Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“No.”

“Just a shirt.”

“Nope.”

“You're a hard man, Streak.”

“That girl took your fall, Sonny. You want to look at her morgue pictures?”

He was quiet a long time, his face looking straight ahead at the rain striking the windshield.

“Did she suffer?” he said.

“They tore her apart. What do you think?”

His mouth was red against his white skin.

“They were after me, or maybe the notebook I gave you,” he said.

“I've got it. You've written a potential best-seller and people are getting killed over it.”

“Dave, you lock me up, those guys are going to get to me.”

“That's the breaks, partner.”

He was quiet again, his eyes focused inward.

“Are we talking about some kind of CIA involvement?” I said.

“Not directly. But you start sending the wrong stuff through the computer, through your fax machines, these guys will step right into the middle of your life. I guarantee it, Dave.”

“How's the name Emile Pogue sit with you?” I said.

He let out his breath quietly. Under his suspenders his stomach was flat and corded with muscle.

“Another officer ran him all kinds of ways and came up empty,” I said.

He rubbed the ball of his thumb across his lips. Then he said, “I didn't eat yet. What time they serve at the lockup?” Try to read that. Two hours later Clete called me at home. It was raining hard, the water sluicing off the gutters, and the back lawn was full of floating leaves. “What'd you get out of him?” Clete said. “Nothing.”

I could hear country music and people's voices in the background.

“Where are you?”

“In a slop chute outside Morgan City. Dave, this guy bothers me. There's something not natural about him.”

“He's a hustler. He's outrageous by nature.”

“He doesn't get any older. He always looks the same.” I tried to remember Sonny's approximate age. I couldn't. “There's something else,” Clete said. “Where I hit him.

There's a strawberry mark across the backs of my fingers. It's throbbing like I've got blood poisoning or something.”

“Get out of the bar, Clete.”

“You always knoW how to say it.” I couldn't sleep that night. The rain stopped and a heavy mist settled in the trees outside our bedroom window, and I could hear night-feeding bass flopping back in the swamp. I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the curtains puffing in the breeze. “What is it, Dave?” Bootsie said behind me in the dark. “I had a bad dream, that's all.”

“About what?” She put her hand on my spine. “A captain I knew in Vietnam. He was a stubborn and inflexible man. He sent a bunch of guys across a rice field under a full moon. They didn't come back.”

“It's been thirty years, Dave.”