Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“That little anecdote about Julia's cheerleading days bother you?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Come on, Dave, I was talking about a college prank. It's innocent stuff.”

“Not from you it isn't.”

“You have an irritating habit. You're always suggesting an unstated conclusion for other people to guess at,” he said. He waited. “Would you care to explain yourself, Dave?”

“The problem isn't mine to explain, sir.” In the distance, out by the access road, I could see a heavyset man jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, a towel looped around his glistening neck.

“I think the role of human enigma would become kind of tiresome,” he said. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder, tracked the flight of a seagull with it, then at the last second blew the head off a clump of pampas grass. He cracked open the breech, picked the empty casing out, and flung it smoking into the mud.

“I believe I'll go back inside,” I said.

“I think you've made an unpleasant implication, Dave. I insist we clear it up.”

“I went back out to your plantation this week. I'm not sure what's going on out there, but part of it has to do with Ruthie Jean Fontenot.”

He looked into my eyes. “You want to spell that out?” he said.

“You know damn well what I'm talking about. If you want to hide a personal relationship, that's your business. But you're hiding something else, too, Moleen, about that plantation. I just don't know what it is.”

He fitted the shotgun's stock to his shoulder, fired at a nutria that was swimming behind a half-submerged log, and blew a pattern of bird shot all over the pond. The nutria ducked under the water and surfaced again but it was hurt and swimming erratically. Moleen snapped open the breech and flung the casing out into the water.

“I don't take kindly to people insulting me on my own property,” he said.

“The insult is to that woman on the plantation. You didn't even have the decency to inscribe her name on the photograph you gave her.”

“You're beyond your limits, my friend.”

“And you're cruel to animals as well as to people. Fuck you,” I said, and walked back toward the camp.

I found Bootsie on the gallery.

“We have to go,” I said.

“Dave, we just ate.”

“I already said our good-byes. I have some work to do at the dock.”

“No! It's rude.”

Three women drinking coffee nearby tried not to hear our conversation.

“Okay, I'm going to put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jog a couple of miles. Pick me up out on the road.” She looked at me with a strangled expression on her face. “I'll explain it later.”

We had come in Bootsie's Toyota. I unlocked the trunk, took out my running shoes and gym shorts, and changed in the lee of the car. Then I jogged across a glade full of buttercups, past a stand of persimmon trees that fringed the woods, and out onto the hard-packed dirt road that led off the chenier.

The wind was warm and the afternoon sky marbled with yellow and maroon clouds. I turned my face into the breeze, kept a steady pace for a quarter mile, then poured it on, the sweat popping on my forehead, the blood singing in my chest until Moleen Bertrand's words, his supercilious arrogance, became more and more distant in my mind.

I passed a clump of pecan trees that were in deep shadow, the ground under them thick with palmettos. Then in the corner of my

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vision I saw another jogger step out into the spangled light and fall in beside me.

I smelled him before I saw him. His odor was like a fog, gray, visceral, secreted out of glands that could have been transplanted from animals. His head was a tan cannonball, the shoulders ax-handle wide, the hips tapering down to a small butt that a woman could probably cover with both her hands. His T-shirt was rotted into cheesecloth, the armpits dark and sopping, the flat chest a nest of wet black hair.