James Burke - Burning Angel

Afterward, she lay inside my arm and touched what seemed to me all the marks of my mortality and growing age — the white patch of hair on the side of my head, my mustache, now flecked with silver, the puckered indentation from a .38 round below my left collarbone, the gray scar, like a flattened earthworm, from a pun gi stick, on my stomach, and the spray of arrow-shaped welts on my thigh where steel shards from a Bouncing Betty still lay embedded. Then she rolled against me and kissed me on the cheek.

“What’s that for?” I said.

“Because you’re the best, cher ”

“You, too, Boots.”

“But you’re not telling me something.”

“I have a bad feeling about this one.”

She raised up on one elbow and looked into my face. Her bare hip looked sculpted, like pink marble, against the light outside.

“These two murders,” I said. “We’re not dealing with local dimwits.”

“So?”

“It’s an old problem, Boots. They come from places they’ve already ruined, and then it’s our turn. By the time we figure out we’re dealing with major leaguers, they’ve been through the clock shop with baseball bats.”

“That’s why we hire cops like you,” she said, and tried to smile. When I didn’t answer, she said, “We can’t remove south Louisiana from the rest of the world, Dave.”

“Maybe we should give it a try.”

She lay against me and placed her hand on my heart. She smelled of shampoo and flowers and the milky heat in her skin. Outside, I could hear crows cawing angrily in a tree as the sun broke out of the clouds like a heliograph.

It’s probably safe to say the majority of them are self-deluded, uneducated, fearful of women, and defective physically. Their political knowledge, usually gathered from paramilitary magazines, has the moral dimensions of comic books. Some of them have been kicked out of the service on bad conduct and dishonorable discharges; others have neither the physical nor mental capacity to successfully complete traditional basic training in the U.S. Army. After they pay large sums of money to slap mosquitoes at a mere training camp in the piney woods of north Florida, they have themselves tattooed with death heads and grandiloquently toast one another, usually in pecker wood accents, with the classic Legionnaire’s paean to spiritual nihilism, “ Vive la guerre, vive la mort .”

Miami is full of them.

If you want to connect with them in the New Orleans area, you cross the river over to Algiers into a neighborhood of pawnshops and Vietnamese-owned grocery stores and low-rent bars, and visit Tommy Carrol’s Gun & Surplus.

It was Sunday evening, and Helen Soileau and I were off the clock and out of our jurisdiction. Tommy Carrol, whom I had never met, was locking up his glass gun cases and about to close. He wore baggy camouflage trousers, polished combat boots, and a wide-necked bright yellow T-shirt, like body builders wear. His shaved head reminded me of an alabaster bowling ball. He chewed and snapped his gum maniacally, his eyes flicking back and forth from his work to Helen and me as we walked in file between the stacks of survival gear, ammunition, inflatable rafts, knife display cases, and chained racks of bolt-action military rifles.

“So I’m stuck again with me goddamn kids, that’s what you’re saying?” Helen said over her shoulder to me. She wore tan slacks, lacquered straw sandals, and a flowered shirt hanging outside her belt. She sipped from a can of beer that was wrapped in a brown bag.

“Did I say that? Did I say that?” I said at her back.

“You need something?” Tommy Carrol said.

“Yeah, a couple of Excedrin,” I said.

“Is there a problem here?” Tommy Carrol asked.

“I’m looking for Sonny Boy Marsallus,” I said.

“Don’t tell us the herpes outpatient clinic, either. We already been there,” Helen said.

“Shut up, Helen,” I said.

“Did I marry Mr. Goodwrench or not?” she said.

“What’s going on?” Tommy asked, his gum snapping in his jaw.

“Doesn’t Sonny hang in here?” I said.

“Sometimes. I mean he used to. Not anymore.”

“Helen, why don’t you go sit in the car?” I said.

“Because I don’t feel like changing diapers on your goddamn kids.”

“I’ve been out of the loop,” I said to Tommy. “I’d like to get back to work.”

“Doing what?”

“Peace Corps. Isn’t this the sign-up place?” I said.

He arched his eyebrows and looked sideways. Then he made a tent on his chest with the fingers of one hand. His eyes were like blue marbles.

“It makes you feel better to jerk my Johnson, be my guest,” he said. “But I’m closing up, I don’t have any contact with Sonny, and I got nothing to do with other people’s family troubles.” He widened his eyes for emphasis.

“This is the guy knows all the meres?” Helen said, and brayed at her own irony. She upended her beer can until it was empty. “I’m driving down to the store on the corner. If you’re not there in five minutes, you can ride the goddamn bus home.”

She let the glass door slam behind her. Tommy stared after her. “For real, that’s your wife?” he said, chewing his gum.

“Yeah.”

“What’s your experience? Maybe I can help.”

“One tour in “Nam. Some diddle-shit stuff with the tomato pickers.”

He pushed a pencil and pad across the glass countertop.

“Write your name and number down there. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“You can’t hook me up with Sonny?”

“Like I say, I don’t see him around, you know what I mean?” His eyes were as bright as blue silk, locked on mine, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw.

“He’s out of town and nobody’s missing him?” I smiled at him.

“You summed it up.”

“How about two guys who look like Mutt and Jeff?”

He began shaking his head noncommittally. “The short guy’s got a fire hydrant for a neck. Maybe he did some work for Idi Amin. Maybe Sonny Boy popped a cap on his brother,” I said.

His eyes stayed fixed on mine, but I saw his hand tic on the countertop, heard his heavy ring click on the glass. He picked up the notepad from the countertop and tossed it on a littered desk behind him.

“You shouldn’t job me, man,” he said. His eyes were unblinking, his gum rolling on his teeth.

“You think I’m a cop?”

“You got it, Jack.”

“You’re right.” I opened my badge holder on the countertop. “You know who the guy with the sawed-off neck is, don’t you?”

He dropped his ring of keys in his pocket and called out to a man sweeping the wood floors in front, “Lock it up, Mack. I’m gonna see what the old woman’s got for supper. The fun guy here is a cop. But you don’t have to talk to him, you don’t want.” Then he spat his chewing gum neatly into a trash bag and clanged through a metal door into the back alley.

I went through the door after him. He began to walk rapidly toward his car, his keys ringing in the pocket of his camouflage trousers.

“Hold on, Tommy,” I said.

Helen had parked her car by the end of the alley, next to a Dumpster and a stand of banana trees that grew along a brick wall. She got out of her car with her baton in her hand.

“Right there, motherfucker!” she said, breaking into a run. “Freeze! Did you hear me? I said freeze, goddamn it!”

But Tommy Carrol was not a good listener and tried to make his automobile. She whipped the baton behind his knee, and his leg folded under him as though she had severed a tendon. He crashed into the side of his car door, his knee held up before him with both hands, his mouth open as though he were trying to blow the fire out of a burn.