James Burke - Sunset Limited

I SPENT THE REST of the day with the paperwork that my file drawer seemed to procreate from the time I closed it in the afternoon until I opened it in the morning. The paperwork all concerned the Pool, that comic Greek chorus of miscreants who are always in the wings, upstaging our most tragic moments, flatulent, burping, snickering, catcalling at the audience. It has been my long-held belief as a police officer that Hamlet and Ophelia might command our respect and admiration, but Sir Toby Belch and his minions usually consume most of our energies.

Here are just a few random case file entries in the lives of Pool members during a one-month period.

A pipehead tries to smoke Drāno crystals in a hookah. After he recovers from destroying several thousand brain cells in his head, he dials 911 and dimes his dealer for selling him bad dope.

A man steals a blank headstone from a funeral home, engraves his mother's name on it, and places it in his back yard. When confronted with the theft, he explains that his wife poured his mother's ashes down the sink and the man wished to put a marker over the septic tank where his mother now resides.

A woman who has fought with her common-law husband for ten years reports that her TV remote control triggered the electronically operated door on the garage and crushed his skull.

Two cousins break into the back of a liquor store, then can't start their car. They flee on foot, then report their car as stolen. It's a good plan. Except they don't bother to change their shoes. The liquor store's floor had been freshly painted and the cousins track the paint all over our floors when they file their stolen car report.

THAT EVENING CLETE AND I filled a bait bucket with shiners and took my outboard to Henderson Swamp and fished for sac-a-lait. The sun was dull red in the west, molten and misshaped as though it were dissolving in its own heat among the strips of lavender cloud that clung to the horizon. We crossed a wide bay, then let the boat drift in the lee of an island that was heavily wooded with willow and cypress trees. The mosquitoes were thick in the shadows of the trees, and you could see bream feeding among the lily pads and smell an odor like fish roe in the water.

I looked across the bay at the levee, where there was a paintless, tin-roofed house that had not been there three weeks ago.

"Where'd that come from?" I said.

"Billy Holtzner just built it. It's part of the movie," Clete said.

"You're kidding. That guy's like a disease spreading itself across the state."

"Check it out."

I reached into the rucksack where I had packed our sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and my World War II Japanese field glasses. I adjusted the focus on the glasses and saw Billy Holtzner and his daughter talking with a half dozen people on the gallery of the house.

"Aren't you supposed to be out there with them?" I asked Clete.

"They work what they call a twelve-hour turnaround. Anyway, I go off the clock at five. Then he's got some other guys to boss around. They'll be out there to one or two in the morning. Dave, I'm going to do my job, but I think that guy's dead meat."

"Why?"

"You remember guys in Nam you knew were going to get it? Walking fuckups who stunk of fear and were always trying to hang on to you? Holtzner's got that same stink on him. It's on his breath, in his clothes, I don't even like looking at him."

A few drops of rain dimpled the water, then the sac-a-lait started biting. Unlike bream or bass, they would take the shiner straight down, pulling the bobber with a steady tension into the water's darkness. They would fight hard, pumping away from the boat, until they broke the surface, when they would turn on their side and give it up.

We layered them with crushed ice in the cooler, then I took our ham-and-onion sandwiches and coffee thermos out of the rucksack and lay them on the cooler's top. In the distance, by the newly constructed movie set, I saw two figures get on an airboat and roar across the bay toward us.

The noise of the engine and fan was deafening, the wake a long, flat depression that swirled with mud. The pilot cut the engine and let the airboat float into the lee of the island. Billy Holtzner sat next to him, a blue baseball cap on his head. He was smiling.

"You guys on the job?" he said.

"No. We're just fishing," I said.

"Get out of here," he said, still smiling.

"We fish this spot a lot, Billy. We're both off the clock," Clete said.

"Oh," Holtzner said, his smile dying.

"Everything copacetic?" Clete said.

"Sure," Holtzner said. "Want to come up and watch us shoot a couple of scenes?"

"We're heading back in a few minutes. Thanks just the same," I said.

"Sure. My daughter's with me," he said, as though there were a logical connection between her presence and his invitation. "I mean, maybe we'll have a late-night dinner later."

Neither Clete nor I responded. Holtzner touched the boat pilot on the arm, and the two of them roared back across the bay, their backdraft showering the water's surface with willow leaves.

"How do you read that?" I said.

"The guy's on his own, probably for the first time in his life. It must be rough to wake up one morning and realize you're a gutless shit who doesn't deserve his family," Clete said, then bit into his sandwich.

THE NEXT DAY TWO uniformed city cops and I had to arrest a parolee from Alabama by the swimming pool at City Park. Even with cuffs on, he spit on one cop and kicked the other one in the groin. I pushed him against the side of the cruiser and tried to hold him until I could get the back door open, then the cop who had been spit on Maced him and sprayed me at the same time.

I spent the next ten minutes rinsing my face and hair in the lavatory inside the recreation building. When I came back outside, wiping the water off my neck with a paper towel, the parolee and the city cops were on their way to the jail and Adrien Glazier was standing by my pickup truck. Out on the drive, among the oak trees, I saw a dark blue waxed car with two men in suits and shades standing by it. Leaves were swirling in eddies around their car.

"The sheriff told us you were here. How's that stuff feel?" she said.

"Like somebody holding a match to your skin."

"We just got a report from Interpol on the dwarf. He's enjoying himself on the Italian Riviera."

"Glad to hear it," I said.

"So maybe the shooter who did Ricky Scar left with him."

"You believe that?" I asked.

"No. Take a walk with me."

She didn't wait for a reply. She turned and began walking slowly through the trees toward the bayou and the picnic tables that were set under tin sheds by the waterside.

"What's going on, Ms. Glazier?" I said.

"Call me Adrien." She rested her rump against a picnic table and folded her arms across her chest. "Did Cisco Flynn confess his involvement in a homicide to you?"

"Excuse me?"

"The guy who got chucked out a hotel window in San Antonio? I understand his head hit a fire hydrant. Did Cisco come seeking absolution at your bait shop?"

"My memory's not as good as it used to be. Y'all have a tap on his phone or a bug in his house?"

"We're giving you a free pass on this one. That's because I acted like a pisspot for a while," she said.

"It's because you know Harpo Scruggs was a federal snitch when he helped crucify Jack Flynn."

"You should come work for us. I never have any real laughs these days."

She walked off through the trees toward the two male agents who waited for her, her hips undulating slightly. I caught up with her.

"What have you got on the dwarfs partner?" I asked.

"Nothing. Watch your ass, Mr. Robicheaux," she replied.

"Call me Dave."

"Not a chance," she said. Then she grinned and made a clicking goodbye sound in her jaw.