The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  “You and Miss Babette are okay, too?”

  “Peaches and cream. What makes you think otherwise?”

  “No reason. She’s probably had a hard life. She deserves a break.”

  “You trying to tell me something?”

  “No,” I said. “Did you know any of the people in the meeting?”

  “You talking about those black whores? I think I busted one of them.”

  “There’re no whores in A.A. Whatever people did before they came in doesn’t count.”

  “Yeah, and all God’s chil’en got shoes, too,” he said. “This heat stinks. I need to get back to Florida. There’s nothing like that blue and green water down in the Keys.” He lit up, letting the smoke drift in my face.

  “You’re done worrying about somebody clipping you?” I said.

  The tropical vision that gave him a brief respite from his problems left his eyes. “What the fuck, man? You get me here to mess with my head?”

  Something like that, I thought.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING CLETE and I went to City Park and watched Homer play softball under the lights. Homer was still awkward with the bat, but he usually got a chunk of the ball and made it to first base. Once there, he was a greased laser beam on the bases. He came in under the tag on his face, like a human plowshare burrowing through the dirt. When the second baseman thought it was over, Homer was on his feet and headed for third. He got caught in the hotbox once, then scampered between the shortstop’s legs and went around third and almost sanded his face off sliding across home plate.

  “What’s Homer’s status with the social welfare people?” I said.

  “I think they want the situation to go away. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not giving him back.”

  “You and Sherry Picard getting along?”

  “Sure, I dig her.”

  Of course, that was not what I’d asked. “I took Spade Labiche to a meeting today.”

  “I bet he was a big hit.”

  “I think he’s been working for Tony Squid from the jump. I think he sent Penny after me the night T. J. Dartez died. In so many words, he’s told me he has the key to my soul, meaning he knows what happened when Dartez cashed in.”

  “I can make a midnight visit on this guy. He’ll be in a cooperative mood, I guarantee it.”

  “That stuff is for the other guys,” I said. “We don’t do it.”

  Clete took a beer out of a sack by his foot and cracked the tab. “Better look around, noble mon. There’s some bad shit going down. My stomach clenches up when I think about it.”

  “Jimmy Nightingale?”

  “I know how assassins feel.”

  “Don’t ever give these guys that kind of power,” I said.

  Homer was in the batter’s box. He smacked a Texas-leaguer into short center.

  “Look at that kid go,” Clete said.

  * * *

  WAY LEADS ON to way.

  After the game, we strolled with Homer back to Clete’s Caddy, down by the concrete boat ramp. Not far away, Levon Broussard and Tony Nemo’s film crew were winding up for the day. In the twilight, I saw Alafair standing by Nemo’s limo. The back door was open. Alafair was shouting at someone in the backseat.

  “I’d better check this out,” I said.

  “Stay out of it, Streak,” Clete said.

  “I’ve had it with Nemo.”

  “Alafair isn’t going to like it.”

  “I’m her father.”

  “Homer and I will wait here.”

  “Maybe we should go with him,” Homer said, looking up at Clete.

  “Dave’s got it covered,” Clete said, patting him on the back.

  I walked toward the limo just as Alafair flung the clipboard inside.

  “Make your own damn changes!” she said. “You’re an idiot! You have no business in a movie theater, much less on a set!”

  She stormed past me.

  “Whoa, what’s the deal?” I said.

  “Spermo thinks he’s D. W. Griffith.”

  “Spermo is Tony?”

  “Duh.” She kept walking, furious, wiping her hair out of her face.

  I looked inside the limo. Tony was spread across the backseat like a dirigible with a bad leak.

  “Tony, baby. What’s the haps?” I said.

  “I think your daughter is the product of a busted rubber.”

  “I couldn’t say. She’s adopted.”

  His portable oxygen bottle was propped on his groin; his face was mottled and sweaty, a piece of dried mucus at the corner of his mouth, his breathing arduous, like a strand of piano wire sawing on a hole in a tin can. “Fuck both y’all, you arrogant cocksucker.”

  “A cleaner’s out there, Tony. I think you’re next in line.”

  “I shot craps in Reno with Jimmy Fratianno. I ate dinner with Meyer Lansky. A leg-breaker for a certain celebrity gave me trouble once, and I kicked a baseball bat up his ass. I’m making a movie Jimmy Nightingale thought he was gonna make. I got Levon Broussard jumping through hoops. What’s that tell you, wise guy? I got a broomstick up the ass of every one of y’all.”

  “Hear that sucking sound?” I said.

  “What sucking sound?”

  “It’s the ground pulling on you.”

  “Yeah? Guys like me live a hundred years and get hanged for rape. Play your mind-fuck games with somebody else.”

  I looked up and down his person. “Your fly is unzipped.”

  I left him staring down at his lap and walked along the bank in the gloaming of the day, then onto the drawbridge. The air was full of birds, the sky mauve, the bayou bladed by the wind. Far down the Teche, a solitary streak of lightning split the sky and quivered as brightly as gold in the water.

  * * *

  I HEARD FROM lafayette PD that the .223 shell casings I’d picked up in the Cajun Dome were clean. If the shooter was the same as the killer of the St. Mary Parish deputy and JuJu and Pookie, he probably had an arsenal at his disposal. Whether he’d tried to hit Jimmy Nightingale was debatable. The consequence wasn’t. The story was on the wire services, CNN, FOX, all the networks, and the front pages of newspapers across America as well as overseas. Jimmy was a star, a populist in whom everyone could find something to like. I had to hand it to him.

  * * *

  SPADE LABICHE LIVED in a rented two-story small house with a balcony and ironwork in the shadow of the drawbridge. At high tide, the bayou was almost in his front yard. He had no neighbors. The flower beds were planted with banana plants and windmill palms and caladiums and hydrangeas. The plaster on the bricks, the rain-washed lavender paint, and the trumpet vine on the balcony’s railing reminded him of his boyhood in New Orleans or, rather, the boyhood he wished he’d had.

  Spade had grown up in the Iberville Project on a diet of welfare commodities and a drunk man’s breath. The Quarter was for tourists and homosexual artists. The Iberville playgrounds were the St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park, where Spade and his friends jackrolled any fool who wandered in at night. The Garden District was the other side of the universe.

  Spade felt secure in his rented home. Through the front windows, he could see the bayou, the old convent on the far side, the green and red lights smudged in the fog. Behind him, the slope rose to the backside of buildings that were over a century old, the bricks fissured, the wooden storm shutters hanging askew on rusted hinges. No one could approach his house without being detected by his surveillance cameras and motion-activated floodlamps. This was Fortress Labiche. Let the world have at it.

  On a muggy Saturday evening, he made a salad and grilled a chicken on his patio and ate dinner inside, first locking all the doors. The light was golden in the sky, a few raindrops striking the windows. He had never seen weather like this. The days were superheated, the nights flickering with heat lightning that promised relief but gave none, the sunrise as swampy as an egg yolk. After he washed his dishes, he turned on the television and took a touch of nose candy and a fe
w hits of reefer and a sip of Scotch on ice. But his chemical accessories didn’t work like they used to. His worries and bad dreams and paranoia seemed to intensify to the point where he feared both solitude and the company of others. He feigned composure during the day and fell apart at night. People wondered why a cop would eat his gun. Try waking up with snakes every morning not because you’re loaded but because you’re not.

  After sunset, Spade walked to the bar-and-grill for a drink. But he couldn’t put up with the crowd, at least not tonight. He returned home in the dark and went inside and locked the door, his heart a lump of ice. Maybe he should quit the department on Monday and go back to the Keys, hang out at Sloppy Joe’s and the other joints on Duval, fish for marlin, screw all this Cajun bullshit. Yeah, kick the addictions, live on orange juice and sunshine and lobster tail and get it on with hippie girls who loved sugar daddies with a badge and a gun.

  He went upstairs and lay down on top of the sheets in his skivvies. As he closed his eyes, he heard the rain clicking on the roof. Tomorrow would be a better day. Yes, he would quit Monday and eighty-six his woes and rock on down to his old haunts.

  In the early A.M., he woke to an odor that made no sense: mayonnaise and ham and tomatoes and onions and bread. Was he dreaming? He sat up in bed, an erection dying inside his shorts. In the red glow of the clock on the nightstand, a man was eating a sandwich, the juice running down his chin. He was wearing cotton gloves and a baseball cap. His limbs looked composed of sourdough. His smile made Spade think of an open wound.

  “Hi. My name is Chester,” the man said.

  Spade pushed himself up on his elbows. “How’d you get in here?”

  “You invited me.”

  “I invited you when? Who are you?”

  “When people do bad things, they invite me in. I just told you who I am.”

  “Is that a gun?”

  “A .357.”

  “You’re the cleaner, aren’t you.”

  Chester didn’t answer.

  “I’m not tied up with anybody,” Spade said. “You got no beef with me.”

  “You’ve done bad things.”

  “Who sent you? Just tell me. I’ll square it.”

  “You sent me.”

  “You’re talking in riddles. I didn’t do anything to anybody. You’re operating on wrong information.”

  Chester set his sandwich on the nightstand with a napkin or magazine under it. “These index cards have drawings on them. They show what you made the colored ladies do.”

  “What colored ladies?” Spade said.

  “The ones you were cruel to.”

  “Somebody’s been lying. Look, we’ve got to talk this out.”

  “I have to give you the chance.”

  “Chance for what?”

  “To say you’re sorry.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “So you don’t want to say you’re sorry?”

  “I’m ready to work with you on that. Don’t point that at me, man. Come on, you got the wrong guy. I get along with black people. I was undercover in Liberty City.”

  “You made one of the ladies put her baby in the freezer. You left him in there till she agreed to do that bad thing.”

  “I never did any such thing. Put down the piece.”

  “You’re sure about that? Think hard. Don’t make a mistake.”

  “I smoked some skunk with angel dust on it. It makes you crazy. Don’t cock that. Please.”

  “Take the pillowcase off the pillow.”

  “Do what?”

  “Put the pillowcase over your head.”

  “I’m forgetting this ever happened. I’m leaving town. I already made up my mind before you came in. Nobody will ever see me again.”

  “I’m going to shoot you in the stomach unless you do what you’re told,” Chester said.

  “I got a feeling you had a bad childhood, kind of like me. I grew up in the Iberville. That’s in New Orleans. My old man was a guard with the Big Stripes in Angola. He was meaner than hell to us kids.”

  “I was born in New Or-yuns. The boys in the Iberville made fun of me.”

  “That’s not me. I wasn’t like that.”

  “I know all the things you’re going to say. They won’t change anything.”

  Chester stood up and aimed. The shot was deafening inside the room. Matting flew from the hole in the mattress just below Spade’s genitalia.

  Spade’s bowels melted. He had to force the bile back down his throat to speak. “I got the pillowcase. I’m putting it on. Where we going? My cuffs are on the dresser. You want to hook me up?”

  “On the dresser? I don’t see them.”

  “I’ll show you. Can I take off the pillowcase?”

  There was no answer. Spade could hear himself breathing, smell the sourness of his breath, feel two wet lines running from his eyes. He’d never thought he could be this afraid. “Say something. Please.”

  But there was no reply.

  “I got some cash and gold cuff links. I took them off a guy in the Medellín Cartel. Anything you want here is yours. Take my watch, too.” Then he realized what his tormentor was doing. “You’re eating a fucking sandwich?”

  “Not now. I’m finished.”

  Spade remembered a prayer from his childhood. How did it go? He always said it before he went to bed. Somehow it removed the sounds of his father yelling, his mother laughing even when he hit her, a baby crying in the other room. Now I lay me down to sleep. Was that how it went? It was too simple. He needed something heavier, a magical or metaphysical way to block off what was about to happen. Where were the words? Why were they denied him?

  “Chester?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I used to say a prayer called ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’ when I was a kid.”

  “But you’ve been very bad, haven’t you?” Chester said.

  “Yes, I’ve been a bad man.”

  “Do you feel better now?”

  Spade could feel the last drops of his self-respect sliding from his armpits. “You creepy little snerd, who do you think you are?”

  Spade reached for the top of the pillowcase. Then the world became a snow-covered mountain slope cracking loose from its fastenings, grinding up trees and rocks in its path, boulders as big as cars bouncing over his head, the sky an immaculate blue, the air pristine, the flecks of ice on his skin as cool and gentle as a lover’s fingers. He closed his eyes and extended his arms by his sides and waited for the roar to engulf him, to lift him into a place where rage and fear and need were but rags ripped away in the wind, the soul as bright as a burnished shield, the landscape down below one of blue and green waters and coral reefs and sea horses that frolicked in the waves.

  Then he realized he was already there. Safe. The book written. The covers closed.

  HELEN CALLED AT 3:16 Sunday morning. “I’m in Lafayette. We got a shots-fired at Spade Labiche’s house. Can you get over there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was barefoot and in my skivvies in the kitchen. “Who called it in?”

  “A guy walking across the bridge. He heard a pop and saw a flash through the upstairs window. A patrolman just kicked open the door. He says it’s a mess. We ROA there.”

  “Labiche is dead?”

  “His place is a fortress. I don’t know how anyone could get in. Maybe he ate his gun.”

  I rubbed water on my face and brushed my teeth, put on a pair of khakis, and hung my badge around my neck and hooked my nine-millimeter on my belt.

  “Where you going?” Alafair said from her bedroom door.

  “It’s Spade Labiche.”

  “Somebody caught up with him?”

  “Maybe.”

  I felt her studying my face. “I’ll lock you in,” I said. “Maybe this guy Smiley is back in town.”

  “That’s not what’s on your mind. Labiche is the only guy who knows what happened the night T. J. Dartez died.”

  “That sums it up.”

  I
drove down East Main and turned onto the side street that led to Labiche’s house. Someone had turned on the lights inside. A cruiser was parked in front. There had been a six-car pileup on the four-lane, and the paramedics had not arrived. I went through the broken door and up the stairs. A red-haired, barrel-chested patrolman nicknamed Top met me at the entrance to the bedroom. “I left everything alone. The pillowcase was half off his face when I got here.”

  There was blood splatter on the headboard, the wall, and the window glass. There were three bullet holes in the headboard and a tear in a sheet with powder burns around it and a long bloody swath down the side of the mattress and the bed frame that dead-ended at the body on the floor.

  Through the French doors, I saw the lights of emergency vehicles turning off Main. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the edge of the pillowcase with my ballpoint. There was an entry wound high up on Labiche’s left cheek, a graze that had taken off most of one ear, and another entry wound on his neck. His left eye had turned to milk. Half of his body was painted with blood. I let the pillowcase drop and looked around the floor, then shook out the sheets and a bedcover on the foot of the bed.

  “You see a gun?” I said.

  “No,” Top said.

  “Casings?”

  “Nope. You think he shot himself four times?”

  “I was hoping our shooter dropped his weapon.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t precluded the possibility of suicide. I’ve seen victims who had to take a run at it several times before they pulled it off, particularly when they were filled with rage at others and couldn’t let go of this world.

  I looked under the bed and the nightstand. The recoil in a suicide can put a firearm in strange places. But there was no gun. I opened the drawer on the nightstand. There was a five-shot holstered titanium .38 Special inside, the Velcro strap in place. Then I realized the enormity of the presumption I had been operating on. Labiche’s left hand twitched, as though a tiny electric current had touched it. I knelt again and peeled the pillowcase off his head. The clotted hair in one nostril moved almost imperceptibly.

  “Get the medics up here, Top.”

  * * *

  I STAYED IN the emergency room with Labiche until sunrise, then walked along beside the gurney to the ICU. The neurologist said the bullet in the cheek had been fired at a downward angle and had tunneled through the temporal lobe and cerebellum, destroying Labiche’s hearing and sensory transmitters and muscular control. There was a chance that other areas of his brain were impaired as well. His face was sunken, his breathing little more than a rasp, the rectal catheter leaking. I rested my hand on the rail of the gurney and pushed a door open to help one of nurses. I felt Labiche touch my hand.