Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

”Sometimes you've got to make their souls wince.“

”Dave?“

I carried a sack of groceries inside, then wrapped both my .45 and nine-millimeter Beretta inside a towel, took a tube of first-aid cream from the medicine cabinet, and walked down to the dock. Patsy's elbows were splayed on the table, his face pale and luminous with heat and perspiration. The tide was out and the current was dead in the bayou.

Patsy worked a thumbnail between his teeth and stared at me.

”Put some of this stuff on those mosquito bites,“ I said.

He surprised me. He filled both palms with white cream and rubbed it into his forearms and on his face and neck, his round chin pointed up in the air.

I unfolded the towel on the table. His eyes dropped to the pistols, then looked up at me.

”What, you got cold pieces for sale?“ he said.

I released the magazine from the butt of each automatic so he could see the top round, inserted it again, chambered the round, set the safety, and placed both weapons butt to butt in the center of the table. Then I sat down across from him, my eyes stinging with salt. Up the slope, I could see Bootsie under the light on the gallery.

”If you want to square what I did to you, now's the time,“ I said.

”Otherwise, I'm going to mop up the dock with you.“

He smiled and screwed a fresh cigarette in his mouth, crumpled up the empty pack. ”I always heard you were a drunk. That ain't your problem. You're fucking stupid, man,“ he said.

”Oh?“

”I want to make somebody dead, I don't even have to get out of bed.

Don't try to shine me off, worm man. Tell Johnny and those military as swipes they piece me off or I leave hair on the walls.“

He walked on the balls of his feet toward his automobile, lifting his arm to smell himself again.

Sometimes they don't wince.

Chapter 2O

INSIDE THE dream I know I'm experiencing what a psychologist once told me is a world destruction fantasy. But my knowledge that it is only a dream does no good; I cannot extricate myself from it. As a child I saw the sun turn black against a cobalt sky and sink forever beyond the earth's rim. Years later the images would change and I'd revisit my brief time as a new colonial, see Victor Charles, in black pajamas, sliding on his stomach through a rice paddy, a French bolt-action rifle strapped across his back; two GI's eating C-rations in the shade of banyan trees after machine-gunning a farmer's water buffalo just for meanness' sake; three of our wounded after they'd been skinned and hung in trees like sides of meat by NVA. In my dream tonight i can see the Louisiana coastline from a great height, as alluvial and new as it must have been after Jehovah hung the archer's bow in the sky and drew the waters back over the earth's edges, the rivers and bayous and wetlands shimmering like foil under the moon. But it's a view that will not hold at the center, because now I realize the cold light of the moon is actually the fire from chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi, the shook foil of a dead Jesuit poet nothing more than industrial mercury systemically injected into the earth's veins. The roadways and ditches are blown with litter, the canals a depository for rubber tires, beer cans, vinyl sacks of raw garbage thrown from pickup trucks. A fish's gills are orange with fungus.

I wake from the dream and sit alone in the kitchen. I can hear thunder out of the Gulf and Tripod pulling his chain along the clothesline.

Through the window my neighbor's freshly cut lawn smells like corn silk and milk. I sit on the back steps until the trees turn gray with the false dawn, then I go back inside and fall asleep just as the first raindrops ping against the blades of the window fan.

At noon Bootsie and I were eating lunch in the kitchen when Ruthie Jean Fontenot called.

”Moleen's at Dot's in St. Martinville. You know where that's at, I'm talking about in the black section?“ she said.

”I'm not his keeper, Ruthie Jean.“

”You can get him out.“

”Get him out yourself.“

”Some secrets suppose to stay secret. You know the rules about certain things that go on between white and black people.“

”Wrong man to call,“ I said.

”The man owns the place is a friend of Luke's. He said Moleen's got a li'l pistol stuck down inside his coat. The man doesn't want to call the police unless he has to.“

”Forget Moleen and take care of yourself, Ruthie Jean. He's not worth-“