James Burke - Sunset Limited

But they rolled him inside a rug and carried him to a place where he knew he did not want to go. He'd screwed up, no denying it, and they'd unzipped his package. But it should have been over. Why were they doing this? They were lifting him again now, out of a car trunk, over the top of the bumper, carrying him across grass, through a fence gate that creaked on a hinge, unrolling him now in the dirt, under a sky bursting with stars.

One of his eyes didn't work and the other was filmed with blood. But he felt their hands raising him up, molding him to a cruciform design that was foreign to his life, that should not have been his, stretching out his arms against wood. He remembered pictures from a Sunday school teacher's book, a dust-blown hill and a darkening sky and helmeted soldiers whose faces were set with purpose, whose fists clutched spikes and hammers, whose cloaks were the color of their work.

Hadn't a woman been there in the pictures, too, one who pressed a cloth against a condemned man's face? Would she do that for him, too? He wondered these things as he turned his head to the side and heard steel ring on steel and saw his hand convulse as though it belonged to someone else.

HELEN AND I WALKED THROUGH the clumps of banana trees and blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn, where a group of St. Mary Parish plainclothes investigators and uniformed sheriffs deputies and ambulance attendants stood in a shaded area, one that droned with iridescent green flies, looking down at the collapsed and impaled form of Swede Boxleiter. Swede's chest was pitched forward against the nails that held his wrists, his face hidden in shadow, his knees twisted in the dust. Out in the sunlight, the flowers on the rain trees were as bright as arterial blood among the leaves.

"It looks like we got joint jurisdiction on this one," a plainclothes cop said. His name was Thurston Meaux and he had a blond mustache and wore a tweed sports coat with a starched denim shirt and a striped tie. "After the photographer gets here, we'll take him down and send y'all everything we have."

"Was he alive when they nailed him up?" I asked.

"The coroner has to wait on the autopsy. Y'all say he took the head wound in his apartment?" he said.

"That's what it looks like," I replied.

"You found brass?"

"One casing. A.25."

"Why would somebody shoot a guy in Iberia Parish, then nail him to a barn wall in St. Mary?" Meaux said.

"Another guy died here in the same way forty years ago," I said.

"This is where that happened?"

"I think it's a message to someone," I said.

"We already ran this guy. He was a thief and a killer, a suspect in two open homicide cases. I don't see big complexities here."

"If that's the way you're going to play it, you won't get anywhere."

"Come on, Robicheaux. A guy like that is a walking target for half the earth. Where you going?"

Helen and I walked back to our cruiser and drove through the weeds, away from the barn and between two water oaks whose leaves were starting to fall, then back out on the state road.

"I don't get it. What message?" Helen said, driving with one hand, her badge holder still hanging from her shirt pocket.

"If it was just a payback killing, the shooters would have left his body in the apartment. When we met Harpo Scruggs at the barbecue place? He said something about hating rich people. I think he killed Swede and deliberately tied Swede's murder to Jack Flynn's to get even with somebody."

She thought about it.

"Scruggs took the Amtrak to Houston, then flew back to Colorado," she said.

"So he came back. That's the way he operates. He kills people over long distances."

She looked over at me, her eyes studying my expression.

"But something else is bothering you, isn't it?" she said.

"Whoever killed Swede hung him up on the right side of where Jack Flynn died."

She shook a half-formed thought out of her face.

"I like working with you, Streak, but I'm not taking any walks inside your head," she said.

ALEX GUIDRY WAS FURIOUS. He came through the front door of the sheriffs department at eight o'clock Monday morning, not slowing down at the information desk or pausing long enough to knock before entering my office.

"You're getting Ida Broussard's case reopened?" he said.

"You thought there was a statute of limitations on murder?" I replied.

"You took splinters out of my old house and gave them to the St. Mary Parish sheriffs office?" he said incredulously.

"That about sums it up."

"What's this crap about me suffocating her to death?"

I paper-clipped a sheaf of time sheets together and stuck them in a drawer.

"A witness puts you with Ida Broussard right before her death. A forensic pathologist says she was murdered, that water from a tap was forced down her nose and mouth. If you don't like what you're hearing, Mr. Guidry, I suggest you find a lawyer," I said.

"What'd I ever do to you?"

"Sullied our reputation in Iberia Parish. You're a bad cop. You bring discredit on everyone who carries a badge."

"You better get your own lawyer, you sonofabitch. I'm going to twist a two-by-four up your ass," he said.

I picked up my phone and punched the dispatcher's extension.

"Wally, there's a man in my office who needs an escort to his automobile," I said.

Guidry pointed one stiffened finger at me, without speaking, then strode angrily down the hallway. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and sat on the edge of my desk.

"I just saw our ex-jailer in the parking lot. Somebody must have spit on his toast this morning. He couldn't get his car door open and he ended up breaking off his key in the lock."

"Really?" I said.

Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

FOUR HOURS LATER OUR fingerprint man called. The shell casing found on the carpet of Swede Boxleiter's apartment was clean and the apartment contained no identifiable prints other than the victim's. That same afternoon the sheriff called Helen and me into his office.

"I just got off the phone with the sheriffs department in Trinidad, Colorado. Get this. They don't know anything about Harpo Scruggs, except he owns a ranch outside of town," he said.

"Is he there now?" Helen said.

"That's what I asked. This liaison character says, 'Why you interested in him?' So I say, 'Oh, we think he might be torturing and killing people in our area, that sort of thing.'" The sheriff picked up his leather tobacco pouch and flipped it back and forth in his fingers.

"Scruggs is a pro. He does his dirty work a long way from home," I said.

"Yeah, he also crosses state lines to do it. I'm going to call that FBI woman in New Orleans. In the meantime, I want y'all to go to Trinidad and get anything you can on this guy."

"Our travel budget is pretty thin, skipper," I said.

"I already talked to the Parish Council. They feel the same way I do. You keep crows out of a cornfield by tying a few dead ones on your fence wire. That's a metaphor."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING our plane made a wide circle over the Texas panhandle, then we dropped through clouds that were pooled with fire in the sunrise and came in over biscuit-colored hills dotted with juniper and pine and pinyon trees and landed at a small windblown airport outside Raton, New Mexico.

The country to the south was as flat as a skillet, hazed with dust in the early light, the monotony of the landscape broken by an occasional mesa. But immediately north of Raton the land lifted into dry, pinyon-covered, steep-sided hills that rose higher and higher into a mountainous plateau where the old mining town of Trinidad, once home to the Earps and Doc Holliday, had bloomed in the nineteenth century.

We rented a car and drove up Raton Pass through canyons that were still deep in shadow, the sage on the hillsides silvered with dew. On the left, high up on a grade, I saw a roofless church, with a facade like that of a Spanish mission, among the ruins and slag heaps of an abandoned mining community.