James Burke - Sunset Limited

What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field where Guidry was hit with the.357?

Then I saw Megan Flynn's automobile park by the boat ramp and Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her head.

She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair. Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted gallery and living room of my house.

"Wet night to be out," I said.

She sat down at the counter and blotted her face with a paper napkin.

"I got a call from Adrien Glazier. She told me about this guy Ruben Esteban," she said.

Not bad, Adrien, I thought.

"This guy's record is for real, Dave. I heard about him when I covered the Falklands War," she said.

"He was in custody on a misdemeanor in Lafayette this morning. He doesn't blend into the wallpaper easily."

"We should feel better? Why do you think the Triads sent a walking horror show here?"

Megan wasn't one to whom you gave facile assurances.

"We don't know who his partner is. While we're watching Esteban, the other guy's peddling an icecream cart down Main Street," I said.

"Thank you," she said, and dried the back of her neck with another napkin. Her skin seemed paler, her mouth and her hair a darker shade of red under the overhead light. I glanced away from her eyes.

"You and Cisco want a cruiser to park by your house?" I asked.

"I have a bad feeling about Clete. I can't shake it," she said.

"Clete?" I said.

"Geri Holtzner is driving his car all around town. Look, nobody is going to hurt Billy Holtzner. You don't kill the people who owe you money. You hurt the people around them. These guys put bombs in people's automobiles."

"I'll talk to him about it."

"I already have. He doesn't listen. I hate myself for involving him in this," she said.

"I left my Roman collar up at the house, Meg."

"I forgot. Swinging dicks talk in deep voices and never apologize for their mistakes."

"Why do you turn every situation into an adversarial one?" I asked.

She raised her chin and tilted her head slightly. Her mouth reminded me of a red flower turning toward light.

Bootsie opened the screen door and came in holding a raincoat over her head.

"Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean to walk into the middle of something," she said. She shook her raincoat and wiped the water off it with her hand. "My, what a mess I'm making."

THE NEXT AFTERNOON WE executed a search warrant on the property where Alex Guidry was shot. The sky was braided with thick gray and metallic-blue clouds, and the air smelled like rain and wood pulp and smoke from a trash fire.

Thurston Meaux, the St. Mary Parish plainclothes, came out of the barn with a rake in his hand.

"I found two used rubbers, four pop bottles, a horseshoe, and a dead snake. That any help to y'all?" he said.

"Pretty clever," I said.

"Maybe Alex Guidry was just setting you up, podna. Maybe you're lucky somebody popped him first. Maybe there was never anything here," Meaux said.

"Tell me, Thurston, why is it nobody wants to talk about the murder of Jack Flynn?"

"It was a different time. My grandfather did some things in the Klan, up in nort' Louisiana. He's an old man now. It's gonna change the past to punish him now?"

I started to reply but instead just walked away. It was easy for me to be righteous at the expense of another. The real problem was I didn't have any idea what we were looking for. The yellow crime scene tape formed a triangle from the barn to the spot where Guidry's Cadillac had been parked. Inside the triangle we found old shotgun and.22 shells, pig bones, a plowshare that groundwater had turned into rusty lace, the stone base of a mule-operated cane grinder overgrown with morning glory vine. A deputy sheriff swung his metal detector over a desiccated oak stump and got a hot reading. We splintered the stump apart and found a fan-shaped ax head, one that had been hand-forged, in the heart of the wood.

At four o'clock the uniformed deputies left. The sun came out and I watched Thurston Meaux sit down on a crate in the lee of the barn and eat a sandwich, let the wax paper blow away in the wind, then pull the tab on a soda can and drop it in the dirt.

"You're contaminating the crime scene," I said.

"Wrong," he replied.

"Oh?"

"Because we're not wasting any more time on this bullshit. You've got some kind of obsession, Robicheaux." He brushed the crumbs off his clothes and walked to his automobile.

Helen didn't say anything for a long time. Then she lifted a strand of hair out of her eye and said, "Dave, we've walked every inch of the field and raked all the ground inside and around the barn. You want to start over again, that's okay with me, but-"

"Guidry said, 'It was under your feet, you arrogant shithead.' Whatever he was talking about, it's physical, maybe something we walked over, something he could pick up and stick in my face."

"We can bring in a Cat and move some serious dirt."

"No, we might destroy whatever is here."

She let out her breath, then began scraping a long divot with a mattock around the edges of the hardpan.

"You're a loyal friend, Helen," I said.

"Bwana has the keys to the cruiser," she said.

I stood in front of the barn wall and stared at the weathered wood, the strips of red paint that were flaking like fingernail polish, the dust-sealed nail holes where Jack Flynn's wrists had been impaled. Whatever evidence was here had been left by Harpo Scruggs, not Alex Guidry, I thought. It was something Scruggs knew about, had deliberately left in place, had even told Guidry about. But why?

To implicate someone else. Just as he had crucified Swede Boxleiter in this spot to tie Boxleiter's death to Flynn's.

"Helen, if there's anything here, it's right by where Jack Flynn died," I said.

She rested the mattock by her foot and wiped a smear of mud off her face with her sleeve.

"If you say so," she said.

"Long day, huh?"

"I had a dream last night. Like I was being pulled back into history, into stuff I don't want to have anything to do with."

"You told me yourself, we're the good guys."

"When I kept shooting at Guidry? He was already done. I just couldn't stop. I convinced myself I saw another flash from his weapon. But I knew better."

"He got what he deserved."

"Yeah? Well, why do I feel the way I do?"

"Because you still have your humanity. It's because you're the best."

"I want to make this case and lock the file on it. I mean it, Dave."

She put down her mattock and the two of us began piercing the hardpan with garden forks, working backward from the barn wall, turning up the dirt from six inches below the surface. The subsoil was black and shiny, oozing with water and white worms. Then I saw a coppery glint and a smooth glass surface wedge out of the mud while Helen was prizing her fork against a tangle of roots.

"Hold it," I said.

"What is it?"

"A jar. Don't move the fork."

I reached down and lifted a quart-size preserve jar out of the mud and water. The top was sealed with both rubber and a metal cap. I squatted down and dipped water out of the hole and rinsed the mud off the glass.

"An envelope and a newspaper clipping? What's Scruggs doing, burying a time capsule?" Helen said.

We walked to the cruiser and wiped the jar clean with paper towels, then set it on the hood and unscrewed the cap. I lifted the newspaper clipping out with two fingers and spread it on the hood. The person who had cut it out of the Times-Picayune had carefully included the strip at the top of the page which gave the date, August 8, 1956. The headline on the story read: "Union Organizer Found Crucified."

Helen turned the jar upside down and pulled the envelope out of the opening. The glue on the flap was still sealed. I slipped my pocketknife in the corner of the flap and sliced a neat line across the top of the envelope and shook three black-and-white photos out on the hood.