James Burke - Crusader's Cross

Jimmie had gone back to New Orleans and I was alone again. I had never done well with solitude. But I had another enemy, too, one that did not depart with age. I suspect monastic saints tossed in their sleep with it, waking fatigued and throbbing at first light, their fingers knotted in prayer as they tried to extricate themselves from the soft shapes that beckoned to them from their dreams. For that reason alone I always admired them, but my admiration for them did not make my own problem with celibacy any the less, perhaps because I was a drunk as well as one of those for whom the sybaritic life was only a wink of the eye away.

Sometimes I thought I heard Bootsie telling me I should not be alone. Didn't the story in Genesis indicate the same? Was it not a form of pride to set a standard above that of ordinary men?

That evening I went to Clete's cottage at the motor court, where he was waxing his Caddy under a mimosa tree. He was bare-chested and wore a Marine Corps utility cap on the back of his head and a huge pair of electric-blue Everlast boxing trunks that hung to his knees. The shadows of the mimosa branches looked like feathers moving on his skin.

"Where have you been for the last three days?" I said.

"Chasing down a couple of child molesters. They run every time. I don't know why Nig and Willie -"

"Why don't you answer your cell phone?" I said.

"I lost it somewhere. I think maybe a gal rolled me. I can't deal with working for Nig and Willie anymore. It's really affecting my stability. You think I could get on with the department?"

"In Iberia Parish?" I said.

"Something wrong with that?"

"Nothing," I said, my face empty.

"Can you run it by Helen? Salary is not a factor. Long as it's detective grade," he said.

"Sure," I said.

"I'd really like that," he said, rubbing a soft rag along a tailfin on his Cadillac, whistling to himself, as though somehow I had reassured him that people such as ourselves were not out of sync with the rest of the world.

Then I told him about the death of Billy Joe Pitts. "Pitts got hit in the head with his own motorboat?" he said.

"That's what the sheriff says."

Clete opened a Budweiser and drank from it, his throat working, his eyes flat. "You figure somebody took him off the board?" he asked.

"Who knows?"

He watched the way I was looking at him. He wiped the beer off his lips with his hand. "Get yourself a Dr Pepper out of the icebox."

"I don't want one," I said.

"What's bugging you?" he said.

"Nothing," I replied.

He picked up a pint bottle of whiskey from inside the open top of his Caddy. It was wrapped inside a brown paper bag, a shaft of sunlight flashing on the broken seal affixed to the cap. He took a hit from the neck and chased it with beer from his Budweiser can. He lit a cigarette and drank again from the whiskey, then ground the cigarette out in the gravel, his cheeks blooming with color. Unconsciously I wet my bottom lip. His eyes wandered over my face and I saw a great sadness in them.

"I'm a bad example. You stop having the thoughts you're having," he said.

"I'm not having any thoughts. I worry about you," I lied.

"Right," he said.

I headed for my truck.

"I'll put the booze up. I'll drive you to a meeting. Dave, come back here. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" he said.

I put on my running shorts and lifted weights in the backyard, did three sets of push-ups, with my feet propped on a picnic bench – thirty reps to each set – and jogged two miles through City Park, then hit it hard back across the drawbridge to home. But I could not rid myself of the restlessness that seemed to invade my metabolism without cause, nor the thoughts and images that kept drifting before my eyes.

There was no question about their nature. They had to do with the smell of perfume, the amber splash that sour mash makes when it's first poured on ice, a woman's face framed softly inside the thickness of her hair, the shine of bar light on the tops of her breasts, perhaps a cherry held between her teeth, her hand curved on the neck of a freshly opened bottle of champagne, bursting with white foam.

I opened a bottle of Talking Rain and drank it empty, then showered, put on my pajama bottoms, and tried to read, my shield, handcuffs, slapjack, and.45 on the nightstand beside me. The last of the summer light had gone out of the sky, and in the yard I could hear the bamboo rattling in the breeze and the first patter of rain on the trees. Sometime just before midnight I fell asleep with my hand over my eyes. I had not locked the front door.

When I woke, the room was black. I went to the bathroom and got back in bed. Outside, dry lightning flickered on the trees. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed I was inside a cave, my arm twisted behind me. That's when I heard the rocking chair moving back and forth in the corner.

I opened my eyes and saw a silhouette seated in the chair. When I tried to sit up, my right wrist came tight against the handcuffs that were clipped around it and the brass bedstead. I reached with my left hand for the nightstand, where my.45 should have been. It was gone, along with my slapjack. The figure in the chair stopped rocking.

"I was watching you sleep," a woman's voice said.

"Honoria?" I said.

"Your front door was unlocked. That's a dangerous thing to do," she said.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came in to see you."

My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, but I could see her face now, a pale orb wrapped in shadow. "Where's my piece?" I said.

"Your what?"

"My forty-five, where is it?"

She stood up from the chair and walked to the side of the bed. She wore Mexican-style jeans, gold sandals, hoop earrings, and a white blouse that was fluffy with lace. She sat down beside me, her rump pressing deep into the mattress. "I hid it," she said.

I couldn't smell alcohol on her, nor even cigarette smoke, which meant she had probably not been in a bar. "My handcuff key is in my pants. You need to unhook me, Honoria," I said.

"Why?"

"Because friends don't do this to one another," I replied.

She looked into my face and brushed back my hair, then leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. "You like me, don't you?" she said.

"I'm too old for you."

"No, you're not." She placed her hand on my stomach and leaned down again.

"What you're doing is no good for either of us, Honoria," I said.

She took her hand away and sat very still. I could see her breasts rising and falling against the light from the street.

"I think the devil lives under the bayou. I think the devil lives in my father, too," she said.

"I believe you need some help with this stuff. I know a doctor in Lafayette," I said.

"A therapist?"

"I used to see him after my wife Annie was killed. He helped me a lot," I said.

She looked at nothing, her small hand by my hip. "Do you mind if I stay with you a while?"

"No, but I -"

"Just say yes or no."

"No, I don't mind."

"I didn't think you would. I always liked you, Dave. You're a misplaced figure from Elizabethan theater, you know. Your tragedy is the fact no one ever explained that to you."

And with that, she curled up next to me, her face on my shoulder, her arm across my stomach, and went to sleep.

The sun was above the rooftops when I woke. The space beside me was empty and my right wrist was free of the handcuffs that hung from the bedstead. My.45 and slapjack had been replaced on the nightstand, along with the key to my cuffs. From the kitchen I could hear someone clattering pots or pans on the stove.

After I used the bathroom, I pulled on my khakis and went into the kitchen. Honoria was dripping coffee, heating a pan of milk and stirring a pot of oatmeal. Both Snuggs and Tripod were eating out of their pet bowls on the floor. Honoria's hair was brushed and her face made up, but when she glanced in my direction her face had the stark expression of someone who has been caught unawares by a photographer's flash.