James Burke - Sunset Limited

She smiled slightly, then hung her bag from her shoulder and walked out of the office, her eyes already assuming new purpose, as though she were burning away all the antithetical thoughts that were like a thumbtack in her brow.

AT EIGHT-THIRTY THAT NIGHT Bootsie and I were washing the dishes in the kitchen when the phone rang on the counter.

"This is what you've done, asshole. My reputation's ruined. My job is gone. My wife has left me. You want to hear more?" the voice said.

"Guidry?" I said.

"There's a rumor going around I'm the father of a halfwit mulatto I sold to a cathouse in Morgan City. The guy who told me that said he heard it from your buddy Clete Purcel."

"Either you're in a bar or you've become irrational. Either way, don't call my home again."

"Here it is. I'll give you the evidence on Flynn's murder. I said evidence , not just information. I'll give you the shooters who did the two brothers, I'll give you the guys who almost drowned Megan Flynn, I'll give you the guy who's been writing the checks. What's on your end of the table?"

"The Iberia prosecutor will go along with aiding and abetting. We'll work with St. Mary Parish. It's a good deal. You'd better grab it."

He was quiet a long time. Outside, the heat lightning looked like silver plate through the trees.

"Are you there?" I said.

"Scruggs threatened to kill me. You got to bring this guy in."

"Give us the handle to do it."

"It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it, you arrogant shithead."

I waited silently. The receiver felt warm and moist in my hand.

"Go to the barn where Flynn died. I'll be there in forty-five minutes. Leave the muff diver at home," he said.

"You don't make the rules, Guidry. Another thing, call her that again and I'm going to break your wagon."

I hung up, then dialed Helen's home number.

"You don't want to check in with the St. Mary sheriff's office first?" she said.

"They'll get in the way. Are you cool on this?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"We take Guidry down clean. No scratches on the freight."

"The guy who said he'd dig up my grave and piss in my mouth? To tell you the truth, I wouldn't touch him with a baton. But maybe you'd better get somebody else for backup, bwana."

"I'll meet you at the end of East Main in twenty minutes," I said.

I went into the bedroom and took my holstered 1911 model U.S. Army.45 from the dresser drawer and clipped it onto my belt. I wiped my palms on my khakis unconsciously. Through the screen window the oak and pecan trees seemed to tremble in the heat lightning that leaped between the clouds.

"Streak?" Bootsie said.

"Yes?"

"I overheard your conversation. Don't worry about Helen. It's you that man despises," she said.

HELEN AND I DROVE down the two-lane through Jeanerette, then turned off on an oak-lined service road that led past the barn with the cratered roof and sagging walls where Jack Flynn died. The moon had gone behind a bank of storm clouds, and the landscape was dark, the blackberry bushes in the pasture humped against the lights of a house across the bayou. The leaves of the oaks along the road nickered with lightning, and I could smell rain and dust in the air.

"Guidry's going to do time, isn't he?" Helen said.

"Some anyway."

"I partnered with a New Orleans uniform who got sent up to Angola. First week down a Big Stripe cut his face. He had himself put in lockdown and every morning the black boys would spit on him when they went to breakfast."

"Yeah?"

"I was just wondering how many graduates of the parish prison will be in Guidry's cell house."

Helen turned the cruiser off the road and drove past the water oaks through the weeds and around the side of the barn. The wind was up now and the banana trees rattled and swayed against the barn. In the headlights we could see clusters of red flowers in the rain trees and dust swirling off the ground.

"Where is he?" Helen said. But before I could speak she pointed at two pale lines of crushed grass where a car had been driven out in the pasture. Then she said, "I got a bad feeling, Streak."

"Take it easy," I said.

"What if Scruggs is behind this? He's been killing people for forty years. I don't plan to walk blindfolded into the Big Exit." She cut the lights and unsnapped the strap on her nine-millimeter Beretta.

"Let's walk the field. You go to the left, I go to the right… Helen?"

"What?"

"Forget it. Scruggs and Guidry are both pieces of shit. If you feel in jeopardy, take them off at the neck."

We got out of the cruiser and walked thirty yards apart through the field, our weapons drawn. Then the moon broke behind the edge of a cloud and we could see the bumper and front fender of an automobile that was parked close behind a blackberry thicket. I circled to the right of the thicket, toward the rear of the automobile, then I saw the tinted windows and buffed, soft-yellow exterior of Alex Guidry's Cadillac. The driver's door was partly open and a leg in gray pants and a laced black shoe was extended into the grass. I clicked on the flashlight in my left hand.

"Put both hands out the window and keep them there," I said.

But there was no response.

"Mr. Guidry, you will put your hands out the window, or you will be in danger of being shot. Do you hear me?" I said.

Helen moved past a rain tree and was now at an angle to the front of the Cadillac, her Beretta pointed with two hands straight in front of her.

Guidry rose from the leather seat, pulling himself erect by hooking his arm over the open window. But in his right hand I saw the nickel-plated surfaces of a revolver.

"Throw it away!" I shouted. "Now! Don't think about it! Guidry, throw the piece away!"

Then lightning cracked across the sky, and out of the corner of his vision he saw Helen take up a shooter's position against the trunk of the rain tree. Maybe he was trying to hold the revolver up in the air and step free of the car, beyond the open door, so she could see him fully, but he stumbled out into the field, his right arm pressed against the wound in his side and the white shirt that was sodden with blood.

But to Helen, looking into the glare of my flashlight, Guidry had become an armed silhouette.

I yelled or think I yelled, He's already hit , but it was too late. She fired twice, pop, pop , the barrel streaking the darkness. The first round hit him high in the chest, the second in the mouth.

But Guidry's night in Gethsemane was not over. He stumbled toward the barn, his lower face like a piece of burst fruit, and swung his pistol back in Helen's direction and let off one shot that whined away across the bayou and made a sound like a hammer striking wood.

She began firing as fast as her finger could pull the trigger, the ejected shells pinging off the trunk of the rain tree, until I came behind her and fitted my hands on both her muscular arms.

"He's down. It's over," I said.

"No, he's still there. He let off another round. I saw the flash," she said, her eyes wild, the tendons in her arms jumping as though she were cold.

"No, Helen."

She swallowed, breathing hard through her mouth, and wiped the sweat off her nose with her shoulder, never releasing the two-handed grip on the Beretta. I shined the light out across the grass onto the north side of the barn.

"Oh, shit," she said, almost like a plea.

"Call it in," I said.

"Dave, he's lying in the same, I mean like, his arms are out like-"

"Get on the radio. That's all you have to do. Don't regret anything that happened here tonight. He dealt the play a long time ago."

"Dave, he's on the left side of where Flynn died. I can't take this stuff. I didn't know the guy was hit. Why didn't you yell at me?"