James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

"It's a prowler report out at Weldon's again."

"Why do you have to go?"

"The dispatcher messed it up and sent this new fellow from Houston. Now he doesn't answer his radio, and the dispatcher doesn't have a backup."

"Then let them mess it up on their own. You're off duty."

"It's my investigation, Boots. I'll be back in a half hour or so. It's probably nothing."

I saw her eyes become thoughtful.

"Dave, this doesn't sound right. What do you mean he doesn't answer his radio? Isn't he supposed to carry one of those portable radios with him?"

"Garrett's not strong on procedure. Y'all be good. I'll be right back."

I ran through the rain and the flooded lawn, jumped in the pickup truck, and headed up the dirt road toward town. The oak limbs overhead thrashed in the wind, and a bright web of lightning lit the whole sky over the marsh. The rain on my cab was deafening, the windows swimming with water, the surface of the bayou dancing with a muddy light.

When I pulled into Weldon's drive, the night was so black and rain-whipped I could barely see his house. I hit my bright lights and drove slowly toward the house in second gear. Leaves were shredding out of the oak trees in front of the porch and cascading across the lawn, and I could hear a boat pitching and knocking loudly against its mooring inside the boathouse on the bayou. Then I saw Garrett's patrol car parked at an angle by one corner of the house. I flipped on my spotlight and played it over his car, then across the side of the house, the windows and the hedges along the walls, and finally the telephone box that was fastened into the white brick by the back entrance.

There was a line of dull silver-green footprints pressed into the lawn from the patrol car to the telephone box.

Smart man, Garrett, I thought. You know a professional second-story creep always hits the phone box first. But you shouldn't have gone in by yourself.

I left my spotlight burning, took a six-battery flashlight from under the seat, pulled back the receiver on my.45, eased a round into the chamber, and stepped out into the rain.

I stopped in a crouch until I was at the back of the house and past the side windows. The wiring at the bottom of the telephone box had been sliced neatly in half. I looked over my shoulder at the blacktop road, which was empty of cars and glazed with a pool of pink light from a neon bar sign.

Where in the hell were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

I went up the steps to the back entrance to try the door, but two panes of glass, one by the handle and one by the night chain, had been covered with pipe tape and knocked out of the molding, and the door was open. I eased it back and stepped inside. My flashlight reflected off enamel, brass, and glass surfaces and made rings of yellow-green light all over the kitchen, which was immaculately clean and squared away, but already I could see the disarray that existed deeper in the house.

"Garrett?" I said into the darkness. "It's Dave Robicheaux."

But there was no answer. Outside, I could hear the rain pelting the bamboo that grew along the gravel drive. I moved into the dining room, with the.45 extended in my right hand, and swung the flashlight around the room. All the drawers were pulled out of the cabinets and emptied on the floor, the paintings on the wall were knocked down or askew, and the crystalware had been raked off a shelf and ground into the rug.

The front rooms were even worse. The divans and antique upholstered chairs were slashed and gutted, a secretary bookcase overturned on its face and its back smashed in, the marble mantelpiece pried out of the wall, an enormous grandfather's clock shattered into kindling and pieces of glinting brass. A sheet of lightning trembled on the front yard, and in my mind's eye I saw myself silhouetted against the window just as I heard a foot depress a board in the hardwood floor somewhere behind or above me.

I clicked off my flashlight and went back through the dining room to the stairway. There was a closed door at the top of it, but I could see a faint glow at the bottom of the jamb.

The stairs were carpeted, and I moved as quietly as I could, a step at a time, toward the door and the rim of light at the bottom, my palm sweating on the grips of the.45, my pulse racing in my neck. I turned the doorknob, pushed it lightly with my fingers, and let the door drift back on its hinges.

The hallway was strewn with sheets, mattress stuffing, clothes, and shoes that had been thrown out of the doorways to the bedrooms. The only light came from behind a partially closed door at the end of the hall. Through the opening I could see a desk, a word processor, a black leather chair whose back had been split in a large X. I moved along the wall with the.45 at an upward angle, past two demolished bedrooms, a linen closet, a darkened bathroom, an overturned dirty-clothes hamper, a dumbwaiter, until I reached the last bedroom, which was only ten feet from the lighted room that Weldon probably used as a home office.

I stepped quickly inside the bedroom door and swept my.45 back and forth in the darkness. The room was still intact, except for the fact that the box springs had been shoved halfway off the frame of the canopy bed, a warning that I didn't heed.

I caught my breath, squatted down at the base of the door, wiped the sweat and rainwater out of my eyes with my knuckle, then aimed the.45 along the wall at the lighted opening of the office.

"This is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. You're under arrest. Throw your weapons out in the hall. Don't think about it. Do it."

But there was no sound from inside.

"Right now it's breaking and entering," I said. "You can be smart and come out on your own. If we have to come in after you, we'll paint the walls with you. I guarantee it."

Beyond the opening in the door I saw a shadow break across Weldon's desk. I could feel the veins tightening in my head, the sweat dripping out of my hair. It wasn't going to go down right, I thought. When they think about it, they either freeze or become cunning. And my situation was all wrong. I had been forced to take up a position on the right hand side of the hallway, so that I had to extend my right arm at an awkward angle around the doorjamb. I was getting a charley horse in my leg and a muscle twitch in my back. Where were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

"Last chance, partner. We're about to shift up into the dirty boogie," I said. But it was hard-guy flimflam. All I could do was contain whoever was in there and wait for backup.

Then the shadow broke across the desk again, a shoe scraped against a piece of furniture, and I straightened my back, stiffened my right arm, and aimed the.45 in the middle of the door, my eyes burning with salt.

But I'd forgotten that old admonition from Vietnam: Don't let them get behind you, Robicheaux.

He came out of the bedroom closet like a spring exploding from a broken clock, a short crowbar raised above his head. His head was huge, his face full of bone, his torso knotted with muscle under his wet T-shirt. I tried to pivot, swing the.45 clear of the doorjamb and aim it at his chest, or simply stand erect and get away from the arch of the crowbar, but my knees popped and burned and seemed to have all the resilience of cobweb. The crowbar thudded into my shoulder and raked down my arm and sent the.45 bouncing across the carpet.

Then he was on me in earnest and I was rolling away from him, toward the canopy bed, my arms wrapped around my head. He hit me once in the back, a blow that felt just like a wild inside pitch that catches you flat and hard in the spine as you try to twist away from it in the batter's box, and I kicked at him with one foot, tripped backward over the box springs, and saw the bone-plated, muddy-eyed resolution in his face as he came toward me again.