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”You're a gambler, Dave. Marsallus faded the back line and bet against himself a long time ago.“
I looked at the rain rings out on the bayou, at a black man in a pirogue under a cypress overhang who was tossing a hand line and baited treble hook into the current.
”And as far as this supernatural stuff is concerned, I think Marsallus is alive only in your head,“ he said.
”People have seen him.“
”Maybe they see what you want them to see.“
Wrong, skipper, I thought. But this time I kept my own counsel.
”Somebody knew we were coming for Pogue,“ I said. ”Maybe we've got a leak in the department.“
”Who?“
”How about Rufus Arceneaux?“
He thought for a moment, adjusted his shirt collar with his thumb.
”Rufus would probably do almost anything, Dave, as long as he thought he was in control of it. He'd be out of his depth on this one.“
”How'd they know we were coming?“
”Maybe it was just coincidence. We don't solve every crime. This might be one of them.“
”They're wiping their feet on us, Sheriff.“
He ran a pipe cleaner through the stem of his pipe and watched it emerge brown and wet from the metal airhole.
”You're lucky you don't smoke,“ he said.
After work I went home and put on my gym shorts and running shoes and worked out with my weight set in the backyard. It had stopped raining and the sky was rippled with purple and crimson clouds and loud with the droning of tree frogs. Then I went inside and showered and put on a fresh pair of khakis and began poking through the clothes hangers in the closet. Boots sat on the bed and watched me.
”Where's my old charcoal shirt?“ I asked.
”I put it in your trunk. It's almost cheesecloth.“
”That's why I wear it. It's comfortable.“
The trunk was in the back of the closet. I unlocked it and saw the shirt folded next to my ARI5 and the holstered nine-millimeter Beretta I had taught Alafair how to shoot. I removed the shirt, locked the trunk, and dropped the key in a dresser drawer.
”You still thinking about Sonny?“ she said.
”No, not really.“
”Dave?“
”It's not my job to explain what's unexplainable. St. Paul said there might be angels living among us, so we should be careful how we treat one another. Maybe he knew something.“
”You haven't said this to anybody else, have you?“
”Who cares?“ I started to button my shirt, but she got off the bed and began buttoning it for me. ”You're too much, Streak,“ she said, nudging my leg with her knee. In the morning I called a half dozen licensing agencies in Baton Rouge for any background I could get on Blue Sky Electric Company. No one seemed to know much about them, other than the fact they had acquired every permit they needed to begin construction on their current site by Cade.
What was their history? No one seemed to know that, either. Where had they been in business previously? Eastern Washington and briefly in Missoula, Montana. I called a friend in the chemistry department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, then met him for lunch in the student center, which looked out upon a cypress-filled lake on the side of old Burke Hall. He was an elderly, wizened man who didn't suffer fools and was notorious for his classroom histrionics, namely, kicking his shoes across the lecture room the first day of class and gracefully flipping the text over his shoulder into a wastebasket. ”What do these guys make?“ he said. ”Nobody seems to know.“
”What do they un-make?“
”I beg your pardon?“
