James Burke: Burning Angel

I couldn’t let it go.

I walked after him through the destroyed cane, laced my hand inside the horse’s bridle, felt it try to rear against my weight. The survey crew, men whose skin was as dark as chewing tobacco, paused in their work with chaining pins and transit and metal tapes, grinning good-naturedly, unsure of what was taking place.

Moleen wasn’t prepared for an audience.

“If you’re planning on a trip, I hope it’s with Ruthie Jean,” I said.

He tried to jerk the horse’s head free. I tightened my fingers inside the leather.

“Cops don’t prevent crimes, they solve them after the fact,” I said. “In this case, I’m creating an exception. Don’t take either her or Luke Fontenot for granted because they’re black. The person who kills you is the one at your throat before you ever know it.”

He raised his quirt. I flung the bridle from my hand, slapped his horse, and spooked it sideways among the surveyors.

I glanced back at him before I got into my truck. He was reining and soothing his horse, turning in a circle, his skin filmed with sweat and the dust that rose around him like a vortex, his face dark with shame and embarrassment.

But it was no victory. I was convinced Moleen had sold us out, was bringing some new form of evil into our lives, and there was nothing I could do about it.

An hour later I was in the Iberia Parish building permit office. All the applications for construction permits on Moleen’s property had been filed by Jason Darbonne. The blueprints had the clean, rectangular lines that you associate with a high school drafting class; but they were also general in nature, and the interior seemed to be nothing more than a huge concrete pad, an empty shell, a question mark without function or purpose.

“What’s the name of the company?” I asked the engineer.

“Blue Sky Electric,” he said.

“What do they do?”

“They work on electrical transformers or something,” he answered.

In small letters, in one corner of the blueprint, was the word incinerator .

“These plans have all the specifics of a blimp hangar,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“What’s the problem?” he said.

“I wish I knew.”

Late that evening Bootsie looked out the kitchen screen into the backyard.

“Clete Purcel’s sitting at our picnic table,” she said.

I went out the back door. Clete sat with his back to the house, hunched over a six-pack of Budweiser, an opened can in one hand, a Lucky Strike in the other. He wore elastic-wasted white tennis shorts, flip-flops, and a starched short-sleeve print shirt. By his foot was a cardboard box with tape across the top. The sun had dropped below my neighbor’s treeline, and the sugarcane field behind my house was Covered with a purple haze.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Figuring out how I should tell you something.”

I sat down across from him. His green eyes were filled with an indolent, alcoholic shine. My foot accidentally hit the cardboard box under the table.

“You look like you made an early pit stop today,” I said.

“You remember those two geeks I put on the bus, the brander and the child rapist? I called Nig to see if they got there all right. Guess what? The brander’s back in custody. He got to the victim and beat the living shit out of her. Of course, he asks Nig to write another bond for him. Nig tells him the guy is past his envelope, the guy’s a flight risk, he’s going down for sure this time, and, besides, even Nig can’t stomach this barf bag any longer.

“So the barf bag gets cute, tells Nig, “Write the bond, I’ll give up the guy’s gonna do Purcel’s buddy, what’s-his-face, Robicheaux.”

“Nig asks the barf bag who put him inside a whack on a cop, and the barf bag says, get this for lowlife class distinction, Patsy Dap used to piece off five-hundred-buck hits to him in the projects because Patsy thinks it’s beneath him to do colored dope dealers.”

Clete drank from his beer can, looked at me over the tops of his fingers.

“Patsy’s working for Johnny Carp again?” I said.

“It makes sense, mon. Patsy’s a stir bug. Johnny puts Patsy back in the jar and takes you out at the same time.”

“They don’t hit cops.”

“Dave, you rubbed shit in John Giacano’s face in front of everybody he respects. You broke his nose and four of his ribs. A paramedic had to pry his bridge out of his throat. I didn’t tell you everything the barf bucket said, either...

“The word is Johnny wants it in pieces, like the Giacanos did it to Tommy Fig, remember, they processed him into pork roasts and strung them from the ceiling fan in his own butcher shop, then had a big eggnog party while Tommy went spinning around in the air, except Johnny wants it to go down even worse, longer, on videotape, with an audio...”

Clete collapsed the aluminum beer can slowly in his huge hand, his eyes glancing away from mine uncertainly.

“Look, I need to be off the record here,” he said.

“About what?”

“I’m serious, Streak. When you operate with your shield you think too much like these Rotary cocksuckers... Excuse my language.”

“Will you just say it, Clete?”

He lifted the cardboard box from under the table, tore the tape, reached down inside the flaps.

“This afternoon I creeped the dump Patsy rents out on the Jeanerette Road,” he said. “Don’t worry, he was in a motel with his chippy at Four Corners in Lafayette. Dig this, big mon, a Tec-9, ventilated barrel, twenty-five-round nine-millimeter magazine, courtesy of an arms dealer in Miami who can provide them on the spot so the Jamaicans and the Cuban crazies don’t have to wait on the mailman.”

He worked the action, snapped the firing pin on the empty chamber. “It’s got a ‘hell trigger’ these guys out in Colorado make. You can fire bursts with it almost as fast as a machine gun. Fits neatly under a raincoat. Great for schoolyards and late-night convenience-store visits... Here’s a set of Smith & Wesson handcuffs, state of the art, solid steel, spring-loaded. Aren’t you glad to know a guy like Patsy can buy these at any police supply store...”

He put his hand back in the box and I saw his face change, his mouth form a seamed, crooked line, the scar through his eyebrow tighten against the bone. His hand was fitted through the handle of a stubby, cylindrical metal object shaped like a coffeepot.

“The receipt was stuck to the bottom, Dave. He bought it yesterday. Patsy Bones with a blowtorch? Put yourself inside his head—”

Through the kitchen window I could see Bootsie and Alafair washing dishes, talking to each other, the breeze from the attic fan blowing the curtains by the sides of their lighted faces.

Clete scratched his cheek with four fingers, like a zoo creature in a cage, his eyes waiting.

It was midmorning, the sun hazy through the oak trees that shaded the cluster of trailers and cottages where Patsy Dapolito lived east of town. Helen and I were parked in my truck behind a tin shed that had already started to creak with heat, watching Patsy shoot baskets in a dirt clearing by the side of a garage. His sock less ankles and white legs were layered with scar tissue and filmed with dust, his gym shorts knotted around his genitals like a drenched swimsuit, his T-shirt contoured against his hard body like wet Kleenex.

He whanged one more shot off the hoop, then dribbled the ball — bing, bing, bing — toward the door to his cottage. I got out of the truck, moved in fast behind him, and pushed him hard through the door. When he turned around, his mouth hooked like a cornered predator’s, my .45 was pointed in the middle of his face.