James Burke: Sunset Limited

The tenth book in the Robicheaux series

I would like to thank the following attorneys for all the legal information they have provided me in the writing of my books over the years: my son James L. Burke, Jr., and my daughter Alafair Burke and my cousins Dracos Burke and Porteus Burke.

I would also like once again to thank my wife Pearl, my editor Patricia Mulcahy, and my agent Philip Spitzer for the many years they have been on board.

I'd also like to thank my daughters Pamela McDavid and Andree Walsh, from whom I ask advice on virtually everything.

I HAD SEEN A DAWN like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny nails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall.

Just before the sun broke above the Gulf's rim, the wind, which had blown the waves with ropes of foam all night, suddenly died and the sky became as white and brightly grained as polished bone, as though all color had been bled out of the air, and the gulls that had swooped and glided over my wake lifted into the haze and the swells flattened into an undulating sheet of liquid tin dimpled by the leathery backs of stingrays.

The eastern horizon was strung with rain clouds and the sun should have risen out of the water like a mist-shrouded egg yolk, but it didn't. Its red light mushroomed along the horizon, then rose into the sky in a cross, burning in the center, as though fire were trying to take the shape of a man, and the water turned the heavy dark color of blood.

Maybe the strange light at dawn was only coincidence and had nothing to do with the return to New Iberia of Megan Flynn, who, like a sin we had concealed in the confessional, vexed our conscience, or worse, rekindled our envy.

But I knew in my heart it was not coincidence, no more so than the fact that the man crucified against the barn wall was Megan's father and that Megan herself was waiting for me at my dock and bait shop, fifteen miles south of New Iberia, when Clete Purcel, my old Homicide partner from the First District in New Orleans, and I cut the engines on my cabin cruiser and floated through the hyacinths on our wake, the mud billowing in clouds that were as bright as yellow paint under the stern.

It was sprinkling now, and she wore an orange silk shirt and khaki slacks and sandals, her funny straw hat spotted with rain, her hair dark red against the gloom of the day, her face glowing with a smile that was like a thorn in the heart.

Clete stood by the gunnel and looked at her and puckered his mouth. "Wow," he said under his breath.

SHE WAS ONE OF those rare women gifted with eyes that could linger briefly on yours and make you feel, rightly or wrongly, you were genuinely invited into the mystery of her life.

"I've seen her somewhere," Clete said as he prepared to climb out on the bow.

"Last week's Newsweek magazine," I said.

"That's it. She won a Pulitzer Prize or something. There was a picture of her hanging out of a slick," he said. His gum snapped in his jaw.

She had been on the cover, wearing camouflage pants and a T-shirt, with dog tags around her neck, the downdraft of the British helicopter whipping her hair and flattening her clothes against her body, the strap of her camera laced around one wrist, while, below, Serbian armor burned in columns of red and black smoke.

But I remembered another Megan, too: the in-your-face orphan of years ago, who, with her brother, would run away from foster homes in Louisiana and Colorado, until they were old enough to finally disappear into that wandering army of fruit pickers and wheat harvesters whom their father, an unrepentant IWW radical, had spent a lifetime trying to organize.

I stepped off the bow onto the dock and walked toward my truck to back the trailer down the ramp. I didn't mean to be impolite. I admired the Flynns, but you paid a price for their friendship and proximity to the vessel of social anger their lives had become.

"Not glad to see me, Streak?" she said.

"Always glad. How you doin', Megan?"

She looked over my shoulder at Clete Purcel, who had pulled the port side of the boat flush into the rubber tires on my dock and was unloading the cooler and rods out of the stern. Clete's thick arms and fire-hydrant neck were peeling and red with fresh sunburn. When he stooped over with the cooler, his tropical shirt split across his back. He grinned at us and shrugged his shoulders.

"That one had to come out of the Irish Channel," she said.

"You're not a fisher, Meg. You out here on business?"

"You know who Cool Breeze Broussard is?" she asked.

"A house creep and general thief."

"He says your parish lockup is a toilet. He says your jailer is a sadist."

"We lost the old jailer. I've been on leave. I don't know much about the new guy."

"Cool Breeze says inmates are gagged and handcuffed to a detention chair. They have to sit in their own excrement. The U.S. Department of Justice believes him."

"Jails are bad places. Talk to the sheriff, Megan. I'm off the clock."

"Typical New Iberia. Bullshit over humanity."

"See you around," I said, and walked to my truck. Rain was pinging in large, cold drops on the tin roof of the bait shop.

"Cool Breeze said you were stand-up. He's in lockdown now because he dimed the jailer. I'll tell him you were off the clock," she said.

"This town didn't kill your father."

"No, they just put me and my brother in an orphanage where we polished floors with our knees. Tell your Irish friend he's beautiful. Come out to the house and visit us, Streak," she said, and walked across the dirt road to where she had parked her car under the trees in my drive.

Up on the dock, Clete poured the crushed ice and canned drinks and speckled trout out of the cooler. The trout looked stiff and cold on the board planks.

"You ever hear anything about prisoners being gagged and cuffed to chairs in the Iberia Parish Prison?" I asked.

"That's what that was about? Maybe she ought to check out what those guys did to get in there."

"She said you were beautiful."

"She did?" He looked down the road where her car was disappearing under the canopy of oaks that grew along the bayou. Then he cracked a Budweiser and flipped me a can of diet Dr Pepper. The scar over his left eyebrow flattened against his skull when he grinned.

THE TURNKEY HAD BEEN a brig chaser in the Marine Corps and still wore his hair buzzed into the scalp and shaved in a razor-neat line on the back of his neck. His body was lean and braided with muscle, his walk as measured and erect as if he were on a parade ground. He unlocked the cell at the far end of the corridor, hooked up Willie Cool Breeze Broussard in waist and leg manacles, and escorted him with one hand to the door of the interview room, where I waited.

"Think he's going to run on you, Top?" I said.

"He runs at the mouth, that's what he does."

The turnkey closed the door behind us. Cool Breeze looked like two hundred pounds of soft black chocolate poured inside jailhouse denims. His head was bald, lacquered with wax, shiny as horn, his eyes drooping at the corners like a prizefighter's. It was hard to believe he was a second-story man and four-time loser.

"If they're jamming you up, Cool Breeze, it's not on your sheet," I said.