James Burke - Sunset Limited

"What you call Isolation?"

"The screw says you asked for lockdown."

His wrists were immobilized by the cuffs attached to the chain around his waist. He shifted in his chair and looked sideways at the door.

"I was on Camp J up at Angola. It's worse in here. A hack made a kid blow him at gunpoint," he said.

"I don't want to offend you, Breeze, but this isn't your style."

"What ain't?"

"You're not one to rat out anybody, not even a bad screw."

His eyes shifted back and forth inside his face. He rubbed his nose on his shoulder.

"I'm down on this VCR beef. A truckload of them. What makes it double bad is I boosted the load from a Giacano warehouse in Lake Charles. I need to get some distance between me and my problems, maybe like in the Islands, know what I saying?"

"Sounds reasonable."

"No, you don't get it. The Giacanos are tied into some guys in New York City making dubs of movies, maybe a hundred t'ousand of them a week. So they buy lots of VCRs, cut-rate prices, Cool Breeze Midnight Supply Service, you wit' me?"

"You've been selling the Giacanos their own equipment? You're establishing new standards, Breeze."

He smiled slightly, but the peculiar downward slope of his eyes gave his expression a melancholy cast, like a bloodhound's. He shook his head.

"You still don't see it, Robicheaux. None of these guys are that smart. They started making dubs of them kung fu movies from Hong Kong. The money behind them kung fus comes from some very bad guys. You heard of the Triads?"

"We're talking about China White?"

"That's how it gets washed, my man."

I took out my business card and wrote my home number and the number of the bait shop on the back. I leaned across the table and slipped it in his shirt pocket. "Watch your butt in here, Breeze, particularly that ex-jarhead."

"Meet the jailer. It's easy to catch him after five. He like to work late, when they ain't no visitors around."

MEGAN'S BROTHER CISCO OWNED a home up Bayou Teche, just south of Loreauville. It was built in the style of the West Indies, one story and rambling, shaded by oaks, with a wide, elevated gallery, green, ventilated window shutters, and fern baskets hanging from the eaves. Cisco and his friends, movie people like himself, came and went with the seasons, shooting ducks in the wetlands, fishing for tarpon and speckled trout in the Gulf. Their attitudes were those of people who used geographical areas and social cultures as playgrounds and nothing more. Their glittering lawn parties, which we saw only from the road through the myrtle bushes and azalea and banana trees that fringed his property, were the stuff of legend in our small sugarcane town along the Teche.

I had never understood Cisco. He was tough, like his sister, and he had the same good looks they had both inherited from their father, but when his reddish-brown eyes settled on yours, he seemed to search inside your skin for something he wanted, perhaps coveted, yet couldn't define. Then the moment would pass and his attention would wander away like a balloon on the breeze.

He had dug irrigation ditches and worked the fruit orchards in the San Joaquin and had ended up in Hollywood as a road-wise, city-library-educated street kid who was dumbfounded when he discovered his handsome face and seminal prowess could earn him access to a movie lot, first as an extra, then as a stuntman.

It wasn't long before he realized he was not only braver than the actors whose deeds he performed but that he was more intelligent than most of them as well. He co-wrote scripts for five years, formed an independent production group with two Vietnam combat veterans, and put together a low-budget film on the lives of migrant farmworkers that won prizes in France and Italy.

His next film opened in theaters all over the United States.

Now Cisco had an office on Sunset Boulevard, a home in Pacific Palisades, and membership in that magic world where bougainvillea and ocean sun were just the token symbols of the health and riches that southern California could bestow on its own.

It was late Sunday evening when I turned off the state road and drove up the gravel lane toward his veranda. His lawn was blue-green with St. Augustine grass and smelled of chemical fertilizer and the water sprinklers twirling between the oak and pine trees. I could see him working out on a pair of parallel bars in the side yard, his bare arms and shoulders cording with muscle and vein, his skin painted with the sun's late red light through the cypresses on the bayou.

As always, Cisco was courteous and hospitable, but in a way that made you feel his behavior was learned rather than natural, a barrier rather than an invitation.

"Megan? No, she had to fly to New Orleans. Can I help you with something?" he said. Before I could answer, he said, "Come on inside. I need something cold. How do you guys live here in the summer?"

All the furniture in the living room was white, the floor covered with straw mats, blond, wood-bladed ceiling fans turning overhead. He stood shirtless and barefooted at a wet bar and filled a tall glass with crushed ice and collins mix and cherries. The hair on his stomach looked like flattened strands of red wire above the beltline of his yellow slacks.

"It was about an inmate in the parish prison, a guy named Cool Breeze Broussard," I said.

He drank from his glass, his eyes empty. "You want me to tell her something?" he asked.

"Maybe this guy was mistreated at the jail, but I think his real problem is with some mobbed-up dudes in New Orleans. Anyway, she can give me a call."

"Cool Breeze Broussard. That's quite a name."

"It might end up in one of your movies, huh?"

"You can't ever tell," he replied, and smiled.

On one wall were framed still shots from Cisco's films, and on a side wall photographs that were all milestones in Megan's career: a ragged ditch strewn with the bodies of civilians in Guatemala, African children whose emaciated faces were crawling with blowflies, French Legionnaires pinned down behind sandbags while mortar rounds geysered dirt above their heads.

But, oddly, the color photograph that had launched her career and had made Life magazine was located at the bottom corner of the collection. It had been shot in the opening of a storm drain that bled into the Mississippi just as an enormous black man, in New Orleans City Prison denims strung with sewage, had burst out of the darkness into the fresh air, his hands raised toward the sun, as though he were trying to pay tribute to its energy and power. But a round from a sharpshooter's rifle had torn through his throat, exiting in a bloody mist, twisting his mouth open like that of a man experiencing orgasm.

A second framed photograph showed five uniformed cops looking down at the body, which seemed shrunken and without personality in death. A smiling crew-cropped man in civilian clothes was staring directly at the camera in the foreground, a red apple with a white hunk bitten out of it cupped in his palm.

"What are you thinking about?" Cisco asked.

"Seems like an inconspicuous place to put these," I said.

"The guy paid some hard dues. For Megan and me, both," he said.

"Both?"

"I was her assistant on that shot, inside the pipe when those cops decided he'd make good dog food. Look, you think Hollywood's the only meat market out there? The cops got citations. The black guy got to rape a sixteen-year-old white girl before he went out. I get to hang his picture on the wall of a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar house. The only person who didn't get a trade-off was the high school girl."

"I see. Well, I guess I'd better be going."

Through the French doors I saw a man of about fifty walk down the veranda in khaki shorts and slippers with his shirt unbuttoned on his concave chest. He sat down in a reclining chair with a magazine and lit a cigar.