James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

"Oh yeah?… Well… I'm sure you're right… You swinging dicks are always right… Let's close it down here. I've had my share of the tomato patch for today."

She walked ahead of me through the open front door of the house into the living room, where Clay Mason sat in a deep deer-hide chair amid a litter of shattered glass, antique firearms stripped from the walls, splayed books, and overturned furniture. On one stucco wall, pinned inside a broken viewing case, was a sun-faded flag of the Texas republic.

Mason's hands were folded on top of his cane, his eyes narrow and liquid with resentment.

"Don't get up… I just need to use your John… Such a gentleman…," she said, and continued on into the back of the house, without ever slowing her step.

"Looks like you're going to skate," I said.

"My family earned every goddamn inch of this place. We'll be here when the rest of you are dust."

An upper corner of the Texas flag had fallen loose from the blue felt backboard it was pinned to. I reached through the broken glass and smoothed the cloth flat and replaced the pin. Faded strips of butternut cloth, inscribed in almost illegible ink with the names of Civil War battles, were sewn around the flag's borders.

"This flag belonged to the Fourth Texas. Those were John Bell Hood's boys," I said.

"My great-grandfather carried that flag."

"It was your family who lived on the ranch next to the LaRoses', west of the Pecos, wasn't it? Jerry Joe Plumb told me how y'all slant drilled and ran wets across the river."

"Do you read newspapers? There's a revolution being fought here. Everything you're doing helps those men out there kill Mayan Indians."

"Men like you always have a banner, Dr. Mason. The truth is, you live vicariously through the suffering of other people."

"Get out…" He flicked at the air with the backs of his fingers, as though he were dispelling a bad odor.

I tried to think of a rejoinder, but I had none. Clay Mason had spent a lifetime floating above the wreckage he had precipitated, seemingly immune to all the Darwinian and moral laws that affected the rest of us, and my rhetoric sounded foolish compared to the invective he had weathered for decades.

I stepped across the broken glass on the oak floor toward the open doorway. Outside, the soldiers were loading up in the six-bys.

"Hold on, Streak," Helen said behind me. "It looks like our friend flushed the candy store down the commode. Except it backed up on him. Guess what got stuck under the rim?"

She dipped the tip of her little finger into a child's balloon and held the white powder up in a column of sunlight, then wiped her finger on a piece of tissue paper.

"It's a little wet. Can you call that fat guy in, see if he wants to do the taste test?" she said.

ISHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING but I didn't.

The morning after our return from Guadalajara the sheriff opened the door to my office and leaned inside.

"That was Lafayette P.D. You'd better get over there. Sabelle Crown's pinned inside a car on the Southern Pacific tracks."

"What happened?"

"She was abducted from the city golf course by this guy Zerrang. What was she doing on a golf course?"

"She feeds the pigeons there."

"Anyway, Zerrang must have taken her somewhere. Evidently it was pretty bad. When he was finished, he left her unconscious in her car on the train tracks. Why's Zerrang after Sabelle Crown?"

"He wants her father," I said.

"I don't get it."

"Mookie Zerrang works for Persephone Green and Jimmy Ray Dixon. Jimmy Ray knows sooner or later Aaron's going to kill him."

"What for?"

"I think it has to do with Sabelle."

"To tell you the truth, Dave, I really don't give a damn about any of these people's motivations. It's like figuring out why shit stinks. I just wish they'd stay the hell out of our parish. Get over there, will you?"

The sheriff brushed something out of his eye, then he said, "Except why would this guy torture a woman, then leave her on the train tracks? Why didn't he just kill her and put her out of her misery?"

"Because he hurts a lot more people this way," I said.

Helen Soileau and I drove in a cruiser on the four-lane to Lafayette. Emergency flares burned inside the fog when we arrived at the railroad crossing where the freight locomotive had struck Sabelle's gas-guzzler broadside and pushed it fifty yards down the rails in a spray of sparks.

We parked on the shoulder of the road and walked through the weeds to the car's wreckage by the side of the tracks. It lay upside down, the engine block driven through the firewall, the roof mashed against the steering column. Lafayette firemen had covered the outside metal, the engine, and gas tank with foam and were trying to wedge open the driver's window with a hydraulic jack.

A paramedic had worked his way on his stomach through the inverted passenger's window, and I could hear him talking inside. A moment later he crawled back out. His shirt and both of his latex gloves were spotted with blood.

He sat in the grass, his hands on his thighs. A fireman put a plug of tobacco in the paramedic's mouth to bite off, then helped him up by one arm.

"How's it look?" I said.

"The car didn't burn. Otherwise, that lady don't have a whole lot of luck," he replied. He looked into my eyes and saw the unanswered question still there. He shook his head.

I took off my coat, slipped my clip-on holster off my belt, and squeezed through the passenger's window into the car's interior. I could smell gas and the odor of musty cushions and old grease and burnt electrical wires.

Sabelle's head and upper torso were layered with crumpled metal, so that she had virtually no mobility. I couldn't see the lower portion of her body at all. She coughed, and I felt the spray touch my face like a warm mist.

"What'd he do to you, kiddo?" I said.

"Everything."

"Those guys out there are the best. They'll have you out of here soon."

"When I close my eyes I can feel the world turning. If I don't open them quickly, I won't get back… I betrayed Daddy, Dave."

"It's not your fault."

"Mookie Zerrang knows where he is."

"There's still time to stop it. If you'll trust me."

Her eyes went out of focus, then settled on mine again. One cheek was marbled with broken veins. The rent metal around her head looked like an aura fashioned out of warped pewter.

She told me where to look.

"Jimmy Ray Dixon was your pimp in New Orleans, wasn't he? Then he took you north, to work for him in Chicago."

"I made my own choices. I got no kick coming."

"Your father murdered Ely Dixon, didn't he?"

"Wipe my nose, Streak. My hands are caught inside something."

I worked my handkerchief from my back pocket and touched at her upper lip with it. She coughed again, long and hard this time, gagging in her throat, and I tried to hold her chin so she wouldn't cut it on a strip of razored metal that was wrapped across her chest. The handkerchief came away with a bright red flower in the middle of it.

"I have to go now," I said.

"Tell Daddy I'm sorry," she said.

"You're the best daughter a father could have, Sabelle."

I thought her eyes wrinkled at the corners. But they didn't. Her eyes were haunted with fear, and my words meant nothing.

I backed out of the passenger window onto the grass. I could smell water in a ditch, the loamy odor of decayed pecan husks in an orchard, taste the fog on my tongue, hear the whirring sound of automobile tires out on the paved road. I walked away just as a team of firemen and uniformed Lafayette cops used the Jaws of Life to wrench open one side of the wrecked car. The sprung metal sounded just like a human scream.