had been jerked
downward on a wire, and involuntarily his hands grabbed at Nash's wrist.

"Don't be touching me, boy. That'll get you in a lot of
trouble," Nash said.

"Mr. Nash, we need to talk outside a minute," I said.

"That's not necessary," he replied, and gathered a handful of
Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his palm with it.
"Because everything is going to be just fine here. Why, look, the man's
eyes glisten with repentance already."

WE HAD ONE SUSPECT in Trinidad,
Colorado, now a second one in
New Mexico. I didn't want to think about the amount of paperwork and
the bureaucratic legal problems that might lie ahead of us. After we
dropped John Nash off at the sheriffs office, we ate lunch in a cafe by
the highway. Through the window we could see a storm moving into the
mountains and dust lifting out of the trees in a canyon and flattening
on the hardpan.

"What are you thinking about?" Helen asked.

"We need to get Breedlove into custody and extradite him back
to Louisiana," I said.

"Fat chance, huh?"

"I can't see it happening right now."

"Maybe John Nash will have another interview with him."

"That guy can cost us the case, Helen."

"He didn't seem worried. I had the feeling Breedlove knows
better than to file complaints about local procedure." When I didn't
reply, she said, "Wyatt Earp and his brothers used to operate around
here?"

"After the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral they hunted down some
other members of the Clanton gang and blew them into rags. I think this
was one of the places on their route."

"I wonder what kind of salary range they have here," she said.

I paid the check and got a receipt for our expense account.

"That story Archer Terrebonne told me about Lila and her
cousin firing a gun across a snowfield, about starting an avalanche?" I
said.

"Yeah, you told me," Helen said.

"You feel like driving to Durango?"

WE HEADED UP THROUGH Walsenburg, then
drove west into the
mountains and a rainstorm that turned to snow when we approached Wolf
Creek Pass. The juniper and pinyon trees and cinnamon-colored country
of the southern Colorado plateau were behind us now, and on each side
of the highway the slopes were thick with spruce and fir and pine that
glistened with snow that began melting as soon as it touched the canopy.

At the top of Wolf Creek we pulled into a rest stop and drank
coffee from a thermos and looked out on the descending crests of the
mountains. The air was cold and gray and smelled like pine needles and
wet boulders in a streambed and ice when you chop it out of a wood
bucket in the morning.

"Dave, I don't want to be a pill…" Helen began.

"About what?"

"It seems like I remember a story years ago about that
avalanche, I mean about Lila's cousin being buried in it and
suffocating or freezing to death," she said.

"Go on."

"I mean, who's to say the girl wasn't frozen in the shape of a
cross? That kind of stuff isn't in an old newspaper article. Maybe
we're getting inside our heads too much on this one."

I couldn't argue with her.

When we got to the newspaper office in Durango it wasn't hard
to find the story about the avalanche back in 1967. It had been
featured on the first page, with interviews of the rescuers and
photographs of the slide, the lopsided two-story log house, a barn
splintered into kindling, cattle whose horns and hooves and ice-crusted
bellies protruded from the snow like disembodied images in a cubist
painting. Lila had survived because the slide had pushed her into a
creekbed whose overhang formed itself into an ice cave where she
huddled for two days until a deputy sheriff poked an iron pike through
the top and blinded her with sunlight.

But the cousin died under ten feet of snow. The article made
no mention about the condition of the body or its posture in death.

"It was a good try and a great drive over," Helen said.

"Maybe we can find some of the guys who were on the search and
rescue team," I said.

"Let it go, Dave."

I let out my breath and rose from the chair I had been sitting
in. My eyes burned and my palms still felt numb from involuntarily
tightening my hands on the steering wheel during the drive over Wolf
Creek Pass. Outside, the sun was shining on the nineteenth-century
brick buildings along the street and I could see the thickly timbered,
dark green slopes of the mountains rising up sharply in the background.

I started to close the large bound volume of 1967 newspapers
in front of me. Then, like the gambler who can't leave the table as
long as there is one chip left to play, I glanced again at a color
photograph of the rescuers on a back page. The men stood in a row,
tools in their hands, wearing heavy mackinaws and canvas overalls and
stocking caps and cowboy hats with scarves tied around their ears. The
snowfield was sunlit, dazzling, the mountains blue-green against a
cloudless sky. The men were unsmiling, their clothes flattened against
their bodies in the wind, their faces pinched with cold. I read the
cutline below the photograph.

"Where you going?" Helen said.

I went into the editorial room and returned with a magnifying
glass.

"Look at the man on the far right," I said. "Look at his
shoulders, the way he holds himself."

She took the magnifying glass from my hand and stared through
it, moving the depth of focus up and down, then concentrating on the
face of a tall man in a wide-brim cowboy hat. Then she read the cutline.

"It says 'H. Q. Skaggs.' The reporter misspelled it. It's
Harpo Scruggs," she said.

"Archer Terrebonne acted like he knew him only at a distance.
I think he called him 'quite a character,' or something like that."

"Why would they have him at their cabin in Colorado? The
Terrebonnes don't let people like Scruggs use their indoor plumbing,"
she said. She stared at me blankly, then said, as though putting her
thoughts on index cards, "He did scut work for them? He's had something
on them? Scruggs could be blackmailing Archer Terrebonne?"

"They're joined at the hip."

"Is there a Xerox machine out there?" she asked.

WE GOT BACK TO NEW Iberia late the
next day. I went to the
office before going home, but the sheriff had already gone. In my
mailbox he had left a note that read: "Let's talk tomorrow about
Scruggs and the Feds."

That evening Bootsie and Alafair and I went to a restaurant,
then I worked late at the dock with Batist. The moon was up and the
water in the bayou looked yellow and high, swirling with mud, between
the deep shadows of the cypress and willow trees along the banks.

I heard a car coming too fast on the dirt road, then saw Clete
Purcel's convertible stop in front of the boat ramp, a plume of dust
drifting across the canvas top. But rather than park by the ramp, he
cut his lights and backed into my drive, so that the car tag was not
visible from the road.

I went back into the bait shop and poured a cup of coffee. He
walked down the dock, looking back over his shoulder, his print shirt
hanging out of his slacks. He grinned broadly when he came through the
door.

"Beautiful night. I thought I might get up early in the
morning and do some fishing," he said.

"The weather's right," I said.

"How was Colorado?" he asked, then opened the screen door and
looked back outside.

I started to pour him a cup of coffee, but he reached in the
cooler and twisted the top off a beer and drank it at the end of the
counter so he could see the far end of the dock.

"You mind if I sleep here tonight? I don't feel like driving
back to Jeanerette," he said.

"What have you done, Clete?"

He ticked the center of his forehead with one fingernail and
looked into space.

"A couple of state troopers almost got me by Spanish Lake. I'm
not supposed to be driving except for business purposes," he said.

"Why would they be after you?"

"This movie gig is creeping me out. I went up to Ralph
& Kacoo's in Baton Rouge," he said. "All right, here it is. But
I didn't start it. I was eating oysters on the half-shell and having a
draft at the bar when Benny Grogan comes up to me—you know,
Ricky the Mouse's bodyguard, the one with platinum hair, the wrestler
and part-time bone smoker.

"He touches me on the arm, then steps away like I'm going to
swing on him or something. He says, 'We got a problem, Purcel. Ricky's
stinking drunk in a back room.'

"I say, 'No,
we
don't got a problem. You
got a problem.'

"He goes, 'Look, he's got some upscale gash in there he's
trying to impress, so everything's gonna be cool. Long as maybe you go
somewhere else. I'll pay your tab. Here's a hundred bucks. You're our
guest somewhere else tonight.'

"I say, 'Benny, you want to wear food on your face again, just
put your hand on my arm one more time.'

"He shrugs his shoulders and walks off and I thought that'd be
the end of it. I was going to leave anyway, right after I took a leak.
So I'm in the men's room, and they've got this big trough filled with
ice in it, and of course people have been pissing in it all night, and
I'm unzipping my pants and reading the newspaper that's under a glass
up on the wall and I hear the door bang open behind me and some guy
walking like the deck is tilting under his feet.

"He goes, 'I got something for you, Purcel. They say it hits
your guts like an iron hook.'

"I'm not kidding you, Dave, I didn't think Ricky Scar could
make my heart seize up, but that's what happened when I looked at what
was in his hand. You ever see the current thread between the prongs on
a stun gun? I go, 'Dumb move, Ricky. I was just leaving. I consider our
troubles over.'

"He goes, 'I'm gonna enjoy this.'

"Just then this biker pushes open the door and brushes by
Ricky like this is your normal, everyday rest-room situation. When
Ricky turned his head I nailed him. It was a beaut, Dave, right in the
eye. The stun gun went sailing under the stalls and Ricky fell backward
in the trough. This plumber's helper was in the corner, one of these
big, industrial-strength jobs for blowing out major toilet blockage. I
jammed it over Ricky's face and shoved him down in the ice and held him
under till I thought he might be more reasonable, but he kept kicking
and flailing and frothing at the mouth and I couldn't let go.

"The biker says, 'The dude try to cop your stick or something?'

"I go, 'Find a guy named Benny Grogan in the back rooms. Tell
him Clete needs some help. He'll give you fifty bucks.'

"The biker goes, 'Benny Grogan gives head, not money. You're
on your own, Jack.'

"That's when Benny comes through the door and sticks a .38
behind my ear. He says, 'Get out of town, Purcel. Next time, your
brains are coming out your nose.'

"I didn't argue, mon. I almost made the front door when I hear
the Mouse come roaring out of the can and charge down the hallway at
me, streaming ice and piss and toilet paper that was stuck all over his
feet.

"Except a bunch of people in a side dining room fling open
this oak door, it must be three inches thick with wrought iron over
this thick yellow glass panel in it, and they slam it right into the
Mouse's face, you could hear the metal actually ding off his skull.