Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

Pay-Monday night I drove out to the Bertrand plantation and returned the spoon Bertie Fontenot had given me. She fanned herself with a ragged magazine in the swing, her breasts hanging like watermelons inside her cotton dress.

“It's the right time period, but I don't think pirates buried those spoons in your garden,” I said.

“They growed there with my radish seeds?”

“The S on those spoons makes me think they're from the Segura plantation on the lake. During the Civil War, a lot of people buried their silverware and coins to keep them from the Yankees, Bertie.”

“They should have buried themselves while they was at it.”

I looked at the lights inside the house next door. Two shadows moved across the shades.

“A lawyer come down from Lafayette and got her out of jail this morning,” she said.

“Which lawyer?”

“I ain't ax his name. I seen him out here with Moleen once. The one look like he got grease on his bald head.”

“Jason Darbonne.”

“I'm going inside now. The mosquitoes is eating me up.” She paused in the square of light the door made, the white ends of her hair shiny with oil. “They gonna run us off, ain't they?”

I had a half dozen answers, but all of them would have been self-serving and ultimately demeaning. So I simply said good night and walked to my truck by the grove of gum trees.

The moon was down, and in the darkness the waving cane looked like a sea of grass on the ocean's floor. In my mind's eye I saw the stubble burning in the late fall, the smoke roiling out of the fire in sulphurous yellow plumes, and I wanted to believe that all those nameless people who may have lain buried in the field-African and West Indian slaves, convicts leased from the penitentiary, Negro laborers whose lives were used up for someone else's profit-would rise with the smoke and force us to acknowledge their humanity and its inextricable involvement and kinship with our own.

But they were dead, their teeth scattered by plowshares, their bones ground by harrow and dozer blade into detritus, and all the fury and mire that had constricted their hearts and tolled their days were now reduced to a chip of vertebrae tangled in the roots of a sugarcane stalk.

Chapter 18

BOY WAS sprung and I was now the full-time operator of a bait shop and boat-rental business that, on a good year, cleared fifteen thousand dollars.

He found me at Red Lerille's Gym in Lafayette.

“Jail wasn't that bad on you, Sonny. You look sharp,” I said.

“Get out of my face with that patronizing attitude, Dave.” He chewed gum and wore a tailored gray suit with zoot slacks and a blue suede belt and a T-shirt.

“I'm off the case, off the job, out of your problems, Sonny.”

I'd forgotten my speed bag gloves at home, but I began working the bag anyway, creating a circular motion with each fist, throbbing the bag harder and harder against the circular board it was suspended from.

“Who appointed you my caretaker?” he asked.

I skinned my knuckles on the bag, hit it harder, faster. He grabbed it with both hands.

“Lose the attitude. I'm talking to you. Who the fuck says you got to quit your job because of me?” he said.

“I didn't quit, I'm suspended. The big problem here is somebody pulled you down from your cross and you can't stand it.”

“I got certain beliefs and I don't like that kind of talk, Dave.” I opened and closed my palms at my sides. My knuckles stung, my wrists pounded with blood. The gym echoed with the smack of gloves on leather, the ring of basketballs against the hardwood floor. Sonny's face was inches from mine, his breath hot on my skin. “Would you step back, please? I don't want to hit you with the bag,” I said. “I don't let anybody take my bounce, Dave.”

“That's copacetic, Sonny. I can relate to it. Hey, I don't want to offend you, but you're not supposed to be in here with street shoes on. They mark up the floors.”

“You can be a wiseass all you want, Dave. Emile Pogue is a guy who once put a flamethrower down a spider hole full of civilians. You think you're on suspension? In whose world?” He walked across the gym floor, through a group of sweating basketball players who looked like their muscles were pumped full of hardening concrete. I hit the speed bag one more time and felt a strip of skin flay back off my knuckle. It rained hard the next morning. Lightning struck in the field behind my house and my neighbor's cows had bunched in the coulee and were lowing inside the sound of the rain. I read the paper on the gallery, then went back inside to answer the phone. “You got to hear me, Dave,”

Sonny said. “Once they take me out, it'll be your turn, then the woman cop, what's-her-name, Helen Soileau, then maybe Purcel, then maybe your wife. They don't leave loose ends.”

“All right, Sonny, you made your point.”