AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"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 driv
e. 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?"
