DR10 - Sunset Limited

I would like to thank the following
attorneys for all the
legal information they have provided me in the writing of my books over
the years: my son James L. Burke, Jr., and my daughter Alafair Burke
and my cousins Dracos Burke and Porteus Burke.

I would also like once again to thank my wife Pearl, my editor
Patricia Mulcahy, and my agent Philip Spitzer for the many years they
have been on board.

I'd also like to thank my daughters Pamela McDavid and Andree
Walsh, from whom I ask advice on virtually everything.

I HAD SEEN A DAWN like this one only
twice in my life: once in
Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night
trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years
earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered
the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny
nails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall.

Just before the sun broke above the Gulf's rim, the wind,
which had blown the waves with ropes of foam all night, suddenly died
and the sky became as white and brightly grained as polished bone, as
though all color had been bled out of the air, and the gulls that had
swooped and glided over my wake lifted into the haze and the swells
flattened into an undulating sheet of liquid tin dimpled by the
leathery backs of stingrays.

The eastern horizon was strung with rain clouds and the sun
should have risen out of the water like a mist-shrouded egg yolk, but
it didn't. Its red light mushroomed along the horizon, then rose into
the sky in a cross, burning in the center, as though fire were trying
to take the shape of a man, and the water turned the heavy dark color
of blood.

Maybe the strange light at dawn was only coincidence and had
nothing to do with the return to New Iberia of Megan Flynn, who, like a
sin we had concealed in the confessional, vexed our conscience, or
worse, rekindled our envy.

But I knew in my heart it was not coincidence, no more so than
the fact that the man crucified against the barn wall was Megan's
father and that Megan herself was waiting for me at my dock and bait
shop, fifteen miles south of New Iberia, when Clete Purcel, my old
Homicide partner from the First District in New Orleans, and I cut the
engines on my cabin cruiser and floated through the hyacinths on our
wake, the mud billowing in clouds that were as bright as yellow paint
under the stern.

It was sprinkling now, and she wore an orange silk shirt and
khaki slacks and sandals, her funny straw hat spotted with rain, her
hair dark red against the gloom of the day, her face glowing with a
smile that was like a thorn in the heart.

Clete stood by the gunnel and looked at her and puckered his
mouth. "Wow," he said under his breath.

SHE WAS ONE OF those rare women gifted
with eyes that could
linger briefly on yours and make you feel, rightly or wrongly, you were
genuinely invited into the mystery of her life.

"I've seen her somewhere," Clete said as he prepared to climb
out on the bow.

"Last week's
Newsweek
magazine," I said.

"That's it. She won a Pulitzer Prize or something. There was a
picture of her hanging out of a slick," he said. His gum snapped in his
jaw.

She had been on the cover, wearing camouflage pants and a
T-shirt, with dog tags around her neck, the downdraft of the British
helicopter whipping her hair and flattening her clothes against her
body, the strap of her camera laced around one wrist, while, below,
Serbian armor burned in columns of red and black smoke.

But I remembered another Megan, too: the in-your-face orphan
of years ago, who, with her brother, would run away from foster homes
in Louisiana and Colorado, until they were old enough to finally
disappear into that wandering army of fruit pickers and wheat
harvesters whom their father, an unrepentant IWW radical, had spent a
lifetime trying to organize.

I stepped off the bow onto the dock and walked toward my truck
to back the trailer down the ramp. I didn't mean to be impolite. I
admired the Flynns, but you paid a price for their friendship and
proximity to the vessel of social anger their lives had become.

"Not glad to see me, Streak?" she said.

"Always glad. How you doin', Megan?"

She looked over my shoulder at Clete Purcel, who had pulled
the port side of the boat flush into the rubber tires on my dock and
was unloading the cooler and rods out of the stern. Clete's thick arms
and fire-hydrant neck were peeling and red with fresh sunburn. When he
stooped over with the cooler, his tropical shirt split across his back.
He grinned at us and shrugged his shoulders.

"That one had to come out of the Irish Channel," she said.

"You're not a fisher, Meg. You out here on business?"

"You know who Cool Breeze Broussard is?" she asked.

"A house creep and general thief."

"He says your parish lockup is a toilet. He says your jailer
is a sadist."

"We lost the old jailer. I've been on leave. I don't know much
about the new guy."

"Cool Breeze says inmates are gagged and handcuffed to a
detention chair. They have to sit in their own excrement. The U.S.
Department of Justice believes him."

"Jails are bad places. Talk to the sheriff, Megan. I'm off the
clock."

"Typical New Iberia. Bullshit over humanity."

"See you around," I said, and walked to my truck. Rain was
pinging in large, cold drops on the tin roof of the bait shop.

"Cool Breeze said you were stand-up. He's in lockdown now
because he dimed the jailer. I'll tell him you were off the clock," she
said.

"This town didn't kill your father."

"No, they just put me and my brother in an orphanage where we
polished floors with our knees. Tell your Irish friend he's beautiful.
Come out to the house and visit us, Streak," she said, and walked
across the dirt road to where she had parked her car under the trees in
my drive.

Up on the dock, Clete poured the crushed ice and canned drinks
and speckled trout out of the cooler. The trout looked stiff and cold
on the board planks.

"You ever hear anything about prisoners being gagged and
cuffed to chairs in the Iberia Parish Prison?" I asked.

"That's what that was about? Maybe she ought to check out what
those guys did to get in there."

"She said you were beautiful."

"She did?" He looked down the road where her car was
disappearing under the canopy of oaks that grew along the bayou. Then
he cracked a Budweiser and flipped me a can of diet Dr Pepper. The scar
over his left eyebrow flattened against his skull when he grinned.

THE TURNKEY HAD BEEN a brig chaser in
the Marine Corps and
still wore his hair buzzed into the scalp and shaved in a razor-neat
line on the back of his neck. His body was lean and braided with
muscle, his walk as measured and erect as if he were on a parade
ground. He unlocked the cell at the far end of the corridor, hooked up
Willie Cool Breeze Broussard in waist and leg manacles, and escorted
him with one hand to the door of the interview room, where I waited.

"Think he's going to run on you, Top?" I said.

"He runs at the mouth, that's what he does."

The turnkey closed the door behind us. Cool Breeze looked like
two hundred pounds of soft black chocolate poured inside jailhouse
denims. His head was bald, lacquered with wax, shiny as horn, his eyes
drooping at the corners like a prizefighter's. It was hard to believe
he was a second-story man and four-time loser.

"If they're jamming you up, Cool Breeze, it's not on your
sheet," I said.

"What you call Isolation?"

"The screw says you asked for lockdown."

His wrists were immobilized by the cuffs attached to the chain
around his waist. He shifted in his chair and looked sideways at the
door.

"I was on Camp J up at Angola. It's worse in here. A hack made
a kid blow him at gunpoint," he said.

"I don't want to offend you, Breeze, but this isn't your
style."

"What ain't?"

"You're not one to rat out anybody, not even a bad screw."

His eyes shifted back and forth inside his face. He rubbed his
nose on his shoulder.

"I'm down on this VCR beef. A truckload of them. What makes it
double bad is I boosted the load from a Giacano warehouse in Lake
Charles. I need to get some distance between me and my problems, maybe
like in the Islands, know what I saying?"

"Sounds reasonable."

"No, you don't get it. The Giacanos are tied into some guys in
New York City making dubs of movies, maybe a hundred t'ousand of them a
week. So they buy lots of VCRs, cut-rate prices, Cool Breeze Midnight
Supply Service, you wit' me?"