James Burke - Sunset Limited

"The man who helped you kill the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?"

"That's him. Or was. I wouldn't eat no pigs that was butchered around here for a while… Take that exit yonder."

We drove for three miles through farmland, then followed a dirt road through pine trees, past a pond that was green with algae and covered with dead hyacinths, to a two-story yellow frame house whose yard was filled with the litter of dead pecan trees. The windows had been nailed over with plywood, the gallery stacked with hay bales that had rotted.

"You recognize it?" he asked.

"It was a brothel," I said.

"The governor of Lou'sana used to get laid there. Walk ahead of me."

We crossed through the back yard, past a collapsed privy and a cistern, with a brick foundation, that had caved outward into disjointed slats. The barn still had its roof, and through the rain I could hear hogs snuffing inside it. A tree of lightning burst across the sky and Scruggs jerked his face toward the light as though loud doors had been thrown back on their hinges behind him.

He saw me watching him and pointed the revolver at my face.

"I told you to walk ahead of me!" he said.

We went through the rear door of the house into a gutted kitchen that was illuminated by the soft glow of a light at the bottom of a basement stairs.

"Where is Jessie Rideau?" I said.

Lightning crashed into a piney woods at the back of the property.

"Keep asking questions and I'll see you spend some time with her," he said, and pointed at the basement stairs with the barrel of the gun.

I walked down the wood steps into the basement, where a rechargeable Coleman lantern burned on the cement floor. The air was damp and cool, like the air inside a cave, and smelled of water and stone and the nests of small animals. Behind an old wooden icebox, the kind with an insert at the top for a block of tonged ice, I saw a woman's shoe and the sole of a bare foot. I walked around the side of the icebox and knelt down by the woman's side and felt her throat.

"You sonofabitch," I said to Scruggs.

"Her heart give out. She was old. It wasn't my fault," Scruggs said. Then he sat down in a wood chair, as though all his strength had drained through the bottoms of his feet. He stared at me dully from under the brim of his hat and wet his lips and swallowed before he spoke again.

"Yonder's what you want," he said.

In the corner, amidst a pile of bricks and broken mortar and plaster that had been prized from the wall with a crowbar, was a steel box that had probably been used to contain dynamite caps at one time. The lid was bradded and painted silver and heavy in my hand when I lifted it back on its hinges. Inside the box were a pair of handcuffs, two lengths of chain, a bath towel flattened inside a plastic bag, and a big hammer whose handle was almost black, as though stove soot and grease had been rubbed into the grain.

"Terrebonne's prints are gonna be on that hammer. The print will hold in blood just like in ink. Forensic man done told me that," Scruggs said.

"You've had your hands all over it. So have the women," I replied.

"The towel's got Flynn's blood all over it. So do them chains. You just got to get the right lab man to lift Terrebonne's prints."

His voice was deep in his throat, full of phlegm, his tongue thick against his dentures. He kept straightening his shoulders, as though resisting an unseen weight that was pushing them forward.

I removed the towel from the plastic bag and unfolded it. It was stiff and crusted, the fibers as pointed and hard as young thorns. I looked at the image in the center of the cloth, the black lines and smears that could have been a brow, a chin, a set of jawbones, eye sockets, even hair that had been soaked with blood.

"Do you have any idea of what you've been part of? Don't any of you understand what you've done?" I said to him.

"Flynn stirred everybody up. I know what I done. I was doing a job. That's the way it was back then."

"What do you see on the towel, Scruggs?"

"Dried blood. I done told you that. You carry all this to a lab. You gonna do that or not?"

He breathed through his mouth, his eyes seeming to focus on an insect an inch from the bridge of his nose. A terrible odor rose from his clothes.

"I'm going for the paramedics now," I said.

"A.45 ball went all the way through my intestines. I ain't gonna live wired to machines. Tell Terrebonne I expect I'll see him. Tell him Hell don't have no lemonade springs."

He fitted the Ruger's barrel under the top of his dentures and pulled the trigger. The round exited from the crown of his head and patterned the plaster on the brick wall with a single red streak. His head hung back on his wide shoulders, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. A puff of smoke, like a dirty feather, drifted out of his mouth.

TWO DAYS LATER THE SKY was blue outside my office, a balmy wind clattering the palm trees on the lawn. Clete stood at the window, his porkpie hat on his head, his hands on his hips, surveying the street and the perfection of the afternoon. He turned and propped his huge arms on my desk and stared down into my face.

"Blow it off. Prints or no prints, rich guys don't do time," he said.

"I want to have that hammer sent to an FBI lab," I said.

"Forget it. If the St. Landry Parish guys couldn't lift them, nobody else is going to either. You even told Scruggs he was firing in the well."

"Look, Clete, you mean well, but-"

"The prints aren't what's bothering you. It's that damn towel."

"I saw the face on it. Those cops in Opelousas acted like I was drunk. Even the skipper down the hall."

"So fuck 'em," Clete said.

"I've got to get back to work. Where's your car?"

"Dave, you saw that face on the towel because you believe. You expect guys with jock rash of the brain to understand what you're talking about?"

"Where's your car, Clete?"

"I'm selling it," he said. He was sitting on the corner of my desk now, his upper arms scaling with dried sun blisters. I could smell salt water and sun lotion on his skin. "Leave Terrebonne alone. The guy's got juice all the way to Washington. You'll never touch him."

"He's going down."

"Not because of anything we do." He tapped his knuckles on the desk. "There's my ride."

Through the window I saw his convertible pull up to the curb. A woman in a scarf and dark glasses was behind the wheel.

"Who's driving?" I asked.

"Lila Terrebonne. I'll call you later."

AT NOON I MET Bootsie in City Park for lunch. We spread a checkered cloth on a table under a tin shed by the bayou and set out the silverware and salt and pepper shakers and a thermos of iced tea and a platter of cold cuts and stuffed eggs. The camellias were starting to bloom, and across the bayou we could see the bamboo and flowers and the live oaks in the yard of The Shadows.

I could almost forget about the events of the last few days.

Until I saw Megan Flynn park her car on the drive that wound through the park and stand by it, looking in our direction.

Bootsie saw her, too.

"I don't know why she's here," I said.

"Invite her over and find out," Bootsie said.

"That's what I have office hours for."

"You want me to do it?"

I set down the stack of plastic cups I was unwrapping and walked across the grass to the spreading oak Megan stood under.

"I didn't know you were with anyone. I wanted to thank you for all you've done and say goodbye," she said.

"Where are you going?"

"Paris. Rivages, my French publisher, wants me to do a collection on the Spaniards who fled into the Midi after the Spanish Civil War. By the way, I thought you'd like to know Cisco walked out on the film. It's probably going to bankrupt him."