James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

"Get away, Eddy! I'm gonna blow up his shit!" a voice behind him said.

A toy of a man stood in the doorway. He looked like a racehorse jockey, except his little body had the rigid lines of a weight lifter's. In his diminutive hand was a blue revolver.

But they had intervened in each other's script and hesitated too long. I saw the.45 on the carpet, next to the hanging box springs, and I grabbed it and tumbled sideways into a half bathroom just as the toy man started firing.

I saw the sparks of gunpowder fly out into the darkness, heard two rounds whock into the tile wall and a third whang off the toilet bowl and blow the tank apart in a cascade of water and splintered ceramic; then he tried to change his angle of fire, and a fourth round ricocheted off a chrome towel rack and collapsed the shower door in a pile of frosted glass.

I was flat on the floor, in a spreading pool of water, my back and hair covered with bits of glass and tile caulking.

But it had turned around on him, and he knew it, because he was already backing fast into the hallway when I raised up and started firing.

The roar of the.45 was deafening, the recoil as powerful and palm-numbing and disconnected as the kick of an air hammer; then the.45 felt suddenly weightless in my hand just before I pulled the trigger again. I fired four times at the bedroom entrance, then stood erect in a tinkle of glass at my feet, opening and closing my mouth to clear my eyes. The bedroom doorway was empty, the layered smoke motionless in the air. Out in the hall, an oil painting lay face down on the carpet, with three holes cored through the back of the canvas.

I could hear them on the stairway, but one of them obviously wanted the game to go into extra innings. He had the high-pitched, metallic voice of a midget.

"Give me your piece! I got that fuck bottled!"

"The boat's leaving, Jewel. Either haul ass or you're on your own," another man said.

I looked around the edge of the doorjamb and let off the.45-too quickly, high and wide, scouring a long trench in the wallpaper. But this time I saw three men-the man with the crowbar, the toy man, who wore black, silver-studded cowboy boots and had short-clipped blond hair that looked like duck down, and a third, older man in a brown windbreaker, black trousers like a priest's, black, razor-trimmed hair, and a mouthful of metal fillings that reflected the light from Weldon's office. Or at least that's how the image of the three men froze itself in my mind just before I heard a sound that I thought was the unmistakable ring of opportunity, the cylinder of a revolver being clicked open and ejected brass cartridges rattling on a wood surface.

I gripped the handle of the.45 with both hands and started to step out into the hall and begin firing, but the man in the windbreaker was a pro and had anticipated me. He had gone to one knee, three steps down from the landing, while the other two men had fled past him, and when he squeezed off his automatic I felt my raincoat leap out from my side as though a gust of air had blown through it. I spun back inside the cover of the doorway and heard him running into the darkness of the house below.

They'll drop you coming down the stairs, I thought.

Think, think. They didn't have a car in front or out on the blacktop. There's no access road in the back. They came on the bayou. They have to go back to it on foot.

I crossed the hallway and went into a bedroom on the opposite side, one with French doors and a verandah that overlooked the driveway, the garage, and the bamboo border of Weldon's backyard. A moment later I heard them running hard on the wet gravel. They were visible for not more than two or three seconds, between the corner of the house and the back of the garage, but I aimed the.45 with both hands across the wood railing and fired until the clip was empty and the breech locked open and a solitary tongue of white smoke rose from the exposed chamber. Just before the three men crashed through the bamboo and disappeared into the rain, just as the man called Eddy was almost home free, the last round in the magazine ripped the corner off the garage and filled his face with a shower of wood splinters. He screamed, and his hand clutched his eye as though he had been scalded.

Then I saw a patrol car turn off the blacktop and head fast up the front drive, the rain spinning in the blue and red kaleidoscopic flashing of emergency lights. I felt in my pocket for my flashlight, but it was gone. I ran down the stairs and out the front door just as LeBlanc and Thibodeaux pulled abreast of the porch, their faces looking at me expectantly through the open passenger window.

"They're headed for the bayou, three of them. They're armed. One guy's hurt. Nail 'em," I said.

The driver stepped on the accelerator, and the car shot around the side of the house, scouring skid marks in the gravel, gutting a big potted plant by the edge of the rose bed. I pulled the empty clip from the magazine of the.45, inserted a full one, and followed them through the rain toward the back of the property.

But it was all comedy now. They drove through Weldon's bamboo, destroyed his vegetable garden, and spun sideways into the coulee. The back wheels of the car whined and smoked in the mud. Out in the darkness I heard an outboard engine roar away from the dock, up the bayou toward St. Martinville.

The driver rolled down his window and looked at me in exasperation.

"Get on the radio," I said.

"Sorry, Dave. I didn't know that goddamn coulee was there."

"Forget about it. Call an ambulance, too."

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah. But I think Garrett's not."

"What happened in there?" the other deputy said, getting out of the passenger's seat.

But I was already walking back toward the house, the rain cold on my head, the.45 heavy and loose in my coat pocket. I found him at the bottom of the cellar stairs. The green dragon on his right forearm was laced with blood. I didn't even want to look at the rest of it.

An hour later the medical examiner and I stood on the colunmed marble front porch and watched the two ambulance attendants load the gurney into the ambulance and close the doors on it. The rain had stopped, and the ambulance lights made swinging red patterns in the oaks. I could hear the frogs out on the bayou.

"Have you ever seen one like that before?" the medical examiner said. He was a thin elderly man who wore goldnmmed glasses and a white shirt and tie and carried a pocket watch on a chain. His sleeves were rolled, and he kept brushing at his wrist with a piece of wet paper towel.

"In New Orleans. When I was at the First District," I said.

He wadded up the towel and threw it into the flower bed.

His face looked disgusted.

"It's a first for me," he said. "Maybe that's why I'll stay in New Iberia. Does he have family here?"

"I think he was single. I don't know if he has relatives back in Houston or not."

"If you have to talk with any of them, you can tell them he was probably out of it with the first shot."

"Is it true?"

"It's what you can tell them, Dave."

"I see."

"His eyes were open when he got the next one. He probably saw it coming. But where's the law say that relatives need to know everything?" A fingerprint man went out the door, and a deputy locked it behind him. They both got in their cars. "So you figure the shooter's from the mob?" the examiner said.

"Who knows? It's their signature."

"Why do they do it that way? Just to be thorough?"

"More likely because most of them are degenerates and sadists. But maybe I say that just because I'm tired." I tried to smile.

"How's your shoulder?"

"All right. I'll put some ice on it."

"I scraped a blood specimen off the corner of the garage.

It might help you later."