James Burke - Sunset Limited

"He claims you're harassing him."

"What did the Humane Society say?"

"They gave him a warning and told him they'd be back. Watch your back with this character, Dave."

"That's it?"

"No. The other problem is your calls to the FBI in New Orleans. They're off our backs for a while. Why stir them up?"

"Cool Breeze should be in our custody. We're letting the Feds twist him to avoid a civil suit over the abuse of prisoners in our jail."

"He's a four-time loser, Dave. He's not a victim. He fed a guy into an electric saw."

"I don't think it's right."

"Tell that to people when we have to pass a parish sales tax to pay off a class action suit, particularly one that will make a bunch of convicts rich. I take that back. Tell it to that female FBI agent. She was here while you were out to lunch. I really enjoyed the half hour I spent listening to her."

"Adrien Glazier was here?"

IT WAS FRIDAY, AND when I drove home that evening I should have been beginning a fine weekend. Instead, she was waiting for me on the dock, a cardboard satchel balanced on the railing under her hand. I parked the car in the drive and walked down to meet her. She looked hot in her pink suit, her ice-blue eyes filmed from the heat or the dust on the road.

"You've got Breeze in lockdown and everybody around here scared. What else do you want, Ms. Glazier?"

"It's Special Agent Gla-"

"Yeah, I know."

"You and Megan Flynn are taking this to the media, aren't you?"

"No. At least I'm not."

"Then why do both of you keep calling the Bureau?"

"Because I'm being denied access to a prisoner who escaped from our jail, that's why."

She stared hard into my face, as though searching for the right dials, her back teeth grinding softly, then said, "I want you to look at a few more photos."

"No."

"What's the matter, you don't want to see the wreckage your gal leaves in her wake?"

She pulled the elastic cord loose from the cardboard satchel and spilled half the contents on a spool table. She lifted up a glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Megan addressing a crowd of Latin peasants from the bed of a produce truck. Megan was leaning forward, her small hands balled into fists, her mouth wide with her oration.

"Here's another picture taken a few days later. If you look closely, you'll recognize some of the dead people in the ditch. They were in the crowd that listened to Megan Flynn. Where was she when this happened? At the Hilton in Mexico City."

"You really hate her, don't you?"

I heard her take a breath, like a person who has stepped into fouled air.

"No, I don't hate her, sir. I hate what she does. Other people die so she can feel good about herself," she said.

I sifted through the photos and news clippings with my fingers. I picked up one that had been taken from the Denver Post and glued on a piece of cardboard backing. Adrien Glazier was two inches away from my skin. I could smell perspiration and body powder in her clothes. The news article was about thirteen-year-old Megan Flynn winning first prize in the Post's essay contest. The photo showed her sitting in a chair, her hands folded demurely in her lap, her essay medal worn proudly on her chest.

"Not bad for a kid in a state orphanage. I guess that's the Megan I always remember. Maybe that's why I still think of her as one of the most admirable people I've ever known. Thanks for coming by," I said, and walked up the slope through the oak and pecan trees on my lawn, and on into my lighted house, where my daughter and wife waited supper for me.

MONDAY MORNING HELEN SOILEAU came into my office and sat on the corner of my desk.

"I was wrong about two things," she said.

"Oh?"

"The mulatto who tried to do Cool Breeze, the guy with the earring through his nipple? I said maybe I bought his story, he thought Breeze was somebody else? I checked the visitors' sheet. A lawyer for the Giacano family visited him the day before."

"You're sure?"

"Whiplash Wineburger. You ever meet him?"

"Whiplash represents other clients, too."

"Pro bono for a mulatto who works in a rice mill?"

"Why would the Giacanos want to do an inside hit on a guy like Cool Breeze Broussard?"

She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

"Maybe the Feds are squeezing Breeze to bring pressure on the Giacanos," I said, in answer to my own question.

"To make them cooperate in an investigation of the Triads?"

"Why not?"

"The other thing I was going to tell you? Last night Lila Terrebonne went into that new zydeco dump on the parish line. She got into it with the bartender, then pulled a.25 automatic on the bouncer. A couple of uniforms were the first guys to respond. They got her purse from her with the gun in it without any problem. Then one of them brushed against her and she went ape shit.

"Dave, I put my arm around her and walked her out the back door, into the parking lot, with nobody else around, and she cried like a kid in my arms… You following me?"

"Yeah, I think so," I said.

"I don't know who did it, but I know what's been done to her," she said. She stood up, flexed her back, and inverted the flats of her hands inside the back of her gunbelt. The skin was tight around her mouth, her eyes charged with light. My gaze shifted off her face.

"When I was a young woman and finally told people what my father did to me, nobody believed it," she said. "'Your dad was a great guy,' they said. 'Your dad was a wonderful parent.'"

"Where is she now?"

"Iberia General. Nobody's pressing charges. I think her old man already greased the owner of the bar."

"You're a good cop, Helen."

"Better get her some help. The guy who'll pay the bill won't be the one who did it to her. Too bad it works out that way, huh?"

"What do I know?" I said.

Her eyes held on mine. She had killed two perps in the line of duty. I think she took no joy in that fact. But neither did she regret what she had done nor did she grieve over the repressed anger that had rescinded any equivocation she might have had before she shot them. She winked at me and went back to her office.

WITH REGULARITY POLITICIANS TALK about what they call the war against drugs. I have the sense few of them know anything about it. But the person who suffers the attrition for the drug trade is real, with the same soft marmalade-like system of lungs and heart and viscera inherited from a fish as the rest of us.

In this case her name was Ruby Gravano and she lived in a low-rent hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, between Lee Circle and Canal, not far from the French Quarter. The narrow front entrance was framed by bare lightbulbs, like the entrance to a 1920s movie theater. But quaint similarities ended there. The interior was superheated and breathless, unlighted except for the glare from the airshaft at the end of the hallways. For some reason the walls had been painted firehouse red with black trim, and now, in the semi-darkness, they had the dirty glow of a dying furnace.

Ruby Gravano sat in a stuffed chair surrounded by the litter of her life: splayed tabloid magazines, pizza cartons, used Kleenex, a coffee cup with a dead roach inside, a half-constructed model of a spaceship that had been stuck back in the box and stepped on.

Ruby Gravano's hair was long and black and made her thin face and body look fuller than they were. She wore shorts that were too big for her and exposed her underwear, and foundation on her thighs and forearms, and false fingernails and false eyelashes and a bruise like a fresh tattoo on her left cheek.

"Dave won't jam you up on this, Ruby. We just want a string that'll lead back to these two guys. They're bad dudes, not the kind you want in your life, not the kind you want other girls to get mixed up with. You can help a lot of people here," Clete said.