The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  “Mr. Nightingale, I think you should let us handle this.”

  “There will be none of that,” Nightingale said.

  The security man handed Clete his snub-nose. Clete dropped it into his shoulder holster. A freshly waxed purple Lincoln with chrome-spoked whitewalls came out of the carriage house with Emmeline Nightingale in the back and Swede Jensen in livery behind the wheel.

  “You’re behind that geek from Florida, Jimmy,” Clete said.

  “Which geek is that?”

  “Goes by the tag Smiley. You’re dirty. You know it and I know it, and I’m going to prove it.”

  “The peace of the Lord be with you.”

  “Stay indoors during lightning storms,” Clete said. He got into the Caddy.

  Nightingale leaned down to the window. “I always liked you, Clete.”

  “Watch your foot,” Clete said. He backed in a semicircle, breaking the flowers off the camellia bushes, and drove toward the highway, the sunlight splintering in the oak limbs above his head.

  How do you get to a guy like Nightingale? he wondered. More important, who was he? A master of illusion or a guy with a genius IQ who was brain-dead when it came to morality?

  Clete looked in the rearview mirror. The security men had gone back to their posts, but Nightingale still stood in the middle of the driveway, one hand lifted in farewell, as though he were saying good-bye to a friend from a previous life.

  * * *

  CLETE CALLED ME and told me to meet him at Clementine’s at seven.

  “What for?” I said.

  “I think Nightingale got inside my head.”

  “Come by the house.”

  “It might be bugged,” he said.

  “You’ve been thinking too much.”

  “Yeah, I imagined the mercury tilt switch I found by my automobile.”

  After supper I walked down to the restaurant. Clete was at the bar. He knocked back the whiskey in his shot glass and pointed at a table by the brick wall in the back of the dining room.

  “Where’s Homer?” I said.

  “Playing softball in the park.” He caught the waiter. “What are you having, Dave?”

  “Nothing.”

  Clete ordered a plate of étouffée and half a dozen raw oysters and a bottle of Danish beer. “I’m so dry I’m a fire hazard. Don’t get on my case because I’ve got to have a hit of this or that.”

  “Lose the Mouseketeer routine, will you?”

  “I got the willies.” He told me what had happened in front of Jimmy Nightingale’s home. “You think he’s just an actor? Nothing rattles him. For a minute he made me feel like we were old friends.”

  “That’s Jimmy. He can be humble because he already owns what everyone else wants. What were you doing out there?”

  “What I said I was going to do.” Clete kept his eyes on mine.

  There was no one within earshot of our table. “You were actually going to bust a cap on him?”

  “If I was sure he put the hit on Homer and me.”

  “In his front yard?”

  “I was going to take down the chauffeur, too. I was going to give them a fair chance, then smoke them.”

  “This is madness, Clete.”

  The waiter brought the Danish beer. Clete took a long swig, looking at me with a protruding eye. He set the bottle on the tablecloth. “Madness is when you let an innocent boy get maimed or blown apart, the way Nightingale did those Indians. Don’t give me any doodah, Streak.”

  “Who’ll take care of Homer if you’re in Angola?”

  “Thanks for the help. You really know how to say it.”

  “I’ll talk to you in the morning,” I said. I flicked my fingernail on the neck of the Danish beer. “No more of this tonight.”

  Clete picked up the bottle and chugged it dry. I got up from the table and squeezed his shoulder, then kept going out the door and down the sidewalk in the summer night, the air heavy with the smell of jasmine, the water high and yellow and coursing with organic debris under the drawbridge. For just a fleeting moment, I wished the year were 1862.

  LEVON BROUSSARD WAS transferred from custody in Iberia Parish to Jefferson Davis Parish. I did not believe he was guilty of the Kevin Penny homicide, but nonetheless I was glad he was gone, and I hoped that I would not be entangled with him and his wife for a while.

  That wasn’t the way it worked out. Sherry Picard was in my office Thursday morning. I rose from my chair when she entered, but it was hard. “Good morning,” I said. “How are you? What brings you to town? Nice day.”

  “You speak like you’re constipated,” she said.

  “I have a tumor on my vocal cords,” I said. “It comes and goes. I’ve never understood it.”

  “What’s with Levon Broussard? Why do you think he confessed?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” I said, my face empty.

  “Good try.”

  “He’s in your jurisdiction, he’s your problem.”

  “I thought he was your friend.”

  “Right now I’m worried about Clete Purcel. He has a terrible character defect. He’s a bad judge of people.”

  I saw the color climb in her face. “I want to speak to Sheriff Soileau.”

  “Bang on her door.”

  “Listen—”

  Then I saw her blink, the breath go out of her throat, a tremble in her chin.

  I lowered my voice. “Look at me, Detective.”

  “Look at you?” she said.

  “Sometimes I get my head on sideways. I’m reactive. I don’t mean it.”

  “I’m tired of getting fucked over,” she said.

  I dropped my eyes. It was an unpleasant moment. Her need was obvious. There is no organizational injustice worse than putting a misogynistic cop or military officer in charge of female personnel. The abuse that follows is immediate, egregious, and cruel to the bone.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said. “I heard that you called one of your targets in Iraq or Afghanistan a sand nigger.”

  “I was mad at Clete. He kept talking about the mamasan he killed by accident. I told him to let it go. I was deliberately crude about my own history. You think I’m a racist?”

  “No.”

  “You want to have lunch?” she said.

  I opened the bottom drawer in my desk and lifted up a brown paper bag that was folded neatly across the top. Inside I kept a spare rain jacket and hood. “Brought my own.”

  “I didn’t intend to hurt Clete. He’s a good guy.”

  “So are you,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?” She touched at a mole on her chin and looked at the ball of her finger. “See you around, hotshot. Keep it in your pants.”

  I watched her walk out the door. I had a feeling that Sherry Picard cast a large net. Maybe that was just my imagination.

  * * *

  ON A PENINSULA that extended into the Gulf of Mexico, Chester Wimple followed the Lincoln driven by the chauffeur with peroxided hair that reminded him of popcorn butter. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, the flags on the boathouses and the elevated camps snapping, waves breaking against the chunks of concrete that had been dumped along the banks to keep the peninsula from eroding away. Chester could see Emmeline in the backseat of the Lincoln, in sunglasses, a scarf on her head.

  The Lincoln turned in to a camp at the end of the peninsula, and Emmeline and the chauffeur went inside, laughing.

  At what? Had Chester set the bomb in the Cadillac owned by the fat man, he might have killed a child. That was something to laugh at? No, Emmeline couldn’t hurt a child. Not after what she and Chester had suffered in the orphanage in Mexico City.

  Chester parked his rented car on a lot that had been left deserted after Hurricane Rita wiped out the structure and left little except clusters of banana plants and windmill palms and persimmon trees. Because it was a weekday with a forecast of storms and lightning, few of the other camps were occupied. He got out of his car with his binoculars and scoped .223 carbine and
worked his way along the bank until he had a good view of the Lincoln and the camp to the south, backdropped by waves that were swelling higher and higher.

  The camp had a rustic exterior with a peaked metal roof and walls made of heavy dark-stained timbers, but the satellite dishes and the propane crab boiler and barbecue pit on the fantail and the sliding glass and gold trim on the doors hinted of the luxury and level of comfort inside.

  Chester focused his binoculars through the sliding door on the living room. Emmeline was brushing out her hair in front of a mirror. The chauffeur had put on boxer swim trunks and was sitting in a black leather chair, his legs crossed. A clipboard was propped on his knee. He was writing on an index card. He tilted his head one way, then another. No, he was not writing. He was sketching something on the same kind of cards that told Chester who and where his target was.

  Chester removed the binoculars from his eyes and watched the seagulls dipping out of the wind into the froth, scooping up tiny fish with their beaks. The sky was gray, the clouds torn in strips like a ruined flag. Out on the horizon, he saw a sailboat trying to tack against the storm, the mast bending into the waves.

  He sat on a block of concrete that knifed into his buttocks, his fists propped on his thighs, his head bowed. He stared at the camp without aid of the binoculars. The building looked like a harmless photo snipped out of a newspaper, without depth or meaning, glued on cardboard. Then he used the binoculars again and saw the face of the chauffeur in the reflection of a desk lamp. The chauffeur was grinning, perhaps laughing at a joke, perhaps laughing at Chester. Emmeline sat in his lap.

  Chester pulled back the bolt on the carbine and snapped a round into the chamber.

  “What you doin’, mister?” a voice said.

  The flesh jumped off his back. He turned and saw a little black girl, no more than ten. She had her pigtails tied on top of her head with a pink ribbon. She wore tennis shoes and floppy shorts and a T-shirt with a laughing octopus on it.

  “Hi,” Chester said, his face like stretched rubber.

  “Is that an air gun?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You ain’t shooting the gulls, are you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You just target-practicing?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “Loretta. My mama work for the Vidrines. Up the road there.”

  “Do they know where you are?”

  “My mama do. Ain’t nobody else there.”

  “You should go back home. There’s a storm coming.”

  “Then I’ll go inside. What’s your name?”

  “Smiley.”

  “Hi, Smiley. Do you know somebody here?”

  “I have a friend named Miss Emmeline.”

  “Look, there’s a flying fish,” she said.

  He watched it glide above the waves, its fins extended, its scaled body as sleek as a spear blade. It disappeared, then rose again, defying the laws of nature.

  “How come it can fly?” the girl asked.

  “It was probably born in a place full of sharks. The sharks were eating all the little fish. So a magic lady who lives under the sea gave them wings. From that day on, they sailed above the water and got away from sharks.”

  “Where’s the magic lady?”

  “She’s still down there, taking care of little fish that don’t have a mommy or a daddy.”

  “I bet you made that up.”

  “Not me.”

  “You’re smiling.”

  “You make me smile,” he said.

  “What’s that can on the end of your gun?”

  “It stops the sound so when I’m target shooting, I don’t scare people.”

  “I got to go now. It was nice to meet you.”

  “Good-bye, Loretta.”

  She looked back. “Don’t get caught in the rain, no.”

  He watched her walk away, then stepped carefully among the chunks of concrete and placed himself on an embankment by a cluster of banana stalks with a clear view of the camp.

  Fifteen minutes passed. A line of black clouds veined with lightning had formed on the southern horizon. The chauffeur came out on the deck and propped his arms on the rail, his unbuttoned shirt swelling around him. Chester sighted and pulled the trigger.

  The chauffeur seemed to stiffen as though someone had touched him unexpectedly between the shoulder blades. A red flower bloomed against his shirt. He turned in a circle, his fingers splayed across his breastbone, and walked with the concentration of a tightrope performer toward the sliding door.

  Chester picked up the ejected shell and drove to the camp and knocked on the door. The carbine hung from his hand.

  Emmeline pulled the door open. Her mouth was twitching, her fingers slick with blood that was as thick as paint. “What have you done?”

  “Could I have a sandwich, please? I didn’t eat lunch. I need to pee-pee, too.”

  He walked past her. She was speechless, her eyelids fluttering, as translucent as a moth’s wings.

  * * *

  THROUGH A DOOR off the living room, he could see a double bed with the coverlet and pillows and sheets in disarray. The chauffeur was sitting on the rug by the sliding doors, one arm hooked over the end of the couch, breathing through his mouth as though he had run up a hill. Emmeline washed her hands in the kitchen sink, looking over her shoulder. The chauffeur began to moan.

  “Get the towels out of the bathroom,” she said to Chester. “There’s a first-aid kit in the closet. I have to think.”

  “I want a snack, Em.”

  “A snack?”

  “My tummy is hurting.”

  “Why did you shoot Swede?” she said, her voice pulling loose from her throat.

  “Who’s Swede?”

  “The man you just shot, you stupid shit.”

  “I have to talk to you about what I was told to do,” Chester said. “To the man with the convertible.”

  The chauffeur moaned again.

  “Shut up,” Chester said to Swede.

  “Chester, please do what I say. Close the curtains. Get some bandages. I didn’t mean to call you a bad word. I have to plan for us. I always took care of us, didn’t I?”

  “Did you know about the boy who lives with the fat man in the motor court?”

  “What boy? What are you talking about?”

  “The man named Purcel. He has a little boy living with him.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Get the kit out of the bathroom. I’ll have to call 911, and you’ll need to get out of here. Did anyone see you?”

  The chauffeur coughed blood on the carpet and began gesturing and making unintelligible sounds. Emmeline was looking out the window at the road.

  “I’ll be right back,” Chester said. He went into the living room and pulled up his trouser leg and removed the British commando knife strapped to his calf. A moment later, he came back into the kitchen and rinsed it in the sink and wiped it with a dish towel. Emmeline stared at him. “What did you just do?”

  “Not much. Asked him why he was writing on my cards. He didn’t answer. Now he can’t.”

  Chester opened the refrigerator and removed a carton of orange juice and drank from it. He heard her go into the living room. “Oh my God,” she said.

  He sat down at the breakfast table, a great fatigue draining through his chest and limbs, the fragmented pieces of his life assembling and reassembling before his eyes. He remembered the music of a calliope in Mexico City, the slap of a teacher’s hand, a punishment closet that had no light, a mattress pad soaked with urine.

  “Snap out of it, Chester,” Emmeline said. “You have to leave. I’ll call 911 and tell them we had a home invasion. They’ll believe me. They think a killer is after Jimmy. Did anyone see you?”

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  “Maybe isn’t good enough.”

  “A little colored girl named Loretta.”

  “She saw you with the gun?”

  “I tol
d her it was an air gun. I told a lie.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “With a family named Vidrine.”

  Her eyes burned into his face. “She saw your car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you give her your name?”

  “Just Smiley. Not my real name.” He looked at a thought inside his mind, a memory, a dark cloud that shouldn’t have been there. He blanched with guilt. “I said I had a friend named Miss Emmeline.”

  A twisted cough came out of her chest. “You gave her my name?”

  “She asked me, so I told her. I had already told one lie.”

  “You know what you have to do now, don’t you, Chester?”

  “No. Not what you’re thinking, Em. No.”

  “Yes. And anyone with her. You shouldn’t have done what you did. You’ve been a bad boy.”

  He hung his head and put his hands between his legs and clenched them with his thighs. She looked at her watch. “Take care of it, Chester. Now. Then call me. We’ll get through this.”

  “The little girl and the people in the house?”

  “We have to make sacrifices sometimes.”

  He nodded, then rose from the chair like a man in his sleep. He went into the living room and looked at the chauffeur curled in a ball on the carpet. He watched where he stepped and heard the first raindrops of the storm striking the windows and the metal roof and the glass doors, saw the rain denting the waves, swallowing the sky, probably thundering down on a sailboat and crew that were trying to reach the shore.

  He wondered if flying fish could lift above the waves during a storm of such magnitude. He wished a whirlpool would form around him and this house and Emmeline and suck them under the sea. He hefted up the carbine he had propped by the front door and walked back into the kitchen and fired until the bolt locked open on an empty magazine, the brass dancing like little soldiers on the hardwood floor.

  WHEN HELEN AND I arrived at the crime scene, the rain was driving hard on the bay, turning it into mist, sweeping in sheets across the roof of the house and deck. The 911 call came from a neighbor named Vidrine who said the daughter of his maid had told him about a man carrying a rifle. The neighbor had gone to the Nightingale camp and discovered the bodies. A fireman in a yellow raincoat with a hood met us at the door. He looked like a bewhiskered monk staring out of a cave. Behind us I could see the headlights and flashers of several emergency vehicles streaming through the rain.