The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  “Stop,” I said. “He’s trying to tell me something.”

  The nurse smiled kindly and shook her head and made the word “no” with her lips.

  “What is it, Spade?” I said.

  One eye had eight-balled. It stared into my face. His other eye was caved, the lid black.

  “Wait out here, Detective,” the nurse said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I looked through the glass in the door as three nurses wheeled him into a room. I wondered what images lay in his head. Was the touch of his finger the result of a muscular spasm, a bump of the gurney, or a signal that the only man who knew the fate of T. J. Dartez was taking flight forever?

  I drove back home and slept for three hours. When I woke, Sherry Picard’s cruiser was parked in my driveway.

  * * *

  I OPENED THE screen door and stepped into the yard. She got out of the cruiser and looked at me across the roof, her hair blowing, leaves drifting on her clothes. “Your daughter said you were asleep. I told her I’d wait.”

  “Where’d she go?” I said, half asleep.

  “To the movie set.”

  “They’re union,” I said. “They’re not supposed to work Sundays.”

  “Tony Nine Ball keeps the Sabbath, does he?”

  “What’s up, Detective?” I said.

  She walked toward me. Her jeans were high up on her hips. She was wearing her gun and badge, her eyes locked on mine. There was an aggressiveness in her body language that was hard to deal with.

  “You got a beef, don’t you?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “You don’t think I’m good for Clete.”

  “It’s his life.”

  “His image of himself has a lot to do with your opinion of him.”

  “Young women feel safe in his company. Then they start feeling better about their situation and dump him.”

  “I look like a dependent woman? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Clete’s my friend. I worry about him. Sometimes unnecessarily.”

  “What’s the status on Labiche?” she asked.

  “One step this side of a vegetable.”

  “The cleaner did it?”

  “We don’t know. Four rounds fired, one into the mattress. Large-caliber. It could be a .357.”

  “Same caliber used on the deputy in St. Mary?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You think he did Penny?”

  “Spade is a mean motor scooter, but torturing a man to death with an electric drill is on another level.”

  “What kind of level?”

  “Sexual vengeance comes to mind.”

  “Levon Broussard for the rape of his wife?”

  “That’s a hard fit.” I looked at my watch. “I was going to church at St. Edward’s.”

  She looked down the street. Leaves were scudding along the sidewalk. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

  “When you figure out what it is, tell me.”

  “I hear Labiche is paranoid and fanatical about security systems,” she said.

  “That’s Spade.”

  “How’d the shooter get in?”

  “He spray-painted the cameras, jumped the wiring, and probably turned a dead bolt with fishing line. He may have used a microcontroller to steal the pad code. Our guy is a total pro.”

  “But you’re in doubt about who he is?”

  “My money is on Smiley,” I said.

  “But there’s something wrong, isn’t there? Cleaners don’t fire four rounds and leave their victims alive.”

  “Want to come inside?”

  “No. You think Labiche got to the shooter? Sent him off in a rage?”

  “Psychotic people are psychotic for a reason,” I said. “They don’t deal well with confrontation.”

  “Clete isn’t answering his cell. You know where he is?”

  “He probably took Homer fishing.”

  I saw the light fade in her eyes.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Some guys in the department have a hard-on about Clete meddling in the Jeff Davis Eight case. They’re going to go through Homer to fuck him up.”

  * * *

  I KNEW WHERE to find him. It was an emblematic postage stamp out of the past on the southwestern side of the Atchafalaya Swamp, a reminder that our connection to the Caribbean and our neocolonial origins was only one hour away.

  On the edge of the bay was a flooded woods strung with moss and dotted with hollow tupelos that reverberated like conga drums when you knocked on them, the lichen on the water undulating like a milky-green blanket in the wake of a passing boat. In a hummock that had been part of a plantation built in the late eighteenth century were former slave quarters made of cypress and roofed with corrugated tin that had been eaten into orange lace. There were palm trees in the hummock and depressions back in the trees where people born in Africa were buried, their names and histories lost. Supposedly, Jean Lafitte moored his boats here when he and James Bowie were transporting slaves from the West Indies to the United States in violation of the 1808 embargo. The story of the Mid-Atlantic Passage was here, as well as the story of the auction houses in New York, Jamestown, Charleston, and New Orleans, all of it now bleached by sun and rain and washed clean of memories that steal into your sleep, the scattered planks and logs as weightless and innocuous as balsa wood and the whitish-brown cylindrical stain in the soil that supposedly was the remnant of a whipping post.

  I cut my outboard and drifted onto the bank. Fifty yards away, Clete and Homer were anchored in a channel that flowed out of a bay between two narrow islands thick with gum and willow trees. They were casting their lures at the edges of the lily pads on the shady side of the islands. The time of day was equally wrong for big-mouth bass and sacalait and goggle-eye perch and bream, but catching fish wasn’t the issue for Clete. He had become Homer’s father, and I didn’t want to think about the travail and injury that awaited both of them.

  The sun was white in the sky, the surface of the bay gold and brown and wobbling with light, the breeze out of the south, smelling of salt and distant rain. I went into the shade and propped an air cushion under my head and went to sleep. I dreamed of a scene out of T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, though I don’t know why. Bedouins on camels and in open-air motorcars were charging down a sand dune, the early-morning sun at their backs. Down below was a hospital train that had been dynamited and jacked off the tracks. The motorcars were equipped with Vickers machine guns, the muzzles flashing, sand rilling from the balloon tires. The train cars were filled with typhoid victims. The cries and moans of the dying were louder than the Vickers.

  I woke with a jerk, a weight like an anvil on my chest, pushing me into a dark pool.

  “Hey,” Clete said. “You’re having a dream. Wake up.”

  I held my head. I looked at my watch. I’d been asleep fifteen minutes. I didn’t know where I was.

  “Must have been a whameroo,” Clete said.

  I looked at Homer and tried to shake the train from my mind. He had put on weight, the right kind. His hair was long and straight, mahogany-colored like an Indian’s, his skin coppery, his eyes blue. I had the feeling he would be a tall boy, maybe a soldier, an underwater welder, a chopper pilot flying out to the rigs, but something out of the ordinary, something that required courage and paying dues. The restoration of his life was due to one man only, and that was Clete Purcel.

  Homer was holding a huge mud cat on a stringer that was wrapped around his wrist.

  “Is that yours or Clete’s?” I said.

  “I caught it on a throw line with a piece of liver,” he said.

  “You know how to skin one without getting spiked?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I opened my Swiss Army knife and handed it to him backward.

  “I don’t have no pliers,” he said.

  “Any pliers,” Clete said.

  “Any pliers,” Homer repeated.

&
nbsp; “They’re in the tackle box,” Clete said. “There’s a nail on that gum tree by the water.”

  We waited until Homer was out of earshot.

  “Something happen?” Clete said.

  I told him about the shooting at Labiche’s house. He listened quietly, showing no expression. Then he said, “It sounds like our guy lost his Kool-Aid. That is, if it’s the nutcase who steals ice cream trucks.”

  “It’s got to be the same guy. He just got sloppy.”

  “Like he’s losing control?” Clete said.

  “That’s my guess. Sherry Picard was at the house this morning.”

  “What for?”

  “She didn’t know where you were. She also said some cops in Jeff Davis want to screw you over.”

  “With the adoption?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe this isn’t just about some pinheads wanting to do payback,” he said. “I’ve been making some calls about Nightingale. That bombing down in South America he told you about? Did he give you specifics?”

  “He said he didn’t see the aftermath,” I replied.

  “I bet. There were more than three dozen people maimed and blinded and killed. The government burned and bulldozed their village and moved them two hundred miles away. Nightingale’s family owned the company. Did he tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to fix him. I mean legit. I know a couple of wire-service guys in New Orleans.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “That’s not going to slide down the pipe?” he said.

  “How many people cared about the things you saw in El Sal?”

  He went to his boat and opened his cooler and took out two cans. He sat down next to me on the mound of compacted dirt and broken bricks. “You were dreaming about ’Nam?”

  “Not directly.”

  He looked around at the cabins, the pools of heat in the corrugated roofs that had been added during Reconstruction, when the former Confederate colonel who owned Angola Plantation turned it into a rental convict farm to replace the slaves set free by the Emancipation Proclamation.

  “It’s still with us, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What do I know?”

  He put a cold can of Dr Pepper in my hand. “Drink up, big mon. Let’s take it to these motherfuckers. Whoever they are.”

  High above us, a burnt-orange pontoon plane was working against a headwind, frozen against a satin-blue sky, droning like an angry bee.

  * * *

  WE GOT THE ballistics back late Monday afternoon. The rounds fired in Labiche’s home came from the same .357 used to kill the St. Mary deputy and the two drug dealers in Algiers.

  The same afternoon Alafair came home in a huff from filming in the backyard of a plantation east of Jeanerette. “I quit.”

  “Because of Nemo?” I said.

  “Along with his skanks and his lowlife hangers-on.”

  “Good for you.”

  “But it’s Levon who disappoints me,” she said.

  “You have to leave people to their own destiny, Alf.”

  We were in the kitchen. She hadn’t noticed Mon Tee Coon sitting on the counter. “When did this happen?”

  “I fed him in the house a couple of times. Now he pops right in, just like Tripod.”

  Snuggs, our short-haired, thick-necked white cat, walked across the floor and joined Mon Tee Coon on the counter with a thump. Snuggs’s body rippled with muscle when he walked, his tail springing back and forth. His badges of honor were his chewed ears and the pink scars embedded in his fur.

  Alafair picked up Snuggs and cradled him in her arms. She looked down into his face. “Want to be a screenwriter? That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t touch Hollywood with your bare seat.”

  “You told Tony Nemo or Levon you were through?” I asked.

  “Both of them.”

  “Nemo said something to you?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “He said I’m lucky I’m beautiful because my books stink.”

  She focused her attention on Snuggs and jiggled his tail.

  “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing. He’s a fat idiot.”

  “Tell me, Alafair.”

  “He said, ‘I bet you give good head.’ ”

  I gazed out the window at the bayou, the shadows and spangled reflections of the sun that were like gold coins in the branches, the smoke from a barbecue pit in the park, the children playing among the camellia bushes.

  “I need to pick up some milk at the store,” I said. “Were y’all filming at Albania Plantation today?”

  “Why?”

  “I just wondered. Is all the gang still there?”

  “Leave it alone, Dave.”

  “There’s an open can of sardines in the icebox,” I said. “Why don’t you treat these guys to a fine meal?”

  * * *

  JEANERETTE WAS A fifteen-minute ride back into the antebellum era, if that’s what you wanted to look for. Albania Plantation was a magnificent place. The live oaks surrounding it were so large that the main house stayed in shadow throughout the brightest and hottest of days. Some of the original slave quarters, constructed of logs, were still standing. I parked my truck and walked around the side of the house. The backyard sloped down to the bayou. The film crew had turned the yard into the setting of a French cotillion when the year was 1862 and the Yankees had been whipped at both First and Second Manassas and the Lost Cause was not lost at all.

  The trees were strung with paper lanterns. The actresses wore hoop dresses, and the actors wore the tailored steel-gray uniforms of the Army of Northern Virginia, many with silk sashes, and the band played the songs of Stephen Foster. The dying sun seemed to conspire with an Islamic moon and light the sky like a scene from One Thousand and One Nights. The food and punch on the tables were real. Imaginary or not, the evening had become a tribute to a moment in history that would not come aborning again. The people on the lawn seemed delighted with their departure from the twenty-first century.

  Tony Nemo was eating from a plastic bucket of potato salad at a picnic table behind the cameras and lights. He was talking to two women in their twenties, both with tats that covered the entire shoulder and trailed away like snakes down the arm. Their midriffs were exposed, their jeans form-fitting, although the denim looked soaked in black grease.

  Even before I went to Vietnam, there was a disorder in my head that I never understood. The catalyst, I suspect, lay in the unconscious. For me, the trigger always had to do with degradation of the body and the spirit, cruelty to animals or children, sexual assault, a man beating a woman, betrayal, lies that stole the faith of another.

  I would see colors rather than people or the environment around me. My words contained little meaning, as though they were written on water and not meant to be understood. My intentions, however, were obvious. Without warning, I would try to tear someone apart, and I mean break bones and teeth and sling blood onto the walls and leave the object of my rage with a reservoir of fear he would never forget.

  I never used a drop, but I owned half a dozen of them, taken from pimps, jackrollers, and smash-and-grabbers who turned over pawnshops. The serial numbers were acid-burned or ground off on an emery wheel, sometimes the trigger and handles reverse-taped so latents couldn’t be lifted from the frame. They were a cop’s get-out-of-jail card. They could have another purpose also.

  Tony never saw it coming. He looked up from his potato salad and started to smile, then realized who I was. The drop was a .22 revolver. The sight had been filed off; the metal was pitted; one wood handle was cracked in half. I held it behind my back, then shoved it into his mouth and cocked the hammer. I stared into his eyes without speaking. He was choking on his own saliva and the food he hadn’t swallowed. The people sitting around him stared in horror.

  “Verbal abuse on the wrong young woman, Tony,” I said.

  He gagged and tried to push away my arm. I
pulled the trigger. His eyes almost came out of his head. I screwed the barrel deeper into his mouth and cocked the hammer again. I snapped it on another empty chamber. His throat was gurgling, his jowls trembling. The blubber on his chest and stomach was shaking like whale sperm. A woman was screaming.

  “Your odds are one in four, Tony. Unless I put two rounds in the cylinder instead of one. I can’t remember.”

  I pulled the trigger a third time. In the silence, a terrible whimpering sound rose from his throat. I removed the pistol from his mouth. Blood and saliva ran down his chin. He fumbled for his oxygen mask. I flipped out the cylinder and showed it to him. “No bullets, Tony. Here, see for yourself.”

  His gaze lifted to my face; he looked like a man who realized a sea change had just taken place in his life, in full view of others, and he would never be able to erase the moment.

  I splashed the gun into his bowl of potato salad and walked back to my truck. I drove back down the highway and passed a trailer slum and crossed the Teche on a drawbridge and continued past another oak-shaded plantation within one hundred yards of the slum property by the bridge. The juxtaposition of the two images could have been extrapolated from a Marxist propaganda film. I felt strange driving through the twilight by myself, as though I had deliberately severed my connection with the rational world and given up all pretense of normalcy and, in so doing, had set myself free.

  I WASN’T DONE. I went to Levon Broussard’s home on Loreauville Road. His wife’s car was in the garage, but his was not. I parked in front and waited. A few minutes later, his SUV turned off the road and came up the driveway. He got out and walked toward me, his engine still running. I could see Rowena watching from the gallery.

  “You crazy fuck,” he said to me.

  “Problem?”