James Burke - Purple Cane Road

The real problem was this guy Johnny Remeta. How did he, Jim Gable, get mixed up with a psychopath, particularly one who could boost cars all over the state, smoke two police officers, and walk through walls as though he were invisible?

He didn't like to think about Remeta. Perps and lowlifes were predictable as a class. Most of them were dumb and did everything in their power to get caught. They sought authority in their lives and attention from father figures and were too stupid to know it. Remeta was different. He brought both intelligence and genuine psychosis to his work, a combination that made Gable swallow unconsciously when he thought about it.

He picked up the jar containing the head of a Viet Cong from the table and set it on the mantel in front of the mirror. The head wobbled slightly in the yellow fluid and nudged against the glass, the slitted eyes staring up at Gable. It gave him a sense of comfort to be able to pick up the jar and move it wherever he wanted, although he wasn't sure why. He looked out the window at the fall colors in the trees and the glitter of the sunset on the bay, and he wanted to wedge a revolver in the mouth of Johnny Remeta and blow the back of his head off.

His mood was broken by the sound of his wife dropping something in the bedroom.

"Dear, would you come in, please? I can't bend over to get my cane," she called.

He went into her bedroom and picked it up for her, then had to help her out of bed. She had not dressed that day and was still in her nightgown, and she smelled like Vicks VapoRub and sour milk. Her hand clung to his wrist after she was on her feet and in her slippers.

"Let's have dinner out on the terrace. It's such a lovely evening. I'll order from the restaurant and have them bring it down," she said.

"That'll be fine, Cora."

"Would you do a favor for me?" she asked, smiling wistfully. She wore no makeup, but there were gin roses in her cheeks and a merry light in her eyes. He nodded, then shivered at the prospect of what she might ask.

"Would you rub my feet? They ache terribly when the season changes," she said.

But he knew what that meant. At first it would be her feet, then her back and neck, and at some point she would touch him on the cheek and let her fingers trail down his sternum and come to rest on his thigh. A visceral sensation washed through him and made his scalp tighten against the bone.

"I'm going through the accounts now. Can I fix you another drink and join you later on the terrace?" he said.

That was smart, he thought. She couldn't expect him to perform romantically on the terrace.

But when he looked at her face, the pinched mouth, the eyes that were suddenly masked, he knew she had seen through him.

"I'll call the restaurant now. But do fix me a drink, and bring my medicine from the cabinet, would you, please? I hate to be a bother. I am a bother, aren't I?" she said.

He hated the tone in her voice. She was the cloying victim and martyr now, a role she was a master at. Her entire personality was a snake pit of neurotic aberrations. He never knew which one was going to slither out on the floor.

He took a bottle of vodka out of the icebox and placed it on a silver tray with a Gibson glass and a jar of tiny pearl onions and a demitasse spoon and set the tray out on the terrace. In the distance he could see a boat with a red sail disappearing over the horizon, and he wanted to be on the boat, the salt breeze in his face, a new life waiting for him somewhere in the Caribbean.

He just had to be patient. Every quart of gin or vodka she drank was like lighting a Chinese firecracker in her heart. She probably had over nine million in her portfolio at Piper, Jaffray. Even after he paid the tax on the capital gains, he could begin construction on his quarter horse track in New Mexico and still be able to live on a ranch in the high desert country and keep a cabin cruiser on the Texas coast.

Not bad for a working-class kid who actually walked a night beat in the Irish Channel.

He went back into the den and picked up his whiskey and ice and sipped from it. Through the window he heard Cora on the remote phone, calling the restaurant for a delivery. He just didn't know if he could bear another evening at home with her. He pulled open a side drawer on his cherrywood desk and removed an address book and thumbed through the names inside. He had entered only the initials beside the telephone numbers of the Mexican, Puerto Rican, and black girls who one way or another had come under his sway. There were over three dozen sets of initials in the book.

Some might consider him profligate, he thought. But so what? Long ago he had learned that most people admired the pagan virtues rather than the Christian ones, particularly in their leaders, no matter what they said. Libido and power and success and creativity were interchangeable characteristics of the human personality. Ask any woman whether she preferred a lover who radiated a quiet sense of power and confidence or one who was self-effacing and pliant. If he was lucky, Cora would drink herself unconscious and he could make a call and meet a woman at a motel in Grand Isle. Why not? He could be back in three hours.

But the quickening of his heart already told him why not.

In his mind's eye he saw himself on an empty stretch of highway, in the dark, the walls of sugarcane twelve feet high on each side of him. Then a tire went flat or a fan belt broke, and while he was jacking up the car or staring down at a steaming radiator a car pulled in behind him, the high beams on, but the driver remained behind the wheel, faceless, letting him burn with apprehension in the headlights' glare.

A film of perspiration had formed on his forehead and he drank from his whiskey. But the ice had melted and the whiskey tasted as though it had been aged inside oily wood. Why was his heart beating so rapidly? Was he a coward, afraid to go down the road because of this kid Remeta?

No. He was just using his judgment. Remeta was a cop killer. The odds were good that if cornered Remeta would never make the jail. All Jim Gable had to do was wait.

He was hungry. He washed his face and hands and combed his hair in the bathroom mirror and went into the kitchen and opened the icebox. It was virtually empty. He pulled back the sliding door on the terrace and went outside. She lay supine on a reclining chair, her face rosy with vodka, her teeth yellow in the waning light.

"Hungry, dear?" she said.

"Yes."

"You've always been a hungry little boy, haven't you?"

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't talk to me like that, Cora."

"Well, your dinner will be here shortly. You'll see."

"Thank you," he said, and went back inside and slid the glass door shut.

How long had her mother lived? Ninety-six years? Good God! Maybe not even a quart of booze a day could kill genes like that. What a horrible thought. No, he was not going to have thoughts like that.

To hell with Johnny Remeta, he told himself. He called the beeper number of a woman in New Orleans, and a half hour later she called him back. Her nickname was Safety Pin Sue, a mindless, totally dependent addict who took a narcissistic pleasure in her own self-destruction.

"Meet me in Grand Isle tonight," he said.

"For you, Jim, anywhere, anytime," she said, her voice warm with crack.

That was more like it, he thought.

He tonged fresh ice into his drink and gazed out the high window at the darkening greenness of the land, the gold light trapped on the bay's horizon, the sailboat that had turned around and was tacking for home. He raised his drink in salute to the evening.

That's when he heard a vehicle under the porte cochere. He opened the middle drawer of his desk and removed a blue-black.38 revolver and let it hang loosely from his hand.