James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

Helen and I drove down I-10 toward the Atchafalaya River. It was misting, and the fields and oak and palm trees along the roadside were gray and wet-looking, and up ahead I could see the orange and blue glow of a filling station inside the fog that rolled off the river.

"What are you worrying about?" Helen said.

I touched the brake on the cruiser.

"I've got to do something," I said.

"What?"

"Maybe Zerrang didn't head right for the Basin. Maybe there's another way to pull his plug."

"You don't look too happy about it, whatever it is," she said.

"How would you like to save Buford LaRose's career for him?" I said.

I called his house from the filling station pay phone. Through the glass I could see the willows on the banks of the Atchafalaya, where we were to meet two powerboats from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department.

"Buford?" I said.

"What is it?"

"Sabelle Crown's dead."

"Oh man, don't tell me that."

"She was tortured, then left on a train track in her car by Mookie Zerrang."

I could hear him take the receiver away from his ear, hear it scrape against a hard surface. Then I heard him breathing in the mouthpiece again.

"You were right about Aaron Crown," I said. "He killed Ely Dixon. But it was a mistake. He went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray. He didn't know that Jimmy Ray had moved out and rented it to his brother."

"Why would he want to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon?"

"Jimmy Ray got Sabelle started in the life… You're vindicated, Buford. That means you get word to Persephone Green to call Mookie Zerrang off."

"Are you insane? Do you think I control these people? What in God's name is the matter with you?"

"No, they control you."

"Listen, I just had that ghoul beating on my front door. I ran him off my property with a pistol."

"Which ghoul?"

"Who else, Dock Green. His wife dumped him. He accused me and Karyn of being involved in a ménage à trois with her. I guess that's her style."

"It seems late to be righteous," I said.

"What's that mean?"

"You treated Sabelle Crown like shit."

He was silent for what seemed a long time. Then he said, "Yeah, I didn't do right by her… I wish I could change it… Good-bye, Dave."

He quietly hung up the phone.

Helen and I sat in the cabin of the St. Martin Parish sheriff's boat. The exhaust pipes idled at the waterline while a uniformed deputy smoked a cigarette in the open hatchway and waited for the boat skipper to return from his truck with a can of gasoline.

I could feel Helen's eyes on my face.

"What is it?" I said.

"I don't like the way you look."

"It hasn't been a good day."

"Maybe you shouldn't be in on this one," she said.

"Is that right?"

"Unless he deals it, Mookie Zerrang comes back alive, Streak."

"Well, you never know how things are going to work out," I said.

Her lips were chapped, and she rubbed them with the ball of her finger, her eyes glazed over with hidden thoughts.

We went down the Atchafalaya, with the spray blowing back across the bow, then we entered a side channel and a bay that was surrounded by flooded woods. Under the sealed sky, the water in the bay was an unnatural, luminous yellow, as though it were the only element in its environment that possessed color. Up ahead, in the mist, I could see the shiny silhouette of an abandoned oil platform, then a canal through the woods and inside the tangle of air vines and cypress and willow trees a shack built on wood pilings.

"That's it," I said to the boat pilot.

He cut back on the throttle, stared through the glass at the woods, then reversed the engine so we didn't drift into the shore.

"You want to go head-on in there?" he asked.

"You know another way to do it?" I said.

"Bring in some SWAT guys on a chopper and blow that shack into toothpicks," he replied.

A St. Martin Parish plainclothes homicide investigator who was on the other boat walked out on the bow and used a bullhorn, addressing the shack as though he did not know who its occupants were.

"We want to talk to y'all that's inside. You need to work your way down that ladder with one hand on your head. There won't nobody get hurt," he said.

But there was no sound, except the idling boat engines and the rain that had started falling in large drops on the bay's surface. The plain-clothes wiped his face with his hand and tried again.

"Aaron, we know you in there. We afraid somebody's come out here to hurt you, podna. Ain't it time to give it up?" he said.

Again, there was silence. The plainclothes' coat was dark with rain and his tie was blown back across his shirt. He looked toward our boat, shrugged his shoulders, and went inside the cabin.

"Let's do it, skipper," I said to the pilot.

He pushed the throttle forward and took our boat into the canal. The wake from our boat receded back through the trees, gathering with it sticks and dead hyacinths, washing over logs and finally disappearing into the flooded undergrowth. The second boat eased into the shallows behind us until its hull scraped on the silt.

Helen and I dropped off the bow into the water and immediately sank to our thighs, clouds of gray mud ballooning around us. She carried a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, with the barrel sawed off an inch above the pump. I pulled back the slide on my.45, chambered the top round in the magazine, and set the safety.

A flat-bottom aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied to a piling under the shack. Helen and I waded through the water, ten yards apart, not speaking, our eyes fixed on the shack's shuttered windows and the ladder that extended upward to an open door with a gunny sack curtain blowing in the door frame.

On my left, the St. Martin plainclothes and three uniformed deputies were spread out in a line, breaking their way through a stand of willows.

Helen and I walked under the shack and listened. I cupped my hand on a piling to feel for movement above.

Nothing.

Helen held the twelve-gauge at port arms, her knuckles white on the stock and pump. Her faded blue jeans were drenched up to her rump. The air was cold and felt like damp flannel against the skin, and I could smell an odor like beached gars and gas from a sewer main.

Then I felt something tick against my face, like a mild irritant, a wet leaf, a blowfly. Unconsciously, I wiped at it with my hand, then I felt it again, harder this time, against my eyebrow, my forehead, in my hair, directly in my face as I stared upward at the plank floor of the shack.

Helen's mouth was parted wide, her face white.

I wiped my face on my coat sleeve and stared at the long red smear across the cloth.

I felt a revulsion go through my body as though I had been spat upon. I tore off my coat, soaked it in the water at my knees, and wiped my face and hair with it, my hand trembling.

Above me, strings of congealed blood hung from the planks and lifted and fell in the wind.

I moved out from under the shack, slipped the safety off the.45, and began climbing the ladder, which was set at a gradual angle, almost like stairs. Helen moved out into the water, away from the shack, and aimed the twelve gauge at the door above my head, then, just before I went inside, swung the barrel away and followed me.

I reached the top rung and paused, my hand on the doorjamb. The gunny sack curtain billowed back on the nails it hung from, exposing a rusted icebox without power, a table and chair, a solitary wood bunk, a coon hide that someone had been fleshing with a spoon.

I pulled myself up and went inside, tearing away the curtain, kicking back the door against the wall.

Except it did not fly back against the wall.

I felt the wood knock into meat and bone, a massive and dense weight that did not surrender space.