Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“I couldn't cover for you anymore, Dave. I told them about you and Purcel salting Sweet Pea's Caddy and queering the warrant.”

“I'm fired?”

“You can submit your resignation. It needs to be on my desk by five.”

I bounced my palms on my thighs.

“About queering the warrant,” I said. “I made the connection between the scrap iron on the floater's body and a junk pile next to Sweet Pea's house. How'd that play out?”

“I'm afraid it's not your concern any longer.”

It was a windy day outside, and I could see the flag snapping and popping on the steel pole without making any sound.

“I'll box up my stuff,” I said.

“I'm sorry about this,” he said.

I nodded and opened the door to leave.

“Are you going to have that letter on my desk?” he asked.

“I don't think so,” I said.

On the way down the hall I picked up my mail and messages, found an empty cardboard box in a custodian's closet, unlocked my office door, and went inside.

It was all that quick, as though a loud train had gone past me, slamming across switches, baking the track with its own heat, creating a tunnel of sound and energy so intense that the rails seem to reshape like bronze licorice under the wheels; then silence that's like hands clapped across the eardrums, a field of weeds that smell of dust and creosote, a lighted club car disappearing across the prairie.

Or simply a man walking through glass doors into a sun-drenched parking lot, a box on his shoulder, and no one taking particular notice.

An electrical storm struck New Iberia that afternoon, and I sent Batist home and shut down the dock and watched a twenty-four-hour news station on the television set that I kept on top of the soda and lunch meat cooler. A lorry carrying three white men had gone into the black homelands of South Africa and had been shot up by black militia of some kind. The footage was stunning. One white man was already dead, crumpled over the steering wheel, his face pushed into a lopsided expression by the horn button; the two other men lay wounded on the pavement. One had propped his back against the tire and had his hands up, but he never spoke. The other man was on his stomach and having trouble raising his head so he could speak to the soldiers whose legs surrounded him. He was a large man, with a wild red beard, a broad nose, and coarse-grained skin, and he could hardly contain the rage in his throat.

“Will you call a fucking ambulance?” he said in a British accent. “My friend's hurt. Did you hear me? We need the fucking ambulance. How do I say it to you? Call the fucking hospital for an ambulance .. . Oh you have, have you? Well, thank you very much. Thank you fucking bloody very much.”

The militia shot him and his friend. Later, the replay of the tape did not show the bearded man getting in the face of his executioners.

Instead, the newscaster said the victims had begged for their lives.

That last line was repeated over and over throughout the afternoon. I kept waiting for it to be corrected. It never was, not to my knowledge. A brave man's death was revised downward to a shameful and humiliating one, either for categorical or dramatic purposes. The truth had become an early casualty.

What's the point?

I didn't know myself.

The thunder finally stopped and the rain roared on the tin roof and drenched the dock and spool tables and blew through the screens in a fine mist. I waited for it to slack off, then I locked up the bait shop and ran up the slope with a raincoat over my head and told Bootsie of the change in our circumstances.

That evening, which was unseasonably cool and marked by strange lights in the sky, Helen Soileau came out to the house and sat with me on the front steps, her thick forearms propped on her thighs like a ballplayer in a dugout, and told me the story about Sonny's phone call within earshot of waves bursting against a coastline.

The two shooters were pros, probably ex-military men, not the much-inflated contract wiseguys who undid their victims through treachery and had to press the muzzle into the hairline to ensure they didn't miss. They had him triangulated from forty yards out, with either ARi5's or .223 carbines. Had the target been anyone else, he would have been hurled backward, matted with shards of glass, and made to dance on invisible wires inside the phone booth. But one of the shooters probably blew it, shifted his sling to box the side of Sonny's face more tightly in his sights, to lock cartilage and jawbone and the almost feminine mouth, which made soundless words the shooter hated without even hearing them, lock them all into a narrow iron rectangle that would splinter into torn watermelon with the slightest pull of the shooter's finger.

But the inverted boat hull he was aiming across dented and made a thunking sound when he shifted the sling, and suddenly Sonny was on rock 'n' roll, his heart bursting with adrenaline, springing from the booth, his shoulders hunched, zigzagging through the boatyard, his hips swiveling like a football quarterback evading ladders, his skin twitching as though someone had touched a hot match to it.

A witness down by the collapsed pier said Sonny seemed painted with magic. He raced between cinder-block tool shops and dry-docked shrimp boats that were eaten with rot, while the shooters tried to lock down on him again and whanged rounds off a welding truck, blew glass out of a watchman's hut, dissected the yawning door of a junked Coca-Cola machine, and stitched a row of bleeding holes across a corrugated tin paint shed.

Sonny bolted down the sandy slope to the riverbank and poured it on.

But for some unexplainable reason he ran for the beach, the wheeling of gulls and other winged creatures, rather than back up the river to higher ground, and the sand became wetter and wetter under his feet, until his shoes sank up to the ankles in porridge.

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