DR10 - Sunset Limited (3 page)

"It ain't gonna take five minutes. We know you boys didn't
have to come all the way over to Iberia Parish just to change your
luck," he said.

The brothers were not cuffed; in fact, they were allowed to
take a twelve-pack of beer with them to drink in the back seat.

A half hour later, just at sunset, a student from USL, who was
camped out in the Atchafalaya swamp, looked through the flooded willow
and gum trees that surrounded his houseboat and saw a car stop on the
levee. Two older men and two boys got out. One of the older men wore a
uniform. They all held cans of beer in their hands; all of them
urinated off the levee into the cattails.

Then the two boys, dressed in jeans and Clorox-stained print
shirts with the sleeves cut off at the armpits, realized something was
wrong. They turned and stared stupidly at their companions, who had
stepped backward up the levee and were now holding pistols in their
hands.

The boys tried to argue, holding their palms outward, as
though they were pushing back an invisible adversary. Their arms were
olive with suntan, scrolled with reformatory tattoos, their hair spiked
in points with butch wax. The man in uniform raised his gun and shouted
an unintelligible order at them, motioning at the ground. When the boys
did not respond, the second armed man, who wore a Panama hat, turned
them toward the water with his hand, almost gently, inserted his shoe
against the calf of one, then the other, pushing them to their knees,
as though he were arranging manikins in a show window. Then he rejoined
the man in uniform up the bank. One of the boys kept looking back
fearfully over his shoulder. The other was weeping uncontrollably, his
chin tilted upward, his arms stiff at his sides, his eyes tightly shut.

The men with guns were silhouetted against a molten red sun
that had sunk across the top of the levee. Just as a flock of ducks
flapped across the sun, the gunmen clasped their weapons with both
hands and started shooting. But because of the fading light, or perhaps
the nature of their deed, their aim was bad.

Both victims tried to rise from their knees, their bodies
convulsing simultaneously from the impact of the rounds.

The witness said, "Their guns just kept popping. It looked
like somebody was blowing chunks out of a watermelon."

After it was over, smoke drifted out over the water and the
shooter in the Panama hat took close-up flash pictures with a Polaroid
camera.

"THE WITNESS USED A pair of
binoculars. He says the guy in the
green uniform had our department patch on his sleeve," the sheriff said.

"White rogue cops avenging the rape of a black girl?"

"Look, get that FBI agent out of here, will you?"

He looked at the question in my face.

"She's got a broom up her ass." He rubbed his fingers across
his mouth. "Did I say that? I'm going to go back to the laundry
business. A bad day used to be washing somebody's golf socks," he said.

I LOOKED THROUGH MY office window at
the FBI agent named
Adrien Glazier. She sat with her legs crossed, her back to me, in a
powder-blue suit and white blouse, writing on a legal pad. Her
handwriting was filled with severe slants and slashes, with points in
the letters that reminded me of incisor teeth.

When I opened the door she looked at me with ice-blue eyes
that could have been taken out of a Viking's face.

"I visited William Broussard last night. He seems to think
you're going to get him out of the parish prison," she said.

"Cool Breeze? He knows better than that."

"Does he?"

I waited. Her hair was ash-blond, wispy and broken on the
ends, her face big-boned and adversarial. She was one of those you
instinctively know have a carefully nursed reservoir of anger they draw
upon as needed, in the same way others make use of daily prayer. My
stare broke.

"Sorry. Is that a question?" I said.

"You don't have any business indicating to this man you can
make deals for him," she said.

I sat down behind my desk and glanced out the window, wishing
I could escape back into the coolness of the morning, the streets that
were sprinkled with rain, the palm fronds lifting and clattering in the
wind.

I picked up a stray paper clip and dropped it in my desk
drawer and closed the drawer. Her eyes never left my face or relented
in their accusation.

"What if the prosecutor's office does cut him loose? What's it
to you?" I said.

"You're interfering in a federal investigation. Evidently you
have a reputation for it."

"I think the truth is you want his
cojones
in a vise. You'll arrange some slack for him after he rats out some
guys you can't make a case against."

She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. She cocked her
elbow on my desk and let one finger droop forward at my face.

"Megan Flynn is an opportunistic bitch. What she didn't get on
her back, she got through posing as the Joan of Arc of oppressed
people. You let her and her brother jerk your pud, then you're dumber
than the people in my office say you are," she said.

"This has to be a put-on."

She pulled a manila folder out from under her legal pad and
dropped it on my desk blotter.

"Those photos are of a guy named Swede Boxleiter. They were
taken in the yard at the Colorado state pen in Canon City. What they
don't show is the murder he committed in broad daylight with a camera
following him around the yard. That's how good he is," she said.

His head and face were like those of a misshaped Marxist
intellectual, the yellow hair close-cropped on the scalp, the forehead
and brainpan too large, the cheeks tapering away to a mouth that was so
small it looked obscene. He wore granny glasses on a chiseled nose, and
a rotted and torn weight lifter's shirt on a torso that rippled with
cartilage.

The shots had been taken from an upper story or guard tower
with a zoom lens. They showed him moving through the clusters of
convicts in the yard, faces turning toward him the way bait fish
reflect light when a barracuda swims toward their perimeter. A fat man
was leaning against the far wall, one hand squeezed on his scrotum,
while he told a story to a half circle of his fellow inmates. His lips
were twisted with a word he was forming, purple from a lollypop he had
been eating. The man named Swede Boxleiter passed an inmate who held a
tape-wrapped ribbon of silver behind his back. After Swede Boxleiter
had walked by, the man whose palm seemed to have caught the sun like a
heliograph now had his hands stuffed in his pockets.

The second-to-last photo showed a crowd at the wall like early
men gathered on the rim of a pit to witness the death throes and
communal roasting of an impaled mammoth.

Then the yard was empty, except for the fat man, the gash
across his windpipe bubbling with saliva and blood, the tape-wrapped
shank discarded in the red soup on his chest.

"Boxleiter is buddies with Cisco Flynn. They were in the same
state home in Denver. Maybe you'll get to meet him. He got out three
days ago," she said.

"Ms. Glazier, I'd like to—"

"It's Special Agent Glazier."

"Right. I'd like to talk with you, but… Look, why
not let us take care of our own problems?"

"What a laugh." She stood up and gazed down at me. "Here it
is. Hong Kong is going to become the property of Mainland China soon.
There're some people we want to put out of business before we have to
deal with Beijing to get at them. Got the big picture?"

"Not really. You know how it is out here in the provinces,
swatting mosquitoes, arresting people for stealing hog manure, that
sort of thing."

She laughed to herself and dropped her card on my desk, then
walked out of my office and left the door open as though she would not
touch anything in our department unless it was absolutely necessary.

AT NOON I DROVE down the dirt road by
the bayou toward my dock
and bait shop. Through the oak trees that lined the shoulder I could
see the wide gallery and purple-streaked tin roof of my house up the
slope. It had rained again during the morning, and the cypress planks
in the walls were stained the color of dark tea, the hanging baskets of
impatiens blowing strings of water in the wind. My adopted daughter
Alafair, whom I had pulled from a submerged plane wreck out on the salt
when she was a little girl, sat in her pirogue on the far side of the
bayou, fly-casting a popping bug into the shallows.

I walked down on the dock and leaned against the railing. I
could smell the salty odor of humus and schooled-up fish and trapped
water out in the swamp. Alafair's skin was bladed with the shadows of a
willow tree, her hair tied up on her head with a blue bandanna, her
hair so black it seemed to fill with lights when she brushed it. She
had been born in a primitive village in El Salvador, her family the
target of death squads because they had sold a case of Pepsi-Cola to
the rebels. Now she was almost sixteen, her Spanish and early childhood
all but forgotten. But sometimes at night she cried out in her sleep
and would have to be shaken from dreams filled with the marching boots
of soldiers, peasants with their thumbs wired together behind them, the
dry ratcheting sound of a bolt being pulled back on an automatic weapon.

"Wrong time of day and too much rain," I said.

"Oh, yeah?" she said.

She lifted the fly rod into the air, whipping the popping bug
over her head, then laying it on the edge of the lily pads. She flicked
her wrist so the bug popped audibly in the water, then a goggle-eye
perch rose like a green-and-gold bubble out of the silt and broke the
surface, its dorsal fin hard and spiked and shiny in the sunlight, the
hook and feathered balsa-wood lure protruding from the side of its
mouth.

Alafair held the fly rod up as it quivered and arched toward
the water, retrieving the line with her left hand, guiding the
goggle-eye between the islands of floating hyacinths, until she could
lift it wet and flopping into the bottom of the pirogue.

"Not bad," I said.

"You had another week off. Why'd you go back to work?" she
said.

"Long story. See you inside."

"No, wait," she said, and set her rod down in the pirogue and
paddled across the bayou to the concrete boat ramp. She stepped out
into the water with a stringer of catfish and perch wrapped around her
wrist, and climbed the wood steps onto the dock. In the last two years
all the baby fat had melted off her body, and her face and figure had
taken on the appearance of a mature woman's. When she worked with me in
the bait shop, most of our male customers made a point of focusing
their attention everywhere in the room except on Alafair.

"A lady named Ms. Flynn was here. Bootsie told me what
happened to her father. You found him, Dave?" she said.

"My dad and I did."

"He was crucified?"

"It happened a long time ago, Alf."

"The people who did it never got caught? That's sickening."

"Maybe they took their own fall down the road. They all do,
one way or another."

"It's not enough." Her face seemed heated, pinched, as though
by an old memory.

"You want some help cleaning those fish?" I asked.

Her eyes looked at me again, then cleared. "What would you do
if I said yeah?" she asked. She swung the stringer so it touched the
end of my polished loafer.

"MEGAN WANTS ME TO get her inside the
jail to take pictures?"
I said to Bootsie in the kitchen.

"She seems to think you're a pretty influential guy," she
replied.

Bootsie was bent over the sink, scrubbing the burnt grease off
a stove tray, her strong arms swollen with her work; her polo shirt had
pulled up over her jeans, exposing the soft taper of her hips. She had
the most beautiful hair I had ever seen in a woman. It was the color of
honey, with caramel swirls in it, and its thickness and the way she
wore it up on her head seemed to make the skin of her face even more
pink and lovely.

"Is there anything else I can arrange? An audience with the
Pope?" I said.

She turned from the drainboard and dried her hands on a towel.

"That woman's after something else. I just don't know what it
is," she said.

"The Flynns are complicated people."

"They have a way of finding war zones to play in. Don't let
her take you over the hurdles, Streak."

I hit her on the rump with the palm of my hand. She wadded up
the dish towel and threw it past my head.

We ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the
back yard. Beyond the duck pond at the back of our property my
neighbor's sugarcane was tall and green and marbled with the shadows of
clouds. The bamboo and periwinkles that grew along our coulee rippled
in the wind, and I could smell rain and electricity in the south.

"What's in that brown envelope you brought home?" Bootsie
asked.

"Pictures of a mainline sociopath in the Colorado pen."

"Why bring them home?"

"I've seen the guy. I'm sure of it. But I can't remember
where."

"Around here?"

"No. Somewhere else. The top of his head looks like a yellow
cake but he has no jaws. An obnoxious FBI agent told me he's pals with
Cisco Flynn."

"A head like a yellow cake? A mainline con? Friends with Cisco
Flynn?"

"Yeah."

"Wonderful."

That night I dreamed of the man named Swede Boxleiter. He was
crouched on his haunches in the darkened exercise yard of a prison,
smoking a cigarette, his granny glasses glinting in the humid glow of
lights on the guard towers. The predawn hours were cool and filled with
the smells of sage, water coursing over boulders in a canyon riverbed,
pine needles layered on the forest floor. A wet, red dust hung in the
air, and the moon seemed to rise through it, above the mountain's rim,
like ivory skeined with dyed thread.