In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  There are always lots of possibilities when you deal with that vast army of psychological mutants for whom police and correctional and parole officers are supposed to be lifetime stewards. I once knew a young psychiatrist from Tulane who wanted to do volunteer counseling in the women's prison at St. Gabriel. He lasted a month. The inkblot tests he gave his first subjects not only drove him into clinical depression but eventually caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle Association.

  I made a call to the home of an AA friend named Lou Girard who was a detective sergeant in Vice at the Lafayette Police Department. He was one of those who drifted in and out of AA and never quite let go of the old way of life, but he was still a good cop and he would have made lieutenant had he not punched out an obnoxious local politician at Democratic headquarters.

  "What's her name again?" he said.

  I told him.

  "Yeah, there's one broad around calls herself Amber, but she's a Mexican," he said. "You said this one sounds like she's from around here?"

  "Yep."

  "Look, Dave, these broads got about two dozen names they trade around—Ginger, Consuela, Candy, Pepper, there's even a mulatto dancer named Brown Sugar. Anyway, there're three or four hookers that float in and out of Red's. They're low-rent, though. Their Johns are oil-field workers and college boys, mostly."

  "I'm going to drive over there in a few minutes. Can you give me some backup?"

  "To check out a snitch?"

  "Maybe she's not just a snitch."

  "What about your own guys?"

  "I'm supposed to be on sick leave right now."

  "Is something wrong over there, Dave?"

  "Things could be better."

  "All right, I'll meet you behind the bar. I'll stay in my car, though. For some reason my face tends to empty out a place. Or maybe I need a better mouth wash."

  "Thanks for doing this."

  "It beats sitting at home listening to my liver rot."

  Red's Bar was located in a dilapidated, racially mixed neighborhood of unsurfaced streets, stagnant rain ditches coated with mosquitoes, and vacant lots strewn with lawn trash and automobile parts. Railway tracks intersected people's dirt yards at crazy angles, and Southern Pacific freight cars often lumbered by a few feet from clotheslines and privies and bedroom windows.

  I parked my truck in the shadows behind the bar. The shell parking lot was covered with hundreds of flattened beer cans, and the bushes that bordered the neighbor's property stank from all the people who urinated into them nightly. The owner of Red's had built his bar by knocking out the front wall of a frame house and attaching a neon-lit house trailer to it perpendicularly. Originally he had probably intended it to be the place it looked like—a low-bottom bar where you didn't have to make comparisons or where you could get laid and not worry about your own inadequacies.

  But the bar became a success in ways that the owner didn't anticipate. He hired black musicians because they were cheap, and through no fault of his own he ended up with one of the best new zydeco bands in southwestern Louisiana. And on Saturday nights he french-fried potatoes in chicken fat and served them free on newspaper to enormous crowds that spilled out into the parking lots.

  But tonight wasn't Saturday, there was no band; little sound except the jukebox's came from the bar, and the dust from my truck tires floated in a cloud across the bushes that were sour with urinated beer.

  Lou Girard got out of his car and walked over to my window. He was a huge man, his head as big as a basketball, who wore cowboy boots with his suits and a chrome-plated .357 magnum in a hand-tooled belt holster. He also carried a braided slapjack in his back pocket and handcuffs that he slipped through the back of his belt.

  "It's good to see you, Streak," he said.

  "You too, Lou. How's everything at home?"

  "My wife finally took off with her beautician. A woman, I'm talking about. I guess I finally figured out why she seemed a little remote in the sack. What are we doing tonight?"

  "I'll go inside and look around. I'd like you to be out here to cover my back. It's not a big deal."

  He looked at the clapboard back of the bar, at the broken windows and the overflow of the garbage cans, and hooked his thumb in his belt.

  "When'd you start needing backup for bullshit like this?"

  "Maybe I'm getting over the hill for it."

  "Be serious, my friend."

  "You know about Kelly Drummond being killed?"

  "That actress? Yeah, sure."

  "I think maybe the shooter was after me. I don't want to walk into a setup."

  "This is a weird fucking place for a setup, Dave. Why would a guy want to bring a cop to a public place in Lafayette for a whack?"

  "Why do these guys do anything?"

  "You have any idea who the shooter might be?"

  "Maybe a guy who was in on a lynching thirty-five years ago."

  He nodded and his eyes became veiled.

  "That doesn't sound plausible to you?" I asked.

  "What's plausible? I try to get off the booze and my liver swells up like a football, my wife turns out to be a dyke, and for kicks I'm standing by a bunch of bushes that stink like somebody with a kidney disease pissed on them."

  I pulled my tropical shirt out of my khakis, stuck my .45 inside the back of my belt, and walked through the rear entrance of the building.

  The inside smelled like refrigerated bathroom disinfectant and tobacco smoke. The wood floors were warped and covered with cigarette burns that looked like black insects. Some college boys were playing the jukebox and drinking pitcher beer at the bar, and two or three couples were dancing in the adjacent room. A lone biker, with a lion's mane of blond hair and arms wrapped with jailhouse art, hit the cue ball so hard on the pool table that it caromed off the side of the jukebox. But it was a dead night at Red's, and the only female at the bar was an elderly woman who was telling a long tale of grief and discontent to a yawning bartender.

  "What'll you have?" he said to me.

  "Has Amber been in?"

  He shook his head to indicate either that she had not or he had no idea whom I was talking about.

  "She hasn't been here?"

  "What do you want to drink?"

  "A 7 Up."

  He opened it and poured it into a glass full of ice. But he didn't serve it to me. He walked to the rear of the long bar, which was empty, set it down, and waited for me. When he leaned on the bar, the biceps of his brown arms ridged with muscles like rocks. I walked down the length of the bar and sat on the stool in front of him.

  "Which Amber you looking for?" he asked.

  "I only know one."

  "She don't come in here reg'lar. But I could call somebody who probably knows where she's at. I mean if we're talking about the same broad."

  "A Mexican?"

  "Yeah, that's right."

  "She talks like a Mexican?"

  "Yeah. What's a Mexican supposed to talk like?"

  "That's not the one I'm looking for, then."

  "Enjoy your 7 Up," he said, and walked away from me.

  I waited a half hour. The biker went out and I heard him kick-start his motorcycle and peel down the dirt street in a roar of diminishing thunder. Then the college boys left and the bar was almost deserted. The bartender brought me another 7 Up. I reached for my billfold.

  "It's on the house," he said.

  "It's my birthday?" I said.

  "You're a cop."

  "I'm a cop?"

  "It don't matter to me. I like having cops in. It keeps the riffraff out."

  "Why do you think I'm a cop, partner?"

  "Because I just went out back for a breath of air and Lou Girard was taking a leak on our banana trees. Tell Lou thanks a lot for me."

  So I gave it up and walked back outside into the humid night, the drift of dust off the dirt road, and the heat lightning that flickered silently over the Gulf.

  "I'm afraid it's a dud," I said to Lou thr
ough his car window. "I'm sorry to get you out for nothing."

  "Forget it. You want to get something to eat?"

  "No, I'd better head home."

  "This hooker, Amber, her full name is Amber Martinez. I heard she was getting out of the life. But I can pick her up for you."

  "No, I think somebody was just jerking me around."

  "Let me know if I can do anything, then."

  "All right. Thanks again. Goodnight, Lou."

  "Goodnight, Dave."

  I watched him drive around the side of the building and out onto the dirt street. Raindrops began to ping on the top of my truck.

  But maybe I was leaving too early, I thought. If the bartender had made Lou Girard, maybe the woman had, too.

  I went back inside. All the bar stools were empty. The bartender was rinsing beer mugs in a tin sink. He looked up at me.

  "She still ain't here. I don't know what else to tell you, buddy," he said.

  I put a quarter in the jukebox and played an old Clifton Chenier record, Hey 'Tite Fille, then I walked out onto the front steps. The rain was slanting across the neon glow of the Dixie beer sign and pattering in the ditches and on the shell parking lot. Across the street were two small frame houses, and next to them was a vacant lot with a vegetable garden and three dark oaks in it and an old white Buick parked in front. Then somebody turned on a light inside the house next to the lot, and I saw the silhouette of somebody in the passenger seat of the Buick. I saw the silhouette as clearly as if it had been snipped out of tin, and then I saw the light glint on a chrome or nickel-plated surface as brightly as a heliograph.

  The shots were muffled in the rain—pop, pop, like Chinese firecrackers under a tin can—but I saw the sparks fly out from the pistol barrel through the interior darkness of the Buick. The shooter had fired at an odd angle, across the seat and through the back window, but I didn't wait to wonder why he had chosen an awkward position to take a shot at me.

  I pulled the .45 from under my shirt, dropped to my knees behind the bumper of a pickup truck, and began firing with both hands extended in front of me. I let off all eight rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. The roar was deafening, like someone had slapped both his palms violently against my eardrums. The hollow-points exploded the glass out of the Buick's windows, cored holes like a cold chisel through the doors, whanged off the steering wheel and dashboard, and blew the horn button like a tiddly-wink onto the hood.

  The slide locked open on the empty magazine, and the last spent casing tinkled on the flattened beer cans at my feet. I stood erect, still in the lee of the pickup truck, slipped the empty magazine out of the .45's butt, inserted a fresh one, and eased a round into the chamber. The street was quiet except for the pattering of the rain in the ditches. Then I heard a siren in the distance and the bar door opening behind me.

  "What the fuck's going on?" the bartender said, his whole body framed in the light. "You fucking crazy or something?"

  "Get back inside," I said.

  "We never had trouble here. Where the fuck are you from? People lose licenses because of bullshit like this."

  "Do you want to get shot?"

  He slammed the door shut, locked it, and pulled the blinds.

  I started across the street just as an electrical short in the Buick caused the horn to begin blowing non-stop. I kept the .45 pointed with both hands at the Buick's windows and moved in a circle around the front of the car. No one was visible above the level of the windows nor was there any movement inside. The hollow-points had cut exit holes the size of half-dollars in the passenger door.

  A Lafayette city police car came hard around the corner, its emergency lights whirling in the rain. The police car stopped twenty yards from the Buick and both front doors sprang open. I could see the cop in the passenger's seat pulling his pump shotgun out of its vertical mount on the dashboard. I got my badge holder out of my back pocket and held it high over my head.

  "Lay your weapon on the ground and step back from the car," the driver said, aiming his revolver at me between the door and the jamb.

  I held my right arm at a ninety-degree angle, the barrel pointing into the sky.

  "I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said. "I'm complying with your request."

  I crouched in the beam of their headlights, laid my .45 by the front tire of the Buick, and raised back up again.

  "Step away from it," the driver said.

  "You got it," I said, and almost lost my balance in the rain ditch.

  "Walk this way. Now," the driver said.

  People were standing on their front porches and the rain was coming down harder in big drops that stung my eyes. I kept my badge turned outward toward the two Lafayette city cops.

  "I've identified myself. Now how about jacking it down a couple of notches?" I said.

  The cop with the shotgun pulled my badge holder out of my hand and looked at it. Then he flexed the tension out of his shoulders, made a snuffing sound in his nose, and handed me back my badge.

  "What the hell's going on?" he said.

  "Somebody took two shots at me. In that Buick. I think maybe he's still inside."

  They both looked at each other.

  "You're saying the guy's still in there?" the driver said.

  "I didn't see him go anywhere."

  "Fuck, why didn't you say so?"

  I didn't get a chance to answer. Just then, Lou Girard pulled abreast of the police car and got out in the rain.

  "Damn, Dave, I thought you'd gone home. What happened?"

  "Somebody opened up on me," I said.

  "You know this guy?" the cop with the shotgun said.

  "Hell, yes, I do. Put your guns away. What's wrong with you guys?" Lou said.

  "Lou, the shooter fired at me twice," I said. "I put eight rounds into the Buick. I think he's still in there."

  "What?" he said, and ripped his .357 from his belt holster. Then he said to the two uniformed cops, "What have you fucking guys been doin' out here?"

  "Hey, Lou, come on. We didn't know who this—"

  "Shut up," he said, walked up to the Buick, looked inside, then jerked open the passenger door. The interior light went on.

  "What is it?" the cop with the shotgun said.

  Lou didn't answer. He replaced his revolver in his holster and reached down with his right hand and felt something on the floor of the automobile.

  I walked toward him. "Lou?" I said.

  His hands felt around on the seat of the car, then he stepped back and studied the ground and the weeds around his feet as though he were looking for something.

  "Lou?"

  "She's dead, Dave. It looks like she caught one right through the mouth."

  "She?" I said. I felt the blood drain from my heart.

  "You popped Amber Martinez," he said.

  I started forward and he caught my arm. The headlights of the city police car were blinding in the rain. He pulled me past the open passenger door, and I saw a diminutive woman in an embryonic position, a white thigh through a slit in a cocktail dress, a mat of brown hair that stuck wetly to the floor carpet.

  Our faces were turned in the opposite direction from the city cops'. Lou's mouth was an inch from my ear. I could smell cigarettes, bourbon, and mints on his breath.

  "Dave, there's no fucking gun," he whispered hoarsely.

  "I saw the muzzle flashes. I heard the reports."

  "It's not there. I got a throw-down in my glove compartment. Tell me to do it."

  I stared woodenly at the two uniformed cops, who stood in hulking silhouette against their headlights like gargoyles awaiting the breath of life.

  Chapter 13

  The sheriff called me personally at 5 a.m. the next morning so there would be no mistake about my status with the department: I was suspended without pay. Indefinitely.

  It was 7 a.m. and already hot and muggy when Rosie Gomez and I pulled up in front of Red's Bar in her automobile. The white Buick was sti
ll parked across the street. The bar was locked, the blinds closed, the silver sides of the house-trailer entrance creaking with heat.

  We walked back and forth in front of the building, feeling dents in the tin, scanning the improvised rain gutters, even studying the woodwork inside the door jamb.

  "Could the bullets have struck a car or the pickup truck you took cover behind?" she said.

  "Maybe. But I didn't hear them."

  She put her hands on her hips and let her eyes rove over the front of the bar again. Then she lifted her hair off the back of her neck. There was a sheen of sweat above the collar of her blouse.

  "Well, let's take a look at the Buick before they tow it out of here," she said.

  "I really appreciate your doing this, Rosie."

  "You'd do the same for me, wouldn't you?"

  "Who knows?"

  "Yeah, you would." She punched me on the arm with her little fist.

  We walked across the dirt street to the Buick. On the other side of the vacant lot I could hear freight cars knocking together. I opened all four doors of the Buick and began throwing out the floor mats, tearing up the carpet, raking trash out from under the seats while Rosie hunted in the grass along the rain ditch.

  Nothing.

  I sat on the edge of the backseat and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. I felt tired all over and my hands were stiff and hard to open and close. In fact, I felt just like I had a hangover. I couldn't keep my thoughts straight, and torn pieces of color kept floating behind my eyes.

  "Dave, listen to me," she said. "What you say happened is what happened. Otherwise you would have taken up your friend on his offer."

  "Maybe I should have."

  "You're not that kind of cop. You never will be, either."

  I didn't answer.

  "What'd your friend call it?" she asked.

  "A 'throw-down.' Sometimes cops call it a 'drop.' It's usually a .22 or some other piece of junk with the registration numbers filed off." I got up off the seat and popped the trunk. Inside, I found a jack handle. I drove the tapered end into the inside panel of the back door on the driver's side.