James Burke - Sunset Limited

"Boxleiter put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, didn't he?" she said.

"What?" he said.

"Swede slung your blood all over the apartment. He might as well have written your name on the wall," I said.

"Swede who? I was robbed and stabbed behind a bar in Clayton," he said.

"That's why you waited until the wound was infected before you got treatment," I said.

"I was drunk for three days. I didn't know what planet I was on," he replied. His hair was curly, the color of metal shavings. He tried to concentrate his vision on me and Helen, but his eyes kept shifting to John Nash.

"Harpo wouldn't let you get medical help down in Louisiana, would he? You going to take the bounce for a guy like that?" I asked.

"I want a lawyer in here," he said.

"No, you don't," Nash said, and fitted his hand on Breedlove's jaws and gingerly moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as though examining the function of Breedlove's neck. "Remember me?"

"No."

He moved his hand down on Breedlove's chest, flattening it on the panels of gauze that were taped across Breedlove's knife wound.

"Mr. Nash," I said.

"Remember the girl in the tent? I sure do." John Nash felt the dressing on Breedlove's chest with his fingertips, then worked the heel of his hand in a slow circle, his eyes fixed on Breedlove's. Breedlove's mouth opened as though his lower Up had been jerked downward on a wire, and involuntarily his hands grabbed at Nash's wrist.

"Don't be touching me, boy. That'll get you in a lot of trouble," Nash said.

"Mr. Nash, we need to talk outside a minute," I said.

"That's not necessary," he replied, and gathered a handful of Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his palm with it. "Because everything is going to be just fine here. Why, look, the man's eyes glisten with repentance already."

WE HAD ONE SUSPECT in Trinidad, Colorado, now a second one in New Mexico. I didn't want to think about the amount of paperwork and the bureaucratic legal problems that might lie ahead of us. After we dropped John Nash off at the sheriffs office, we ate lunch in a cafe by the highway. Through the window we could see a storm moving into the mountains and dust lifting out of the trees in a canyon and flattening on the hardpan.

"What are you thinking about?" Helen asked.

"We need to get Breedlove into custody and extradite him back to Louisiana," I said.

"Fat chance, huh?"

"I can't see it happening right now."

"Maybe John Nash will have another interview with him."

"That guy can cost us the case, Helen."

"He didn't seem worried. I had the feeling Breedlove knows better than to file complaints about local procedure." When I didn't reply, she said, "Wyatt Earp and his brothers used to operate around here?"

"After the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral they hunted down some other members of the Clanton gang and blew them into rags. I think this was one of the places on their route."

"I wonder what kind of salary range they have here," she said.

I paid the check and got a receipt for our expense account.

"That story Archer Terrebonne told me about Lila and her cousin firing a gun across a snowfield, about starting an avalanche?" I said.

"Yeah, you told me," Helen said.

"You feel like driving to Durango?"

WE HEADED UP THROUGH Walsenburg, then drove west into the mountains and a rainstorm that turned to snow when we approached Wolf Creek Pass. The juniper and pinyon trees and cinnamon-colored country of the southern Colorado plateau were behind us now, and on each side of the highway the slopes were thick with spruce and fir and pine that glistened with snow that began melting as soon as it touched the canopy.

At the top of Wolf Creek we pulled into a rest stop and drank coffee from a thermos and looked out on the descending crests of the mountains. The air was cold and gray and smelled like pine needles and wet boulders in a streambed and ice when you chop it out of a wood bucket in the morning.

"Dave, I don't want to be a pill…" Helen began.

"About what?"

"It seems like I remember a story years ago about that avalanche, I mean about Lila's cousin being buried in it and suffocating or freezing to death," she said.

"Go on."

"I mean, who's to say the girl wasn't frozen in the shape of a cross? That kind of stuff isn't in an old newspaper article. Maybe we're getting inside our heads too much on this one."

I couldn't argue with her.

When we got to the newspaper office in Durango it wasn't hard to find the story about the avalanche back in 1967. It had been featured on the first page, with interviews of the rescuers and photographs of the slide, the lopsided two-story log house, a barn splintered into kindling, cattle whose horns and hooves and ice-crusted bellies protruded from the snow like disembodied images in a cubist painting. Lila had survived because the slide had pushed her into a creekbed whose overhang formed itself into an ice cave where she huddled for two days until a deputy sheriff poked an iron pike through the top and blinded her with sunlight.

But the cousin died under ten feet of snow. The article made no mention about the condition of the body or its posture in death.

"It was a good try and a great drive over," Helen said.

"Maybe we can find some of the guys who were on the search and rescue team," I said.

"Let it go, Dave."

I let out my breath and rose from the chair I had been sitting in. My eyes burned and my palms still felt numb from involuntarily tightening my hands on the steering wheel during the drive over Wolf Creek Pass. Outside, the sun was shining on the nineteenth-century brick buildings along the street and I could see the thickly timbered, dark green slopes of the mountains rising up sharply in the background.

I started to close the large bound volume of 1967 newspapers in front of me. Then, like the gambler who can't leave the table as long as there is one chip left to play, I glanced again at a color photograph of the rescuers on a back page. The men stood in a row, tools in their hands, wearing heavy mackinaws and canvas overalls and stocking caps and cowboy hats with scarves tied around their ears. The snowfield was sunlit, dazzling, the mountains blue-green against a cloudless sky. The men were unsmiling, their clothes flattened against their bodies in the wind, their faces pinched with cold. I read the cutline below the photograph.

"Where you going?" Helen said.

I went into the editorial room and returned with a magnifying glass.

"Look at the man on the far right," I said. "Look at his shoulders, the way he holds himself."

She took the magnifying glass from my hand and stared through it, moving the depth of focus up and down, then concentrating on the face of a tall man in a wide-brim cowboy hat. Then she read the cutline.

"It says 'H. Q. Skaggs.' The reporter misspelled it. It's Harpo Scruggs," she said.

"Archer Terrebonne acted like he knew him only at a distance. I think he called him 'quite a character,' or something like that."

"Why would they have him at their cabin in Colorado? The Terrebonnes don't let people like Scruggs use their indoor plumbing," she said. She stared at me blankly, then said, as though putting her thoughts on index cards, "He did scut work for them? He's had something on them? Scruggs could be blackmailing Archer Terrebonne?"

"They're joined at the hip."

"Is there a Xerox machine out there?" she asked.

WE GOT BACK TO NEW Iberia late the next day. I went to the office before going home, but the sheriff had already gone. In my mailbox he had left a note that read: "Let's talk tomorrow about Scruggs and the Feds."

That evening Bootsie and Alafair and I went to a restaurant, then I worked late at the dock with Batist. The moon was up and the water in the bayou looked yellow and high, swirling with mud, between the deep shadows of the cypress and willow trees along the banks.