The Glass Rainbow dr-18

by James Lee Burke

“You’re breaking up, partner,” I said.

  “My cousin saw… blue… the guy with… about three miles… help you.”

  “Move to a different spot. I’m not reading you.”

  “Three miles… the guy with the Florida… blue pickup truck… the guy… out and…”

  “Hang up and call back. I’m going to move my truck.”

  “I’ll… landline,” he said.

  “Hello?”

  The transmission went dead. I started the engine and began to drive down to the trees by the river so I could get under some cover that would deaden the sound of the rain and hail on my cab. Before I had driven ten yards, the cell phone rang again.

  “It’s Marvin. I’m on the store phone now. Can you hear me, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Yeah, but please repeat everything you said. Very little of it came through.”

  “My cousin came into the store and said some guys in a white car with a Florida tag got into it with a guy driving a beat-up blue pickup. Behind the old creamery about two miles south of me. My cousin said he thought they were just talking, but when he looked in his rearview mirror, he could see they were arguing. It was starting to rain, and he didn’t see everything real good, but he thought a guy from the white car shoved the guy driving the pickup. My cousin thinks maybe the guy in the pickup was in deep shit. I don’t know if this is any help to you or not.”

  “The guy in deep shit was driving a blue pickup truck?”

  “That’s what my cousin said. The guy had black hair that was combed up on his head in a square. That’s how my cousin described it. He sounds like the guy you were looking for, doesn’t he?”

  “You bet he does. Does your cousin know where any of these guys went?”

  “No, sir. He felt it wasn’t his business, but then he got bothered about it. You know, two against one?”

  “You did the right thing, and so did your cousin. Call me back if y’all see any of these guys again.”

  “One other thing. My cousin said there was a van parked close by. He didn’t know if anybody was in it.”

  “A cargo van?”

  “He said a delivery van. Same thing, huh?”

  “What color van?”

  “He didn’t say. Sir, can you tell us what’s going on here?”

  “When I figure it out, I’ll get back to you,” I replied.

  “Where are you?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because to tell you the truth, I think you might be messing with some bad dudes. This place isn’t like the place I grew up in, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  I closed my cell phone and drove in a wide arc behind the Acadian cottage, watching the rain swirl across the grass in the field and on the gum trees and on the surface of the river. I had lowered my windows a half inch and could smell the odor of the Gulf and feel the power the storm seemed to draw from both the sky and the land. The river was already running high and wide, the water way over its banks, a yellow froth scudding through the flooded tree trunks. Then out of nowhere, overhead, I saw the same red airplane I had seen earlier, except this time it was fighting hard against the wind, its wings buffeting, its landing lights sparking whitely. What was a crop duster — if that’s what it was — doing up in weather like this? I asked myself.

  When I turned back toward the paved road, trying to stay on the high ground as I passed the Acadian cottage, I stared through my windshield and realized I wasn’t alone.

  A dented, paint-skinned blue pickup truck had come to a stop in the grassy field midway between the Acadian cottage and the road, its headlights on high beam and its windshield wipers flying. I pressed down on the brake and slipped my transmission into neutral and waited. But the blue pickup, the same one I had seen parked at Vidor Perkins’s house, did not move. The sky was completely black now, the airplane gone, the entirety of the landscape so devoid of light that the pale grass in the fields seemed luminous by comparison. In the background the rain was blowing in gray sheets, smudging out the paved road and the farmhouses in the distance.

  I took my pair of Russian field glasses from the glove box and focused them on the windshield of Perkins’s truck. I could see a solitary figure inside, but I couldn’t make out the features. I unsnapped the strap on my .45 and lifted it from its leather holster and set it beside me on the seat. The driver of the blue pickup remained motionless behind the steering wheel, the headlights smoking in the rain.

  What’s it going to be, Vidor? You just want to prove how crazy you are? Are you trying to impress someone? Is this your chance to take me off the board?

  Or was the driver Vidor Perkins? The former soldier at the crossroads store had said a man who was probably Vidor Perkins had gotten into it with two men who had been driving a white car with a Florida tag. Had they commandeered his truck and perhaps weighted Vidor with a cinder block and dumped him in a pond?

  But as though he had read my mind, the driver got out of the pickup and walked in front of his headlights and lifted his arms out from his sides. I refocused my field glasses on his face. There was no question whom I was looking at. There was also no doubt what he was trying to tell me: Vidor Perkins was unarmed and not a source of danger to me or anyone else. To emphasize that fact, he pulled off his shirt and dropped it in the weeds, the rain melting the grease in his hair, glazing his bare shoulders and arms against the beams of his headlights.

  But there was a problem with Perkins’s dramatic display of his innocuousness. Perkins had been jailing most of his life. He knew every ritual associated with every aspect of arrest at a crime scene. He knew what the cost could be for pulling a cell phone from his pocket or tucking the tail of his shirt into his trousers at the wrong moment. He knew how to keep both hands outside a car window if he was pulled to a stop on a road. He knew never to fumble in his glove box for his registration or reach into his coat for ID unless told to do so. He knew what to do on the yard if a warning shot was fired from a gun tower. He knew how to turn into a non-seeing, non-hearing piece of stone after somebody was shanked in a corner and the shank was passed hand to hand before it was thrown at someone’s feet. Vidor was a walking encyclopedia of criminal knowledge. If he had wanted to demonstrate convincingly that he was unarmed, he would have turned his trouser pockets inside out and rotated in a full circle, his arms straight out at his sides, to show me that he did not have a pistol stuffed in his pockets or behind the back of his belt. Inexplicably, he was not doing what he knew I expected.

  I turned my truck at an angle to him and rolled down my window. “On your face, Mr. Perkins,” I said.

  But he gave no reply.

  “Guys like us are old school. Don’t disappoint me,” I said.

  His gaze was riveted on me, the rain separating his hair on his scalp. I thought I could see his lips moving, but I wasn’t sure. “Want to tell me something?” I said.

  He started walking toward me, his hands out by his sides, his face twitching.

  “That’s far enough, Mr. Perkins.”

  He was close enough now for me to see him swallow. “I been trying to he’p,” he said.

  “I got that impression. You want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “Nothing. I saw your truck is all.”

  “Put your hands on your head.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now turn in a circle.”

  “I’m gonna get down on my face.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m just trying to come into compliance here. I was doing my research. I went to the black lady’s house—”

  “You place your hands on the crown of your head and turn around, Mr. Perkins.”

  “Yes, sir, whatever you say.” He knitted his fingers on top of his head and rotated in a circle. When he looked at me again, his chest was rising and falling, his mouth shaping and reshaping itself, like rubber, as though he wanted to speak words that he didn’t know how to form. The skin around
his eyes was bloodless, like that of a man who was seasick. There was a red knot on his collarbone, with two punctures in it, as though he had been bitten by a snake.

  “Who was in that airplane, Mr. Perkins?”

  “I didn’t see no plane.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I got nothing to do with no plane.”

  “Walk toward me.”

  “If you’re gonna bust me, do it. I’m getting on my face. Hook me up. I ain’t here to give you trouble. No, sir, that’s not my way.”

  “No, you will walk toward me, then you will get on your knees. You will do that right now.”

  I picked up my .45 from the seat and opened the door and stepped outside. Then I realized I had missed something. Far behind Perkins’s truck, on the opposite side of the paved road, a gray cargo van was parked under an oak tree, its sliding door open wide.

  “Walk toward me,” I said.

  “No.”

  I cocked back the hammer on my .45. “Do it or I blow your fucking head off,” I said.

  “Mr. Robicheaux, I ain’t a bad man. I didn’t bargain for this. I didn’t have no choice.” He lowered one hand and touched the knot on his collarbone. “See.”

  “You have two seconds to move, Mr. Perkins. Look into my face and tell me I won’t do it. No, don’t look behind you. Look at me.”

  “Yes, sir, I believe you. I’m coming. I apologize for scaring your daughter. I apologize for messing in your life. Mr. Robicheaux, let me explain.” But he couldn’t control his fear. I could see tears welling in his eyes.

  “Come toward me, Mr. Perkins,” I said, pointing the .45 with both hands at the center of his face.

  “Let me get on the ground, sir. Right now. I cain’t walk no more. I went to the bathroom in my pants.”

  “No, you will do what I say.”

  I shifted my position so he was directly between me and the parked van. He looked pleadingly into my eyes. “I didn’t start that fire when I was a kid. It was them other boys. That’s been on my sheet all these years, something I never did. I went from one state home to another. I learned how to draw trees for psychiatrists. If you cain’t make the pencil line come back on itself, they say you’re schizophrenic. That can get you a free pass out of a jail or the wrong foster home. That’s how I grew up.”

  “Tell me about it later, bub. Who’s in the van?”

  I would never get a reply to my question. I heard a dull, wet pop inside the rain and simultaneously saw Vidor Perkins’s jaw drop and an exit wound the size and shape of a watermelon plug fountain from just above his right eye. His motors were cut, and he went straight down on the ground, his eyes never closing, his head tilted upward like a man catching a glimpse of a bird streaking by overhead.

  I was staring across the field at the rain-dimmed outline of the cargo van and the dark opening in its side, where I was sure the shooter was now sighting on me.

  I piled inside the cab of my truck, my head below windshield level, just as two rounds blew out the glass in the driver’s door. I had knocked my cell phone off the seat and could not find it on the floor. I tried to twist the ignition and start the engine, but the shooter changed his line of fire and went to work on the front of the truck, punching holes in the radiator, flattening the right front tire all the way to the rim, whanging at least two rounds off the engine block.

  I found the two extra magazines I kept in the glove box. With my head still down, I opened the passenger door and rolled out on the ground, my .45 in my right hand, my cell phone still lost somewhere under a seat or a floor mat. The shooter let off three more rounds, one punching through the dashboard and ricocheting off the steering wheel. Ironically, the shooter, in flattening the tire, had improved my position. The right side of the truck had sunk almost to ground level, reducing my exposure, and from a kneeling position, I could steady my arm on the side of the headlight and aim on the van. Up until that point, I believed the shooter thought he might have nailed me. I could feel my heart pounding with adrenaline, my skin tingling with expectation. It’s a strange moment, a euphoric high that probably goes back to the cave and later on makes you wonder if bloodlust isn’t much more a part of your chemistry than you wish to concede. But everyone who has been there knows what I’m talking about. The dark corners of the mind are suddenly lit with a clarity that frees you from every fear you ever had.

  I opened up in earnest, squeezing off one round after another, the heavy frame and checkered grips bucking solidly in my palm. The 1911-model army .45 is a lovely weapon to have on your side. Its reliability, power, accuracy, and the amount of damage it can create in a few seconds have no equal, at least in my view. No matter how well armed the person on the receiving end is, he knows he’s not leaving the fight without a bloody nose. When the slide locked open, I pressed the release button on the empty magazine and let it drop from the frame. I shoved in another magazine and slammed it hard into place with the heel of my hand, then released the slide and let it chamber another round. But before I could fire again, I realized that I had more to deal with than the shooter in the van.

  The low-slung white car with the charcoal windows and the hood spray-painted with primer had come up the road from the south and was now turning in to the field, the driver positioning his vehicle behind the rusted tractor that shimmered whenever lightning jumped between the clouds. I saw the front passenger window go down and an arm come out and the barrel of a weapon with a folding wire stock on it point in my direction. This time I wasn’t going to be a stationary target. I got to my feet and started running through the field toward the river, sheets of rain swirling around me, the grass thick and sharp-edged and well over my knees, water and mud exploding from under my shoes.

  I heard three shots from the automobile. I could also hear the driver gunning his engine, his tires whining as they slid over the muck in the field, and I suspected the shooter was firing wildly. I zigzagged as I ran, my lungs burning, the rain stinging my eyes. The Acadian cottage was behind me now, shielding me from the van, but I still had the shooter in the car to worry about. I turned in a circle, almost falling down, and let off one round at the car’s windshield, but I heard no impact and suspected I had fired high. Then I ran full tilt down a coulee that was brown with runoff from the field, grabbing roots and morning glory vines on either side of it for support, until I splashed into a stand of willows and gum trees whose trunks were under at least two feet of water.

  My chest was heaving, my clothes drenched and heavy. I waded downstream between the trees for thirty yards. The rain was striking the river so hard the air glowed with a misty yellow light six inches above the surface. I held on to a tree trunk and opened and closed my mouth, trying to clear my hearing of the kettledrums beating in my head. I stuck the .45 in my belt and swallowed hard and pushed my thumbs under my ears, but nothing worked. The world had become a cacophony of distorted sound that could have been a high-powered engine approaching the riverbank or the humming of the current through the flooded trees.

  I waded back up on the bank, then got down on my knees and worked my way up a clay-slick slope, holding on to cypress roots, until I was in an eroded pocket where I could look out upon the field with minimum exposure. My .45 was smeared with a grayish-pink clay, and I wiped it clean with a wet handkerchief and pointed the barrel downward and hit it to free it of any obstructions inside. Then I raised my head above the embankment. I discovered I had dramatically underestimated my adversaries. These were not nickel-and-dime gumballs. They were cleaners.

  The cargo van and white car were parked deep in the field now, and two men wearing dark raincoats with hoods were loading the body of Vidor Perkins into the van. One of them glanced back at the road, which was almost invisible inside the storm. They closed the van and joined three other men wearing the same type of raincoats, and the five of them began advancing through the grass, not unlike a line of hunters flushing quail from a field.

  I had heard about their kind, and years ago I had even had
an encounter with a paramilitary group that brought a black ops operation into New Orleans, but I had never seen them work up close. The urban legend was they sanitized crime scenes, vacuuming them and scrubbing them down with bleach and, if necessary, replacing walls and carpets and furniture and repainting walls and ceilings. The darker story was they carted off their victims and had them compacted inside junk cars or ground into fish chum. These were stories I had never wanted to believe, because the personnel who did this kind of work were not products of the underworld but had been taught their trade by their government.

  The five men in hooded raincoats were fanning out, their weapons cradled across their chests. I calculated I had perhaps twenty to thirty seconds before they reached the edge of the embankment. When that happened, I would be pinned down and flanked on both sides. I looked behind me. I could try to swim the river, but the opposite bank was steep and clay-sided and devoid of any trees along the mudflat. As soon as I was stranded there, they could pot me as easily as shooting a coon in a bare cornfield. I could try to swim to the next bend downstream, but I would be visible and exposed for at least a hundred yards, and my pursuers could run along the bank and cut me to pieces.

  What do you do under those circumstances? I had eight hollow-point rounds in my .45 and a full magazine in my back pocket. The storm had effectively isolated the environment I was in. Even if someone passed on the paved road, it was unlikely he would take notice of the events down by the river. Over the years I had read of historical situations that were similar, and I had always wondered what I would do. The French Legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu, most of whom were Germans, had kept repeating over and over “Cameroon,” in memory of the famous last stand their antecedents had made in defense of Maximilian during Benito Juárez’s war for Mexico’s independence. Crocket and Bowie and Travis and 185 others went down to the last man at the Alamo, Crocket run through against the barracks wall, Bowie firing his pistols into his executioners in the infirmary just before he was tossed on top of their bayonets. Custer and his men died bravely on the hilltop overlooking the Little Big Horn River, although as many as thirty troopers may have committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be taken half alive and subjected to a fiendish death.