Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

For a while.

The bartender's face is pale yellow, the skin tight against the skull, the skin stretched into cat's whiskers, the mouth a stitched slit. The evening air is filled with the rustle of bead curtains and the silky whisper of the Oriental women who move through them; redolent with the thick, sweet smell of opium, like honey and brown sugar burned in a spoon, and the smoky scent of whiskey aged in charcoal barrels, the black cherries and sliced oranges and limes that you squeeze between your back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure, as though somehow they connect you with tropical gardens rather than places under the earth.

The dream always ends in the same way, but I never know if the scene is emblematic or an accurate recall of events that took place during a blackout. I see myself lifted from a floor by men with no faces who pitch me through a door into a stone-paved alley that reverberates with a clatter of metal cans and crones who scavenge through garbage. A pimp and a whore rifle my pockets while I stare up at them, as helpless as if my spine were severed; my hands are cuffed behind me in a chair in a. Third World police station while I shake with delirium tremens and sweat as big as flattened marbles slides down my face. When I wake from the dream my breath shudders in my throat, the air in the room seems poisoned with exhaled and rebreathed alcohol, and I sit on the edge o f my bed and begin to rework the first three steps of the AA recovery program. But there are other images in my mind now, more disturbing than the ones from my sleep. It's like a red bubble rising out of a heated place just beyond the limits of vision; then it bursts in the back of the brain and I can see tracers lacing the night like strips of barroom neon and taste the bitterness of cordite on my tongue. The rush is just like the whiskey that cauterizes memory and transforms electrified tigers into figures trapped harmlessly inside oil and canvas. My shield and my i9ii-model army-issue .45 automatic sit on top of my dresser in the moonlight. I think it's not an accident they found their way into my life. An hour after I got home thatt evening the phone rang in the kitchen.

”We dug out two rounds,“ the medical examiner said. ”One of them's in good shape. But I'd say both are either nine-millimeter or .38 caliber.“

”Two?“ I said.

”There was a second entry wound below the right armpit. It did the most damage. It flattened against something and toppled before it entered the chest cavity. Anyway, it pierced both his lungs. You still think this was the guy out at your house?“

”Yeah, the guy was carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge under his right arm. One of the rounds probably deflected off it.“

”I suspect he was wrapped awful tight, then.“

”I don't understand,“ I said.

”He jacked a lot of adrenaline into his heart before he got hit.

Otherwise, I don't know how he made it out of there. Anyway, tomorrow we'll see if we can match his blood to the specimens you gave me from Cade and the bushes in front of your house.“

”Thanks for your help, Doc.“

”Keep me posted on this one, will you?“

”Sure.“

”I wasn't passing on an idle thought about the adrenaline in this man's heart. I've read medical papers about the deaths of royalty who were executed during the French Revolution. Sometimes they were told if the headsman's blow was off the mark and they were able to get up and run, their lives would be spared. Some of them actually rose headless from the block and ran several yards before they collapsed.“

”Pretty grim stuff.“

”You're missing my point. I believe the man I took apart today was absolutely terrified. What could put that level of fear in a soldier of fortune?“

Not bad, podna, I thought.

After supper I sat on the gallery and watched Alafair currying her Appaloosa, whose name was Tex, out in the railed lot by the shed we had built f

or him. Tripod was off his chain and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch, his tail hanging down the side of the wire like a ringed banner. My neighbor had moved out of his house and put it up for sale, but each evening he returned to turn on his soak hoses and water sprinklers, filling the air with an iridescent mist that drifted across his hydrangeas onto our lawn. The sun had descended into a flattened red orb on the western horizon, and in the scarlet wash of the afterglow the flooded tree trunks in the swamp seemed suffused with firelight, and you could see an empty rowboat tied up in the black stillness of the bayou's far bank, the wood as dry and white as bone.

Bertie Fontenot's dinged and virtually paint less pickup truck bounced through the ruts in the road and turned into our drive. She got out, slammed the truck door, and labored up the incline, her elephantine hips rolling inside her print-cotton dress, her big lacquered straw bag with the plastic flowers on it gripped under her arm like an ammunition box.

”What you done about my title?“ she said.

”Nothing.“

”That's all you got to say?“

”You don't seem to accept my word, Bertie. So I've given up explaining myself.“

She looked away at the horse lot.

”I seen you at Ruthie Jean's house. I thought maybe you was working on my title,“ she said.

”A murder investigation.“

”Ruthie Jean don't know nothing about a murder. What you talking about?“

”You want to sit down, Bertie?“