DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "What d'you want?" the driver said.

  "Both of you guys are fired. Now get out of here and don't come back."

  "Listen to this guy. You think this is Dodge City?" the driver said.

  "Didn't you learn anything the first time around?" I said.

  "Yeah, that you're a prick who blindsided me, that I can sue your ass, that Julie's got lawyers who can—"

  I lifted the shotgun above the window ledge and screwed the barrel into his cheek.

  "Do yourself a favor and visit your family in New Orleans," I said.

  His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he tried to turn his head away from the pressure of the shotgun barrel. I pressed it harder into the hollow of his cheek.

  "Fuck it, do what the man says. I told you the job was turning to shit when Julie run off Cholo," the other man said. "Hey, you hear me, man, back off. We're neutral about any personal beefs you got, you understand what I'm saying? You ought to do something about that hard-on you got, knock it down with a hammer or something, show a little fucking control."

  I stepped back and pulled the shotgun free of the window. The driver stared at my hand wrapped in the trigger guard.

  "You crazy sonofabitch, you had the safety off," he said.

  "Happy motoring," I said.

  I waited until the taillights of the Cadillac had disappeared through the trees, then I walked up onto the trailer's steps, turned the door knob, and flung the door back into the wall.

  A girl not over nineteen, dressed only in panties and a pink bra, was wiggling into a pair of jeans by the side of two bunk beds that had been pushed together in the middle of the floor. Her long hair was unevenly peroxided and looked like twisted strands of honey on her freckled shoulders; for some reason the crooked lipstick on her mouth made me think of a small red butterfly. Julie Balboni stood at an aluminum sink, wearing only a black silk jockstrap, his salt-and-pepper curls in his eyes, his body covered with fine black hair, a square bottle of Scotch poised above a glass filled with cracked ice. His eyes dropped to the shotgun that hung from my right hand.

  "You finally losing your mind, Dave?" he said.

  I picked up the girl's blouse from the bed and handed it to her.

  "Are you from New Iberia?" I asked.

  "Yes, sir," she said, her eyes fastened on mine as she pushed her feet into a pair of pumps.

  "Stay away from this man," I said. "Women who hang around him end up dead."

  Her frightened face looked at Julie, then back at me.

  Rosie put her hands on the girl's shoulders and turned her toward the door.

  "You can go now," she said. "Listen to what Detective Robicheaux tells you. This man won't put you in the movies, not unless you want to work in pornographic films. Are you okay?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Here's your purse. Don't worry about what's happening here. It doesn't have anything to do with you. Just stay away from this man. He's in a lot of trouble," Rosie said.

  The girl looked again at Julie, then went quickly out the door and into the dark. Julie was putting on his trousers now, with his back to us. The walls were covered with felt paintings of red-mouthed tigers and boa constrictors wrapped around the bodies of struggling unicorns. By the door was the canvas bag filled with baseballs, gloves, and metal bats. Julie's skin looked brown and rubbed with oil in the glow from a bedside lava lamp.

  "It looks like you did a real number on Mikey Goldman's trailer," I said.

  He zipped his fly. "Like most of the time, you're wrong," he said. "I don't go around setting fires on my own movie set. That's Cholo Manelli's work."

  "Why does he want to hurt Mikey Goldman?"

  "He don't. He thought it was my trailer. He's got his nose bent out of joint about some imaginary wrong I done to him. The first thing Cholo does in the morning is stick his head up his hole. You guys ought to hang out together."

  "Why do you think I'm here, Julie?"

  "How the fuck should I know? Nothing you do makes sense to me anymore, Dave. You want to toss the place, see if that little chippy left a couple of 'ludes in the sheets?"

  "You think this is some chickenshit roust, Julie?"

  He combed his curls back over his head with his fingers. His navel looked like a black ball of hair above his trousers.

  "You take yourself too serious," he said.

  "Murphy Doucet has my daughter." I watched his face. He put his thumbnail into a molar and picked out a piece of food with it. "Did you hear what I said?"

  He poured three fingers of Scotch into his glass, then dropped a lemon rind into the ice, his face composed, his eyes glancing out the window at a distant flicker of lightning.

  "Too bad," he said.

  "Too bad, huh?"

  "Yeah. I don't like to hear stuff like that. It upsets me."

  "Upsets you, does it?"

  "Yeah. That's why I don't watch that show Unsolved Mysteries. It upsets me. Hey, maybe you can get her face on one of those milk cartons."

  As he drank from his highball, I could see the slight tug at the corner of his mouth, the smile in his eyes. He picked up his flowered shirt from the back of a chair and began putting it on in front of a bathroom door mirror as though we were not there.

  I handed Rosie the shotgun, put my hands on my hips, and studied the tips of my shoes. Then I slipped an aluminum bat out of the canvas bag, choked up on the taped handle, and ripped it down across his neck and shoulders. His forehead bounced off the mirror, pocking and spider-webbing the glass like it had been struck with a ball bearing. He turned back toward me, his eyes and mouth wide with disbelief, and I hit him again, hard, this time across the middle of the face. He crashed headlong into the toilet tank, his nose roaring blood, one side of his mouth drooping as though all the muscle endings in it had been severed.

  I leaned over and cuffed both of his wrists around the bottom of the stool. His eyes were receded and out of focus, close-set like a pig's. The water in the bowl under his chin was filling with drops of dark color like pieces of disintegrating scarlet cotton.

  I nudged his arm with the bat. His eyes clicked up into my face.

  "Where is she, Julie?" I said.

  "I cut Doucet loose. I don't have nothing to do with what he does. You get off my fucking case or I'm gonna square this, Dave. It don't matter if you're a cop or not, I'll put out an open contract, I'll cowboy your whole fucking family. I'll—"

  I turned around and took the shotgun out of Rosie's hands. I could see words forming in her face, but I didn't wait for her to speak. I bent down on the edge of Julie's vision.

  "Your window of opportunity is shutting down, Feet."

  He blew air out of his nose and tried to wipe his face on his shoulder.

  "I'm telling you the truth. I don't know nothing about what that guy does," he said. "He's a geek. . . . I don't hire geeks, I run them off. . . . I got enough grief without crazy people working for me."

  "You're lying again, Julie," I said, stepped back, leveled the shotgun barrel above his head, and fired at an angle into the toilet tank. The double-ought buckshot blew water and splintered ceramic all over the wall. I pumped the spent casing out on the floor. Julie jerked the handcuffs against the base of the stool, like an animal trying to twist itself out of a metal trap.

  I touched the warm tip of the barrel against his eyebrow.

  "Last chance, Feet."

  His eyes closed; he broke wind uncontrollably in his pants; water and small chips of ceramic dripped out of his hair.

  "He's got a camp south of Bayou Vista," he said. "It's almost to Atchafalaya Bay. The deed ain't in his name, nobody knows about it, it's like where he does all his weird stuff. It's right where the dirt road ends at the salt marsh. I seen it once when we were out on my boat."

  "Is my daughter there?" I said quietly.

  "I just told you, it's where he goes to be weird. You figure it out."

  "We'll be back later, Feet. You can make a lot of noise, if you like, but your gumba
lls are gone and the security guard is watching war movies. If I get my daughter back, I'll have somebody from the department come out and pick you up. You can file charges against me then or do

  whatever you want. If you've lied to me, that's another matter."

  Then I saw a secret concern working in his eyes, a worry, a fear that had nothing to do with me or the pain and humiliation that I had inflicted upon him. It was the fear that you inevitably see in the eyes of men like Julie and his kind when they realize that through an ironic accident they are now dealing with forces that are as cruel and unchecked by morality as the energies they'd awakened with every morning of their lives.

  "Cholo—" he said.

  "What about him?" I said.

  "He's out there somewhere."

  "I doubt it."

  "You don't know him. He carries a barber's razor. He's got fixations. He don't forget things. He tied parts of a guy all over a ceiling fan once."

  His chest moved up and down with his breathing against the rim of the toilet bowl. His brow was kneaded with lines, his nose a wet red smear against his face, his eyes twitching with a phlegmy light.

  I shut off the valve that was spewing water upward into the shattered tank, then found a quilt and a pile of towels in a linen closet and placed the towels under Julie's forearms and the quilt between his knees and the bottom of the stool.

  "That's about all I can do for you, Feet. Maybe it's the bottom of the ninth for both of us," I said.

  The front wheels of the truck shimmied on the cement as I wound up the transmission on Highway 90 southeast of town. It had stopped raining, the oaks and palm trees by the road's edge were coated with mist, and the moon was rising in the east like a pale white and mottled-blue wafer trailing streamers of cloud torn loose from the Gulf's horizon.

  "I think I'm beyond all my parameters now, Dave," Rosie said.

  "What would you do differently? I'd like for you to tell me that, Rosie."

  "I believe we should have Balboni picked up—suspicion for involvement in a kidnapping."

  "And my daughter would be dead as soon as Doucet heard about it. Don't tell me that's not true, either."

  "I'm not sure you're in control anymore, Dave. That remark about the bottom of the ninth—"

  "What about it?"

  "You're thinking about killing Doucet, aren't you?"

  "I can put you down at the four-corners up there. Is that what you want?"

  "Do you think you're the only person who cares about your daughter? Do you think I want to do anything that would put her in worse jeopardy than she's already in?"

  "The army taught me what a free-fire zone is, Rosie. It's a place where the winners make up the rules after the battle's over. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there."

  "You're wrong about all this, Dave. What we don't do is let the other side make us be like them."

  Ahead I could see the lighted, tree-shadowed white stucco walls of a twenty-four-hour filling station that had been there since the 1930s. I eased my foot off the gas pedal and looked across the seat at Rosie.

  "Go on," she said. "I won't say anything else."

  We drove through Jeanerette and Franklin into the bottom of the Atchafalaya Basin, where Louisiana's wetlands bled into the Gulf of Mexico, not far from where this story actually began with a racial lynching, in the year 1957. Rosie had fallen asleep against the door. At Bayou Vista I found the dirt road that led south to the sawgrass and Atchafalaya Bay. The fields looked like lakes of pewter under the moon, the sugarcane pressed flat like straw into the water. Wood farmhouses and barns were cracked sideways on their foundations, as though a gigantic thumb had squeezed down on their roofs, and along one stretch of road the telephone poles had been snapped off even with the ground for a half mile and flung like sticks into distant trees.

  Then the road entered a corridor of oaks, and through the trunks I saw four white horses galloping in circles in a mist-streaked pasture, spooking against the barbed-wire fences, mud flying from their hooves, their nostrils dilated, their eyes bright with fear against a backdrop of dry lightning, their muscles rippling under their skin like silvery water sliding over stone. Then I was sure I saw a figure by the side of the road, the palmetto shadows waving behind him, his steel-gray tunic buttoned at his throat, a floppy campaign hat pulled over his eyes.

  I hit my bright lights, and for just a moment I saw his elongated milk-white face as though a flashbulb had exploded in front of it. "What are you doing here?" I said.

  "Don't use those whom you love to justify a dishonorable cause."

  "That's rhetoric."

  "You gave the same counsel to the Sykes boy."

  "It was you who told me to do it under a black flag. Remember? We blow up their shit big time, general."

  "Then you will do it on your own, suh, and without me."

  The truck's front springs bounced in a chuckhole and splashed a sheet of dirty water across the window; then I was beyond the pasture and the horses that wheeled and raced in the moonlight, traveling deep into the tip of the wetlands, with flooded woods on each side of me, blue herons lifting on extended wings out of the canals, the moist air whipped with the smell of salt and natural gas from the oil platforms out in the swamp.

  The road bent out of the trees, and I saw the long expanses of sawgrass and mudflats that spread out into the bay, and the network of channels that had been cut by the oil companies and that were slowly poisoning the marshes with salt water. Rosie was awake now, rubbing her eyes with one knuckle, her face stiff with fatigue.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep," she said.

  "It's been a long day."

  "Where's the camp?"

  "There's some shacks down by the flats, but they look deserted."

  I pulled the truck to the side of the road and cut the lights. The tide was out, and the bay looked flat and gray and seabirds were pecking shellfish out of the wet sand in the moonlight. Then a wind gusted out of the south and bent a stand of willow trees that stood on a small knoll between the marsh and the bay.

  "Dave, there's a light back in those trees," Rosie said.

  Then I saw it, too, at the end of a two-lane sandy track that wound through the willows and over the knoll.

  "All right, let's do it," I said, and pushed down on the door handle.

  "Dave, before we go in there, I want you to hear something. If we find the wrong thing, if Alafair's not all right, it's not because of anything you did. It's important for you to accept that now. If I had been in your place, I'd have done everything the same way you have."

  I squeezed her hand.

  "A cop couldn't have a better partner than Rosie Gomez," I said.

  We got out of the truck and left the doors open to avoid making any unnecessary sound, and walked up the sandy track toward the trees. I could hear gulls cawing and wheeling overhead and the solitary scream of a nutria deep in the marsh. Humps of garbage stood by the sides of the track, and then I realized that it was medical waste—bandages, hypodermic vials, congealed bags of gelatin, sheets that were stiff with dried fluids.

  We moved away from the side of the road and into the trees. I walked with a shotgun at port arms, the .45 heavy in the right-hand pocket of my raincoat. Rosie had her chrome-plated .357 magnum gripped with both hands at an upward angle, just to the right of her cheek. Then the wind bent the trees again and blew a shower of wet leaves into a clearing, where we could see a tin-roofed cabin with a small gallery littered with cane poles, crab traps, and hand-thrown fishnets, and a Coleman lantern hissing whitely on a wood table in the front room. In the back were an outhouse and a pirogue set up on sawhorses, and behind the outhouse was Murphy Doucet's blue Mercury.

  A shadow moved across the window, then a man with his back to us sat down at the table with a coffee pot and a thick white mug in his hands. Even through the rusted screen I could see his stiff, gray military haircut and the deeply tanned skin of his neck whose tone and texture reminded me of a c
ured tobacco leaf.

  We should have been home free. But then I saw the moonlight glint on the wire that was stretched across the two-lane track, three inches above the sand. I propped the shotgun against a tree, knelt down in the wet leaves, and ran my fingers along the wire until I touched two empty Spam cans that were tied with string to the wire, then two more, then two more after that. Through the underbrush, against the glow of moonlight in the clearing, I could make out a whole network of nylon fishing line strung between tree trunks, branches, roots, and underbrush, and festooned with tin cans, pie plates, and even a cow bell.

  I was sweating heavily inside my raincoat now. I wiped the salt out of my eyes with my hand.

  One lung-bursting rush across the clearing, I thought. Clear the gallery in one step, bust the door out of the jamb, then park a big one in his brisket and it's over.

  But I knew better. I would sound like a traveling junkyard before I ever made the gallery, and if Alafair was still alive, in all probability he would be holding a pistol at her head.

  "We have to wait until it's light or until he comes out," I whispered to Rosie.

  We knelt down in the trees, in the damp air, in the layered mat of black and yellow willow leaves, in the mosquitoes that rose in clouds from around our knees and perched on our faces and the backs of our hands and necks. I saw him get up once, walk to a shelf, then return to the table and read a magazine while he ate soda crackers out of a box. My thighs burned and a band of pain that I couldn't relieve began to spread slowly across my back. Rosie sat with her rump resting on her heels, wiping the mosquitoes off her forearms, her pink skirt hiked up on her thighs, her .357 propped in the fork of a tree. Her neck was shiny with sweat.

  Then at shortly after four I could hear mullet jumping in the water, a 'gator flop his tail back in the marsh, a solitary mockingbird singing on the far side of the clearing. The air changed; a cool breeze lifted off the bay and blew the smell of fish and grass shrimp across the flats. Then a pale glow, like cobalt, like the watery green cast of summer light right before a rain, spread under the rim of banked clouds on the eastern horizon, and in minutes I could see the black shapes of jetties extending far out into the bay, small waves white-capping with the incoming tide, the rigging of a distant shrimp boat dropping below a swell.