Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'Why did it have to be a pathetic and frightened little man like Albert?' she said. She swayed slightly on her feet, and her eyes closed, and I saw the tears squeeze out from under the lashes.

I put my arms around her shoulders and patted her softly on the back. Her forehead was pressed against my chest; I could feel the thickness of her hair against my cheek, the thin and fragile quality of her body inside my arms, the brush of her stomach against my loins. On the neighbor's lawn the iron head of a broken garden sprinkler was rearing erratically with the hose's pressure and dripping water into the grass.

I took the door key from her fingers. It felt stiff and hard in my hand.

'I have to go back-home now, Lucinda,' I said. 'Where can we get hold of Zoot?'

Then I turned and saw the car parked at the curb, a two-door white Toyota. The car of Sister Marie Guilbeaux, whose small hands were as white as porcelain and resting patiently on the steering wheel. In the passenger seat sat Bootsie, her face disbelieving, stunned, hurt in a way that no one can mask, as though all the certainties in her life had proved to be as transitory as a photographic negative from one's youth dissolving on top of a hot coal.

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chapter twenty-two

Bootsie looked straight ahead as we followed I-10 past the sand flats and dead cypress on the northern tip of Lake Pontchartrain. My mind was racing. None of the day's eve

nts seemed to have any coherence.

'I left Motley's and Lucinda's extensions on the answering machine, I left the address of the motel. I didn't imagine it,' I said.

'It wasn't there, Dave.'

'Was there a power failure?'

'How would I know if I wasn't home? It wouldn't have affected the recording, anyway.'

'There's something wrong here, Boots.'

'You're right. Sometimes you worry about other people more than you do your own family.'

'That's a rotten thing to say.'

'Goddamn it, he called while you were out of town looking after this Bergeron woman.'

'Buchalter?'

'Who else?'

'How could he? We just changed the number.'

'It was Buchalter. Do you think I could forget that voice? He even talked about what he did to me.'

I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were shiny in the green glow from the dashboard. A semi passed, and the inside of the pickup was loud with the roar of the exhaust.

'What else did he say?'

'That he'd always be with us. Wherever we were. His voice sounded like he had wet sand in his throat. It was obscene.'

'I think he's a hype. He calls when he's loaded.'

'Why does this woman have to drag you into her investigation?'

'It's my investigation, too, Bootsie. But you're right, I shouldn't have gone. We were firing in the well.'

'I just don't understand this commitment you have to others while a psychopath tries to destroy us.'

'Look, something's out of sync here. Don't you see it? How did the nun, what's her name, get involved in this?'

'She dropped by, that's all.'