James Burke - Crusader's Cross

I checked out a cruiser and returned to the camp in the Atchafalaya Basin where I had awakened on a Sunday morning, hovering on the edges of psychosis, praying the sky might rain Jack Daniel's at any moment and let my drunkard's game go into extra innings.

I found the Creole woman who had watched over me that morning and who had told me I had been in the company of poachers and men who carried knives. Her name was Clarise Lantier, and she was picking up trash behind the lakefront bar her husband operated, stuffing it heavily into a gunnysack. She wore trousers and men's work shoes, and when she stooped over and stared at me sideways, her recessed, milky-blue eye and misshapen face were like those of a female Quasimodo.

"Who were these poachers and men with knives, Miss Clarise?" I asked.

"They live yonder, 'cross the lake. Don't ax me their names, either, 'cause they don't give them. Maybe they from up nort'."

"How do you know?"

"They talk different from us."

"You're not telling me a whole lot."

"They dangerous men, Mr. Dave. That's enough to know, ain't it?" she said.

But she gave me directions to their camp, anyway. I drove on a dirt track around the northern rim of the lake, through stands of swamp maples and persimmon and gum trees. The interior of the woods was dark with shade, the grass a pale green, the canopy rippling in the wind. On the east shore I saw a shack built on stilts by the water's edge, an outboard and a pirogue tied under it. A pickup with crab traps in back and a Tennessee plate was parked up on the high ground, a bullet hole in the rear window.

There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the 'Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.

I got out of the cruiser and stood behind the opened door, my right hand on the butt of my.45. "It's Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. I need somebody to come down here and talk to me," I called up at the shack.

A dark-haired man with a ragged beard appeared in the back doorway, just above the wood steps that led down to dry ground. "Holy shit, you're a cop?" he said.

"Keep your hands where I can see them, please," I said. "Who else is in the camp?"

"Nobody. They went to run the trot line."

"Come down here, please," I said.

His body was so thin it looked skeletal. His jeans and T-shirt were filthy, his neck beaded with dirt rings. He walked slowly down the steps, as though his connective tissue barely held his bones together. It was impossible to tell his age or estimate his potential. He seemed ageless, without cultural reference, painted on the air. He had teeth on one side of his mouth and none on the other. There was a black glaze in his eyes, a long, tapered skinning knife in a scabbard on his belt. His odor was like scrapings from an animal hide that have burned in a fire.

"I sure didn't make you for no lawman," he said.

"What's your name, podna?"

"Same name it was when we met you 'cross the lake at the bar – Vassar Twitty."

"I'm not here to bother you guys about game regulations, Vassar. I don't care what kind of history you might have in other places, either. But I've got a personal problem I think you might be able to help me with. I went on a bender and don't know what I did."

It felt easier saying it than I had thought. He sat down on a step, his knees splayed, and looked about the ground with an idiotic grin on his face.

"Want to let me in on the joke?" I asked.

"You was pretty pissed off. We kept telling you to just have another drink and come coon hunting with us. But you was set on getting even with some guy."

"Which guy?" I said.

"Some TV newsman you said was jamming you up. We tried to get your keys away from you, but there wasn't nothing for it."

"For what?" I said, swallowing.

"When a man wants to rip somebody from his liver to his lights, you leave him alone. We left you alone. I reckon nothing bad happened or you wouldn't be driving a cruiser. Right? Boy, you was sure stewed," he said.

The wind gusted off the lake. It must have been ninety in the shade, but my face felt as cold and bright as if I had bathed it in ice water.

I wasn't in a good state of mind when I got back to the department. Could I have gone to Valentine Chalons's guesthouse and in a bloodlust attacked his sister? How do you reach memories that are locked inside a black box?

I had another problem, too, one I had kept pushing to the edges of my consciousness. I went into Helen's office and closed the door behind me. "You don't look too hot," she said.

"I found a guy in the Basin I was drinking with the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. He said I talked about ripping up Val Chalons. He said he and his friends tried to stop me but I took off in my truck."

"I think we know all that, don't we?"

"You've been protecting me, Helen."

"No," she said.

"I gave you that CD with a blood smear on it. You didn't turn it over to Doogie Dugas."

"Because it didn't come from the crime scene. Because Doogie is an incompetent idiot."

"I know that's Honoria's blood on it."

"No, you don't. Listen, Dave, Val Chalons has done everything in his power to put your head on a stick. But luminol doesn't lie. There were no blood traces in your truck, your clothes, or in your house. Now stop building a case against yourself."

"Raphael Chalons came to my house yesterday and tried to put me on his payroll," I said.

"That's interesting," she said, looking at the tops of her nails.

"One other item. Molly Boyle and I got married Saturday night."

Her elbow was propped on her desk. She rested her chin on her knuckles, her face softening. She seemed to think a long time before she spoke. "You did it."

"Did what?"

"Figured out a way to marry your own church. No, don't say anything. Just quietly disappear. Bwana say 'bye' now."

Jimmie's resourcefulness rarely let him down. His friendship with police officers, private investigators, and people in the life extended from Key Biscayne, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas, which was the long, sickle-shaped rim of America's sexual playground long before the invention of Vegas or Atlantic City. Three hours after his flight had arrived in Miami, he obtained the home address of the man who now called himself Lou Coyne. He also obtained the name of his wife, a woman who called herself Connie Coyne and who lived three houses down from her husband on a canal in Miami Beach.

Jimmie stayed that night in a hotel that fronted the ocean. In the morning, he dressed in a linen suit and lavender silk shirt, had his shoes shined in the hotel lobby, then took a cab to a two-story white stucco house, one with a faded red tile roof, scrolled iron balconies, heavy, brass-ringed oak doors, and gated walls that towered over the grounds. Each house on the street was similar in ambiance, a fortress unto itself, the name of its security service prominently displayed. But even though it was Saturday, there were no people on this dead-end street, no sounds of children playing on a ficus-shaded lawn.

A Hispanic gardener came to the gate after Jimmie pushed the buzzer. The St. Augustine grass was closely clipped and thick, the bluish-green of a Caribbean lagoon. The flower beds bloomed with every tropical plant imaginable, and royal palms touched the eaves of the second story. Off to one side of the yard Jimmie could see a lime-colored swimming pool coated with leaves, the cracked dome of a 1950s underground atomic-bomb shelter protruding from the sod, like the top of a giant toadstool, and a boat dock that offered a sweeping view of the ocean.