James Burke - Crusader's Cross

Mine was an old.38 I took off a Murphy artist and part-time drug mule who used to work out of a bar two blocks from the Desire Welfare Project. The barrel and sight had been hacksawed off an inch from the cylinder. The grips were wrapped with electrician's tape. But the previous owner's carelessness and neglect had not affected his weapon's mechanical integrity. The cylinder still locked firmly in place when the hammer snapped down on the firing pin and didn't shave lead on the back end of the barrel.

I put on my raincoat and hat, dropped the revolver in my pocket, and drove to Lou Kale's motel in Lafayette.

It was still raining hard when I parked under a spreading oak and showed my badge to a young woman at the desk. "Lou Kale," I said.

She was probably a college kid. Her face was plain, earnest, eager to please, totally removed for any implication my presence might have. "He's in one-nineteen. Would you like me to ring his room?" she said.

"That's all right. Would you let me have a key, please?"

"I'm not sure I'm supposed to do that," she said.

"It's fine. This is part of a police investigation," I said.

"Well, I guess it's all right, then," she said, programming a card for me.

I walked down the corridor, past soft drink and candy machines, and entered an annex that paralleled the swimming pool. I didn't feel good about what I had just done. The girl at the desk was probably a good person and I had taken advantage of her trust and deceived her. In my mind's eye I saw myself somehow making it up to her, and I knew at that moment that the script for the next few minutes was already written in my head and the final act was one that I must not allow myself to see. I stuck the electronic key into the door of Room 119 and pulled it out quickly. When the tiny green light flashed at me, I twisted the door handle and stepped inside, my right hand squeezed around the taped grips of the.38.

Lou Kale was asleep on his side, bare-chested, a pair of pajama bottoms notched into his love handles. The room was dark, but the swimming pool lights were on outside and the surface of the water glowed with a misty green luminosity in the rain. When I closed the curtain on the sliding door, Lou Kale's eyes opened as though he had been shaken violently awake.

"You know what a dry drunk is, Lou?" I said.

"Dry what?"

"It's a guy like me. That means you're shit out of luck."

He lifted himself up on his arms. His abdominal muscles looked as hard as the rollers on a washtub, his chest and shoulders coated with soft strips of monkey fur. Even with the air-conditioning on, the room smelled like an animal's lair or un-buried offal. By the bed was a service table, and in the middle of it a steak knife and ragged pink T-bone rested on a white plate marbled with gravy and blood.

"I got no beef with you, Jack," he said.

"Remember when you woke me up in that motel in Galveston? You touched the muzzle of a nickel-plated automatic to the center of my forehead. You called me 'hoss' and told me I had a lot of luck. I was twenty years old."

"What are you doing with that gun, man?"

I had dumped all six shells from the cylinder into my palm. I inserted one of them into a random chamber and clicked the cylinder back into the revolver's frame. Then I put the hammer on half-cock, spun the chamber, and reset the hammer.

"I'm going to hand you this pistol, Lou. When I do, I want you to point it at me and squeeze the trigger. Maybe you'll punch my ticket. But if not, it will be my turn, and the odds for you will have shrunk appreciably. Are you processing this, Lou?"

"You need to fire your psychiatrist."

"Take it," I said.

"I don't want it."

"This is as good as it's going to get, partner. I advise you to take it."

But he kept his hands at his sides, his face jerking away each time the barrel came close to him. "Take it, you piece of shit," I said.

"No!" he said, teeth clenched.

That's when I lost it. I hooked him in the face with my left, mashed my knee into his chest, and forced the revolver into his hands. "Do it!" I said.

"No!"

"Do it, you motherfucker!"

The muzzle was pointed into my chest, inches from my sternum. I forced his thumb onto the trigger and pressed it back against the trigger guard. I heard the hammer snap on an empty chamber. His eyes were wide with disbelief as they stared up into mine.

"You're crazy," he said, his voice seizing in his throat, like a child who has been crying uncontrollably.

"My turn," I said, pulling the revolver from his hands.

"Just tell me what you want."

"Val Chalons is your son, isn't he?"

"That's what this is about? Are you nuts? You make me pull the trigger on a cop over -"

I clenched my left hand on his throat and jammed the.38 into his mouth with my right, forcing the cylinder over his teeth. He gagged, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. I pulled the trigger and heard the hammer snap again on an empty chamber.

"Oh Jesus," he said, trembling all over when I slid the barrel from his mouth.

"Is Val Chalons your -"

"Yeah, yeah, we found out when the old man needed a kidney donation. He had to get the kidney from the girl."

"Honoria?"

He nodded, blotting the spittle and blood on his mouth with the bedsheet.

"Val put the contract on me?" I said.

"Figure it out. How many people want you snuffed?"

"I wouldn't be clever."

"He don't consult with me. He's an educated man. People get in his face, he deals with it. That he gets from me."

I looked at him a long time. There were other questions I could have asked him, but the surge of terror that had robbed him of his defenses was gone and I had no inclination to restore it. In fact, I wondered if the moral insanity that characterizes terminal alcoholism had not taken up presence in my own life. I wiped the.38 clean on a towel and opened the curtain on the sliding glass door. Hailstones were bouncing on the St. Augustine grass and the cement by the pool.

"I can't force you out of the area, Lou, but I'm going to make life as uncomfortable for you as I can," I said.

"You did a switcherroo on that gun, didn't you? You palmed the shell?"

I flipped open the cylinder on the.38 and shucked out the cartridge I had loaded earlier. It had been one chamber removed from rotating under the firing pin.

"You got a lot of luck, Lou. Wear this on your key chain," I said, and bounced the cartridge off his chest.

As I turned to walk out, I heard him scrape the steak knife off his dinner plate and charge at my back. I drove my elbow into his face and left him on the carpet, holding his nose with both hands.

A moment later I stopped at the desk in the lobby. "I owe you an apology, Miss," I said.

"What for?" the girl behind the desk said, smiling.

"One day I'll tell you. Here are a couple of gift certificates for a dinner at the Patio in New Iberia. The owner gave them to me, so it's no big deal."

"You don't have to do that," she said.

"Yeah, I do."

"Thank you," she said.

"Good night," I said.

"Good night," she replied.

I got in my truck and drove out from under the spreading oak where I had parked. A blue and pink neon sign in the shape of a martini glass and a reclining nude inside it was stenciled against the sky. I floored the truck through a broken chain of puddles and swerved out onto the old two-lane to New Iberia, the road ahead black with rain.

At 8:01 a.m. Friday I called Koko Hebert at his office. "Was Honoria Chalons a kidney donor?" I said.

He put down the receiver, then scraped it up a moment later. "Neither a donor nor a recipient," he said. "Why?"

"Val Chalons was asked to be a kidney donor for his father. It turned out they weren't related. Supposedly Honoria bailed out the old man."