James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

I stepped out of the truck with the shotgun hanging from my right arm and tapped with one knuckle on the driver's window. He rolled the glass down, and I saw the long pink scar inside his right forearm, the boxed hairline on the back of his neck, the black welt like an angry insect on his bottom lip where I had broken off his tooth in the restaurant on East Main. The man in the passenger's seat had the flattened eyebrows and gray scar tissue around his eyes of a prizefighter; he bent his neck down so he could look upward at my face and see who I was.

"What d'you want?" the driver said.

"Both of you guys are fired. Now get out of here and don't come back."

"Listen to this guy. You think this is Dodge City?" the driver said.

"Didn't you learn anything the first time around?" I said.

"Yeah, that you're a prick who blindsided me, that I can sue your ass, that Julie's got lawyers who can-"

I lifted the shotgun above the window ledge and screwed the barrel into his cheek.

"Do yourself a favor and visit your family in New Orleans," I said.

His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he tried to turn his head away from the pressure of the shotgun barrel. I pressed it harder into the hollow of his cheek.

"Fuck it, do what the man says. I told you the job was turning to shit when Julie run off Cholo," the other man said. "Hey, you hear me, man, back off. We're neutral about any personal beefs you got, you understand what I'm saying? You ought to do something about that hard-on you got, knock it down with a hammer or something, show a little fucking control."

I stepped back and pulled the shotgun free of the window. The driver stared at my hand wrapped in the trigger guard.

"You crazy sonofabitch, you had the safety off," he said.

"Happy motoring," I said.

I waited until the taillights of the Cadillac had disappeared through the trees, then I walked up onto the trailer's steps, turned the door knob, and flung the door back into the wall.

A girl not over nineteen, dressed only in panties and a pink bra, was wiggling into a pair of jeans by the side of two bunk beds that had been pushed together in the middle of the floor. Her long hair was unevenly peroxided and looked like twisted strands of honey on her freckled shoulders; for some reason the crooked lipstick on her mouth made me think of a small red butterfly. Julie Balboni stood at an aluminum sink, wearing only a black silk jockstrap, his salt-and-pepper curls in his eyes, his body covered with fine black hair, a square bottle of Scotch poised above a glass filled with cracked ice. His eyes dropped to the shotgun that hung from my right hand.

"You finally losing your mind, Dave?" he said.

I picked up the girl's blouse from the bed and handed it to her.

"Are you from New Iberia?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," she said, her eyes fastened on mine as she pushed her feet into a pair of pumps.

"Stay away from this man," I said. "Women who hang around him end up dead."

Her frightened face looked at Julie, then back at me.

Rosie put her hands on the girl's shoulders and turned her toward the door.

"You can go now," she said. "Listen to what Detective Robicheaux tells you. This man won't put you in the movies, not unless you want to work in pornographic films. Are you okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Here's your purse. Don't worry about what's happening here. It doesn't have anything to do with you. Just stay away from this man. He's in a lot of trouble," Rosie said.

The girl looked again at Julie, then went quickly out the door and into the dark. Julie was putting on his trousers now, with his back to us. The walls were covered with felt paintings of red-mouthed tigers and boa constrictors wrapped around the bodies of struggling unicorns. By the door was the canvas bag filled with baseballs, gloves, and metal bats. Julie's skin looked brown and rubbed with oil in the glow from a bedside lava lamp.

"It looks like you did a real number on Mikey Goldman's trailer," I said.

He zipped his fly. "Like most of the time, you're wrong," he said. "I don't go around setting fires on my own movie set. That's Cholo Manelli's work."

"Why does he want to hurt Mikey Goldman?"

"He don't. He thought it was my trailer. He's got his nose bent out of joint about some imaginary wrong I done to him. The first thing Cholo does in the morning is stick his head up his hole. You guys ought to hang out together."

"Why do you think I'm here, Julie?"

"How the fuck should I know? Nothing you do makes sense to me anymore, Dave. You want to toss the place, see if that little chippy left a couple of 'ludes in the sheets?"

"You think this is some chickenshit roust, Julie?"

He combed his curls back over his head with his fingers. His navel looked like a black ball of hair above his trousers.

"You take yourself too serious," he said.

"Murphy Doucet has my daughter." I watched his face. He put his thumbnail into a molar and picked out a piece of food with it. "Did you hear what I said?"

He poured three fingers of Scotch into his glass, then dropped a lemon rind into the ice, his face composed, his eyes glancing out the window at a distant flicker of lightning.

"Too bad," he said.

"Too bad, huh?"

"Yeah. I don't like to hear stuff like that. It upsets me."

"Upsets you, does it?"

"Yeah. That's why I don't watch that show Unsolved Mysteries. It upsets me. Hey, maybe you can get her face on one of those milk cartons."

As he drank from his highball, I could see the slight tug at the corner of his mouth, the smile in his eyes. He picked up his flowered shirt from the back of a chair and began putting it on in front of a bathroom door mirror as though we were not there.

I handed Rosie the shotgun, put my hands on my hips, and studied the tips of my shoes. Then I slipped an aluminum bat out of the canvas bag, choked up on the taped handle, and ripped it down across his neck and shoulders. His forehead bounced off the mirror, pocking and spider-webbing the glass like it had been struck with a ball bearing. He turned back toward me, his eyes and mouth wide with disbelief, and I hit him again, hard, this time across the middle of the face. He crashed headlong into the toilet tank, his nose roaring blood, one side of his mouth drooping as though all the muscle endings in it had been severed.

I leaned over and cuffed both of his wrists around the bottom of the stool. His eyes were receded and out of focus, close-set like a pig's. The water in the bowl under his chin was filling with drops of dark color like pieces of disintegrating scarlet cotton.

I nudged his arm with the bat. His eyes clicked up into my face.

"Where is she, Julie?" I said.

"I cut Doucet loose. I don't have nothing to do with what he does. You get off my fucking case or I'm gonna square this, Dave. It don't matter if you're a cop or not, I'll put out an open contract, I'll cowboy your whole fucking family. I'll-"

I turned around and took the shotgun out of Rosie's hands. I could see words forming in her face, but I didn't wait for her to speak. I bent down on the edge of Julie's vision.

"Your window of opportunity is shutting down, Feet."

He blew air out of his nose and tried to wipe his face on his shoulder.

"I'm telling you the truth. I don't know nothing about what that guy does," he said. "He's a geek… I don't hire geeks, I run them off… I got enough grief without crazy people working for me."

"You're lying again, Julie," I said, stepped back, leveled the shotgun barrel above his head, and fired at an angle into the toilet tank. The double-ought buckshot blew water and splintered ceramic all over the wall. I pumped the spent casing out on the floor. Julie jerked the handcuffs against the base of the stool, like an animal trying to twist itself out of a metal trap.