Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  "Tell me what it is," she said.

  "You want to know?"

  "Dave, you're my whole life. How could I not want to know?"

  "Those sonsofbitches put me on my hands and knees and worked me over like they would a dog."

  I could see the pain in her eyes. Her hand went to my cheek, then to my throat.

  "Somebody will catch them. You know that," she said.

  "No, they're hunting on the game reserve. They're mainline badasses, and they don't have anybody more serious to deal with than a dry cleaner in a sheriff's suit."

  "You gave it up. We have a good life now. This is the place you've always wanted to come back to. Everybody in town likes you and respects you, and the people up and down the bayou are the best friends anyone could have. Now we have Alafair, too. How can you let a couple of criminals hurt all that?"

  "It doesn't work that way."

  "Yes, it does, if you look at what's right with your life instead of what's wrong with it."

  "Are you going to push the chair in front of the door?"

  She paused. Her face was quiet and purposeful. She turned off the light on the bedstand and pushed the heavy leather chair until it caught under the doorknob. In the moonlight through the window her curly gold hair looked as if it were flecked with silver. She pulled back the sheet and took away the ice bag, then touched me with her hand. The pain made both my knees jump.

  I heard her sigh as she sat back down on the side of the bed.

  "Are we going to fight with each other when we have a problem?" she said.

  "I'm not fighting with you, kiddo."

  "Yes, you are. You can't turn loose of the past, Dave. You get hurt, or you see something that's wrong in the world, and all the old ways come back to you."

  "I can't help that."

  "Maybe not. But you don't live alone anymore." She took my hand and lay down beside me again. "There's me, and now there's Alafair, too."

  "I'll tell you what it feels like, and I won't say any more. You remember when I told you about how those North Vietnamese regulars overran us and the captain surrendered to them? They tied our hands around trees with piano wire, then took turns urinating on us. That's what it feels like."

  She was quiet a long time. I could hear breathing in the dark. Then she took a deep breath and let it out and put her arm across my chest.

  "I have a very bad feeling inside me, Dave," she said.

  There was nothing more to say. How could there be? Even the most sympathetic friends and relatives of a battery or assault victim could not understand what that individual experiences. Over the years I had questioned people who had been molested by degenerates, mugged by street punks, shanked and shot by psychopaths, gang-banged and sodomised by outlaw bikers. They all had the same numb expression, the same drowning eyes, the same knowledge that they somehow deserved their fate and that they were absolutely alone in the world. And often we made their grief and humiliation even greater by ascribing the responsibility for their suffering to their own incaution, so that we could remain psychologically invulnerable ourselves.

  I wasn't being fair to Annie. She had paid her share of dues, but there are times when you are very alone in the world and your own thoughts flay your skin an inch at a time. This was one of them.

  I didn't sleep that night. But then insomnia and I were old companions.

  Two days later the swelling between my legs had gone down and I could walk without looking like I was straddling a fence. The sheriff came out to see me at the boat dock and told me he had talked to the Lafayette city police and Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA. Lafayette had sent a couple of detectives to question Eddie Keats at his bar, but he claimed that he had taken two of his dancers sailing on the day I was beaten up, and the two dancers corroborated his story.

  "Are they going to accept that?" I said.

  "What are they supposed to do?"

  "Do some work and find out where those girls were two days ago."

  "Do you know how many cases those guys probably have?"

  "I'm not sympathetic, Sheriff. People like Keats come into our area because they think they have a free pass. What did Minos P. Dautrieve have to say?"

  The sheriff's face colored and the skin at the corner of his mouth tugged slightly in a smile.

  "I think he said you'd better get your ass into his office," the sheriff replied.

  "Those were his words?"

  "I believe so."

  "Why's he mad at me?"

  "I get the impression he thinks you're messing around in federal business."

  "Does he know anything about a Haitian named Toot?"

  "No. I went through Baton Rouge and the National Crime Information Center in Washington and couldn't find out anything, either."

  "He's probably an illegal. There's no paper on him," I said.

  "That's what Dautrieve said."

  "He's a smart cop."

  I saw a look of faint embarrassment in the sheriff's eyes, and I felt instantly sorry for my remark.

  "Well, I promise you I'll give it my best, Dave," he said.

  "I appreciate what you've done."

  "I'm afraid I haven't done very much."

  "Look, these guys are hard to put away," I said. "I worked two years on the case of a syndicate hit man who pushed his wife off a fourth-floor balcony into a dry swimming pool. He even told me he did it. He walked right out of it because we took her diary out of the condo without a warrant. How about that for first-rate detective work? Every time I'd see him in a bar, he'd send a drink over to my table. It really felt good."

  He smiled and shook hands.

  "One more thing before I go," he said. "A man named Monroe from Immigration was in my office yesterday. He was asking questions about you."

  The sunlight was bright on the bayou. The oaks and cypress on the far side made deep shadows on the bank.

  "He was out here the day after that plane went down at Southwest Pass," I said.

  "He asked if you had a little girl staying with you."

  "What'd you tell him?"

  "I told him I didn't know. I also told him it wasn't my business. But I got the feeling he wasn't really interested in some little girl. You bother him for some reason."

  "I gave him a bad time."

  "I don't know those federal people that well, but I don't think they drive up from New Orleans just because a man with a fish dock gives them a bad time. What's that fellow after, Dave?"

  "I don't know."

  "Look, I don't want to tell you what to do, but if you and Annie are helping out a little girl that doesn't have any parents, why don't you let other folks help you, too? People around here aren't going to let anybody take her away."

  "My father used to say that a catfish had whiskers so he'd never go into a hollow leg he couldn't turn around in. I don't trust those people at Immigration, Sheriff. Play on their terms and you'll lose."

  "I think maybe you got a dark view sometimes, Dave."

  "You better believe it," I said.

  I watched him drive away on the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees. I clicked my fingers on the warm board rail that edged my dock, then walked up to the house and had lunch with Annie and Alafair.

  An hour later I took the.45 automatic and the full clip of hollow-points from the dresser drawer and walked with them inside the folded towel to the pickup truck and put them in the glove box. Annie watched me from the front porch, her arm leaned against a paintless wood post. I could see her breasts rise and fall under her denim shirt.

  "I'm going to New Orleans. I'll be back tonight," I said.

  She didn't answer.

  "It's not going to take care of itself," I said. "The sheriff is a nice guy who should be cleaning stains out of somebody's sports coat. The feds don't have jurisdiction in an assault case. The Lafayette cops don't have time to solve crimes in Iberia Parish. That means we fall through the cracks. Screw that."

  "I'm sure that somehow that makes sense. You know, r
ah, rah for the penis and all that. But I wonder if Dave is giving Dave a shuck so we can march off to the wars again."

  Her face was cheerless and empty.

  I watched the wind flatten the leaves in the pecan trees, then I opened the door of the pickup.

  "I need to take some money out of savings to help somebody," I said. "I'll put it back next month."

  "What can I say? Like your first wife told you, 'Keep it high and hard, podjo," she said, and went back inside the house.

  The sweep of wind in the pecan trees seemed deafening.

  I gassed up the truck at the dock, then as an afterthought I went inside the bait shop, sat at the wooden counter with a Dr. Pepper, and called Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette. While the phone rang I gazed out the window at the green leaves floating on the bayou.

  "I understand you want my ass in your office," I said.

  "Yeah, what the fuck's going on over there?"

  "Why don't you drive over and find out?"

  "You sound funny."

  "I have stitches in my mouth."

  "They bounced you around pretty good, huh?"

  "What's this about you wanting my ass in your office?"

  "I'm curious. Why are a bunch of farts who deal dope and whores so interested in you? I think maybe you're on to something we don't know about."

  "I'm not."

  "I think also you may have the delusion you're still a police officer."

  "You've got things turned around a little bit. When a guy gets his cojones and his face kicked in, he becomes the victim. The guys who kick in his cojones and face are the criminals. These are the guys you get mad at. The object is to put them in jail."

  "The sheriff said you can't identify Keats."

  "I didn't see his face."

  "And you never saw the Zulu before?"

  "Keats, or whoever the white guy was, said he was one of Baby Doc's tontons macoute."

  "What do you want us to do, then?"

  "If I remember our earlier conversation right, y'all were going to handle it."

  "It's after the fact now. And I don't have authority in this kind of assault case. You know that."

  I looked out the window at the leaves floating on the brown current.

  "Do you all ever salt the mine shaft?" I said.

  "You mean plant dope on a suspect? Are you serious?"

  "Save the Boy Scout stuff. I've got a wife and another person in my home who are in jeopardy. You said you were going to handle things. You're not handling anything. Instead I get this ongoing lecture that somehow I'm the problem in this situation."

  "I never said that."

  "You don't have to. A collection of moral retards runs millions in drugs through the bayous, and you probably don't nail one of them in fifty. It's frustrating. It looks bad on the monthly report. You wonder if you're going to be transferred to Fargo soon. So you make noise about civilians meddling in your business."

  "I don't like the way you're talking to me, Robicheaux."

  "Too bad. I'm the guy with the stitches. If you want to do something for me, figure out a way to pick up Keats."

  "I'm sorry you got beat up. I'm sorry we can't do more. I understand your anger. But you were a cop and you know our limits. So how about easing off the Purple Heart routine?"

  "You told me Keats's bars have hookers in them. Get the local heat to park patrol cars in front of his bars a few nights. You'll bring his own people down on him."

  "We don't operate that way."

  "I had a feeling you'd say that. See you around, partner. Don't hang on the rim too long. Everybody will forget you're in the game."

  "You think that's clever?"

  I hung up on him, finished my Dr. Pepper, and drove down the dirt road in the warm wind that thrashed the tree limbs overhead. The bayou was covered with leaves now, and back in the shadows on the far bank I could see cottonmouths sleeping on the lower branches of the willow trees, just above the water's languid surface. I rumbled across the drawbridge into town, withdrew three hundred dollars from the bank, then took the back road through the sugarcane fields to St. Martinville and caught the interstate to New Orleans.

  The wind was still blowing hard as I drove down the long concrete causeway over the Atchafalaya swamp. The sky was still a soft blue and filled with tumbling white clouds, but a good storm was building out on the Gulf and I knew that by evening the southern horizon would be black and streaked with rain and lightning. I watched the flooded willow trees bend in the wind, and the moss on the dead cypress in the bays straighten and fall, and the way the sunlight danced and shattered on the water when the surface suddenly wrinkled from one shore to the next. The Atchafalaya basin encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, willow islands, sand bogs, green leaves covered with buttercups, wide bays dotted with dead cypress and oil-well platforms, and flooded woods filled with cottonmouths, alligators, and black clouds of mosquitoes. My father and I had fished and hunted all over the Atchafalaya when I was a boy, and even on a breezy spring day like this we knew how to catch bull bream and goggle-eye perch when nobody else would catch them. In the late afternoon we'd anchor the pirogue on the lee side of a willow island, when the mosquitoes would start to swarm out of the trees, and cast our bobbers back into the quiet water, right against the line of lilly pads, and wait for the bream and goggle-eye to start feeding on the insects. In an hour we'd fill our ice chest with fish.

  But my reverie about boyhood moments with my father could not get rid of the words Annie had said to me. She had wanted to raise a red welt across the heart, and she had done a good job of it. But maybe what bothered me worse was the fact that I knew she had hurt me only because she had an unrelieved hurt inside herself. Her reference to a statement made by my first wife was an admission that maybe there was a fundamental difference in me, a deeply ingrained character flaw, that neither Annie nor my ex-wife nor perhaps any sane woman would ever be able to accept. I was not simply a drunk; I was drawn to a violent and aberrant world the way a vampire bat seeks a black recess within the earth.

  My first wife's name was Niccole, and she was a dark-haired, beautiful girl from Martinique who loved horse racing almost as much as I. But unfortunately she loved money and clubhouse society even more. I could have almost forgiven her infidelities in our marriage, until we both discovered that her love affairs were not motivated by lust for other men but rather contempt for me and loathing for the dark, alcoholic energies that governed my life.

  We had been at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain, and I had been drinking all afternoon at Jefferson Downs and now I had reached the point where I didn't even bother to leave the small bar under the mimosa trees at the lawn party and make a pretense of interest at the conversation around me. The wind was balmy and it rattled the dry palm fronds on the lakeshore, and I watched the red sun set on the horizon and reflect on the green, capping surface of the water. In the distance, white sailboats lurched in fountains of spray toward the Southern Yacht Club. I could feel the whiskey in my face, the omiscient sense of control that alcohol always brought me, the bright flame of metaphysical insight burning behind my eyes.

  But my seersucker sleeve was damp from the bar, and my words were thick and apart from me when I asked for another Black Jack and water.

  Then Niccole was standing next to me with her current lover, a geologist from Houston. He was a summer mountain climber, and he had a rugged, handsome profile like a Roman's and a chest that looked as hard as a barrel. Like all the other men there, he wore the soft tropical colors of the season-a pastel shirt, a white linen suit, a purple knit tie casually loose at the throat, he ordered Manhattans for both of them, then while he waited for the Negro bartender to fix their drinks he stroked the down on top of Nicole's arm as though I were not there.

  Later, I would not be able to describe accurately any series of feelings or events after that moment. I felt something rip like wet newspaper in the back of my head; I saw his startled face look suddenly into
mine; I saw it twist and convulse as my fist came across his mouth; I felt his hands try to grab my coat as he went down; I saw the genuine fear in his eyes as I rained my fists down on him and then caught his throat between my hands.

  When they pulled me off him, his tongue was stuck in his throat, his skin was the color of ash, and his cheeks were covered with strings of pink spittle. My wife was sobbing uncontrollably on the host's shoulder.

  When I awoke on our houseboat the next morning, my eyes shuddering in the hard light refracting off the lake, I found the note she had left me:

  Dear Dave,

  I don't know what it is you're looking for, but three years of marriage to you have convinced me I don't want to be there when you find it. Sorry about that. As your pitcher-bartender friend says, Keep it high and hard, podjo.

  Niccole

  I followed the highway through the eastern end of the Atchafalaya basin. White cranes rose above the dead cypress in the sunlight just as the first drops of rain began to dimple the water below the causeway. I could smell the wet sand, the moss, the four-o'clock flowers, the toadstools, the odor of dead fish and sour mud blowing on the wind out of the marsh. A big willow tree by the water's edge looked like a woman's hair in the wind.

  4

  THE RAIN WAS falling out of a blue-black sky when I parked the pickup truck in front of the travel agency in New Orleans. I knew the owner, and he let me use his WATS line to call a friend in Key West. Then I bought a one-way ticket there for seventy-nine dollars.

  Robin lived in a decrepit Creole-style apartment building off South Rampart. The cracked brick and mortar had been painted purple; the red tiles in the roof were broken; the scrolled iron grillwork on the balconies had burst loose from its fastenings and was tilted at odd angles. The banana and palm trees in the courtyard looked as though they had never been pruned, and the dead leaves and fronds clicked loudly in the rain and wind. Dark-skinned children rode tricycles up and down the second-floor balcony, and all the apartment doors were open and even in the rain you could hear an incredible mixed din of daytime television, Latin music, and people shouting at each other.