James Burke - Sunset Limited

"You eighty-sixed Cisco?" she said.

"Not exactly. I just didn't feel like talking to him anymore."

"Was this over Megan?"

"When she comes out here, we have trouble," I said.

The breeze ginned the blades in the window fan and I could hear leaves blowing against the screen.

"It's not her fault, it's mine," Bootsie said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"You take on other people's burdens, Dave. It's just the way you are. That's why you're the man I married."

I put my hand on her shoulder. She looked at our reflection in the dresser mirror and stood up, still facing the mirror. I slipped my arms around her waist, under her breasts, and put my face in her hair. Her body felt muscular and hard against mine. I moved my hand down her stomach, and she arched her head back against mine and clasped the back of my neck. Her stiffening breasts, the smoothness of her stomach and the taper of her hips, the hardness of her thighs, the tendons in her back, the power in her upper arms, when I embraced all these things with touch and mind and eye, it was like watching myself become one with an alabaster figure who had been infused with the veined warmth of a new rose.

Then I was between her thighs on top of the sheet and I could hear a sound in my head like wind in a conch shell and feel her press me deeper inside, as though both of us were drawing deeper into a cave beneath the sea, and I knew that concerns over winged chariots and mutability and death should have no place among the quick, even when autumn thudded softly against the window screen.

IN VIETNAM I HAD anxieties about toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds that made the skin tighten around my temples and the blood veins dilate in my brain, so that during my waking hours I constantly experienced an unrelieved pressure band along one side of my head, just as though I were wearing a hat. But the visitor who stayed on in my nightmares, long after the war, was a pajama-clad sapper by the name of Bedcheck Charlie.

Bedcheck Charlie could cross rice paddies without denting the water, cut crawl paths through concertina wire, or tunnel under claymores if he had to. He had beaten the French with resolve and a shovel rather than a gun. But there was no question about what he could do with a bolt-action rifle stripped off a dead German or Sudanese Legionnaire. He waited for the flare of a Zippo held to a cigarette or the tiny blue flame from a heat tab flattening on the bottom of a C-rat can, then he squeezed off from three hundred yards out and left a wound shaped like a keyhole in a man's face.

But I doubt if Ricky Scarlotti ever gave much thought to Vietnamese sappers. Certainly his mind was focused on other concerns Saturday morning when he sat outside the riding club where he played polo sometimes, sipping from a glass of burgundy, dipping bread in olive oil and eating it, punching his new girlfriend, Angela, in the ribs whenever he made a point. Things were going to work out. He'd gotten that hillbilly, Harpo Scruggs, back on the job. Scruggs would clip that snitch in New Iberia, the boon, what was his name, the one ripping off the Mob's own VCRs and selling them back to them, Broussard was his name, clip him once and for all and take the weight off Ricky so he could tell that female FBI agent to shove her Triad bullshit up her nose with chopsticks.

In fact, he and Angela and the two bodyguards had tickets for the early flight to Miami Sunday morning. Tomorrow he'd be sitting on the beach behind the Doral Hotel, with a tropical drink in his hand, maybe go out to the trotters or the dog track later, hey, take a deep-sea charter and catch a marlin and get it mounted. Then call up some guys in Hallandale who he'd pay for each minute they had that fat shit Purcel begging on videotape. Ricky licked his lips when he thought about it.

A sno'ball truck drove down the winding two-lane road through the park that bordered the riding club. Ricky took off his pilot's glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, then put them back on again. What's a sno'ball truck doing in the park when no kids are around? he thought. The sno'ball truck pulled into the oak trees and the driver got out and watched the ducks on the pond, then disappeared around the far side of the truck.

"Go see what that guy's doing," Ricky said to one of his bodyguards.

"He's lying in the shade, taking a nap," the bodyguard replied.

"Tell him this ain't Wino Row, go take his naps somewhere else," Ricky said.

The bodyguard walked across the road, into the trees, and spoke to the man on the ground. The man sat up and yawned, looked in Ricky's direction while the bodyguard talked, then started his truck and drove away.

"Who was he?" Ricky asked the bodyguard.

"A guy sells sno'balls."

"Who was he?"

"He didn't give me his fucking name, Ricky. You want I should go after him?"

"Forget it. We're out of drinks here. Get the waiter back."

An hour later Ricky's eyes were red with alcohol, his skin glazed with sweat from riding his horse hard in the sun. An ancient green milk truck, with magnetized letters on the side, drove down the two-lane road through the park, exited on the boulevard, then made a second pass through the park and stopped in the trees by the duck pond.

Benny Grogan, the other bodyguard, got up from Ricky's table. He wore a straw hat with a multicolored band on his platinum hair.

"Where you going?" Ricky said.

"To check the guy out."

"He's a knife grinder. I seen that truck all over the neighborhood," Ricky said.

"I thought you didn't want nobody hanging around, Ricky," Benny said.

"He's a midget. How's he reach the pedals? Bring the car around. Angela, you up for a shower?" Ricky said.

The milk truck was parked deep in the shade of the live oaks. The rear doors opened, flapping back on their hinges, and revealed a prone man in a yellow T-shirt and dark blue jeans. His long body was stretched out behind a sandbag, the sling of the scoped rifle twisted around his left forearm, the right side of his face notched into the rifle's stock.

When he squeezed off, the rifle recoiled hard against his shoulder and a flash leaped off the muzzle, like an electrical short, but there was no report.

The bullet tore through the center of Ricky's throat. A purple stream of burgundy flowed from both corners of his mouth, then he began to make coughing sounds, like a man who can neither swallow nor expel a chicken bone, while blood spigoted from his wound and spiderwebbed his chest and white polo pants. His eyes stared impotently into his new girlfriend's face. She pushed herself away from the table, her hands held out in front of her, her knees close together, like someone who did not want to be splashed by a passing car.

The shooter slammed the back doors of the milk truck and the driver drove the truck through the trees and over the curb onto the boulevard. Benny Grogan ran down the street after it, his.38 held in the air, automobiles veering to each side of him, their horns blaring.

IT WAS MONDAY WHEN Adrien Glazier gave me all the details of Scarlotti's death over the phone.

"NOPD found the truck out by Lake Pontchartrain. It was clean," she said.

"You got anything on the shooter?"

"Nothing. It looks like we've lost our biggest potential witness against the boys from Hong Kong," she said.

"I'm afraid people in New Orleans won't mourn that fact," I said.

"You can't tell. Greaseball wakes are quite an event. Anyway, we'll be there."

"Tell the band to play 'My Funny Valentine,'" I said.

THAT EVENING I DROVE DOWN to Clete's cottage outside Jeanerette. He was washing his car in the side yard, rubbing a soapy sponge over the hood.

"I think I'm going to get it restored, drive it around like a classic instead of a junk heap," he said. He wore a pair of rubber boots and oversized swimming trunks, and the hair on his stomach was wet and plastered to his skin.