Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“Are you worried about our finances?”

“Not really. We're doing okay.”

She placed one arm across my side.

“The department did you wrong, Dave. Accept it and let it go. We don't need them. What do you call that in AA?”

“Working the Third Step. But that's not it, Boots. I think Johnny

Giacano or these military guys are starting to take people off the board.”

“They'd better not try it around here,” she said. I looked into her face. It was calm, without anger or any display of self-manufactured feeling. Then she said, “If one of those sons of-bitches tries to harm anyone in this family, he's going to think the wrath of God walked into his life.” I started to smile, then looked at the expression in her eyes and thought better of it. “I believe you, kiddo,” I said. “Kiddo, yourself,” she answered. She tilted her head slightly on the pillow and moved her fingers on my hip. I kissed her mouth, then her eye

s and hair and ran my hands down her back. Bootsie never did anything in half measures. She closed the door that gave onto the hallway-in case Alafair got up from bed and went into the kitchen for a drink of water-then pulled off her nightgown and stepped out of her panties in front of the window. She had the smoothest complexion of any woman I'd ever known, and in the spinning shadows of the window fan's blades the curves and surfaces of her body looked like those of a perfectly formed statue coming to life against a shattering of primordial light. I moved on top of her and she hooked her legs inside mine and pressed her palms into the small of my back, buried her mouth in my neck, ran her fingers up my spine into my hair, rolled her rump in a slow circle as her breath grew louder in my ear and her words became a single, heart-twisting syllable: “Dave .. . Dave .. . Dave …

oh Dave …” It started to rain outside, unexpectedly, the water sluicing hard off the roof, splaying in front of the window fan. The wind-stiffened branches of the oak tree seemed to drip with a wet light, and I felt Bootsie lock her arms around my rib cage and draw me deeper inside her, into coral caves beneath the sea where there was neither thought nor fear, only an encompassing undulating current that rose and fell as warmly as her breast.

I had wired my house with a burglar alarm system that I couldn't afford and had taught my thirteen-year-old daughter how to use a weapon that could turn an intruder into potted meat product.

I also had dragged “my insomnia and worry into the nocturnal world of my wife.

Who was becoming the prisoner of fear? Or, better put, who was allowing himself to become a spectator while others wrote his script?

Early Saturday morning Clete took one of my outboards down the bayou, with his spinning rod and a carton of red wigglers, and came back with a stringer of bream and sun perch that he lifted out of his cooler like a heavy, gold-green ice-slick chain. He knelt on the planks in the lee of the bait shop and began cleaning them in a pan of bloody water, neatly half-mooning the heads off at the gills.

”You should have gone out with me,“ he said.

”That's like inviting the postman for a long walk on his day off,“ I said.

He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and smiled. The fish blood on his fingers made tiny prints on the cigarette paper.

”You look sharp, big mon. How about I take y'all to Possum's for lunch?“ he said.

”Not today .. . I'm going to New Orleans in a few minutes. I told Bootsie you might hang around a little bit.“

He got to his feet and washed his hands under a faucet by the rail.

”What are you up to, Streak?“

”I'm tired of living in a bull's-eye.“

”Who's going to cover your back, mon?“ he said, drying his hands on a rag.

”Thanks for watching the house,“ I said, and walked back up the dock to my truck. When I looked in the rearview mirror, he was leaning against the dock rail, his face shadowed by his hat, one hand propped on his hip. The wind was hot blowing across the swamp

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and smelled of beached gars and humus drying in the sunlight. Just as I started my truck, the shadows of large birds streaked across the surface of the bayou. I looked into the sky and saw a circle of buzzards descending out of their pattern into the cypress, their wings clattering for balance just before they lighted on their prey. There are a lot of ways to see New Orleans. At the right time of day the Quarter is wonderful. A streetcar ride up St. Charles Avenue through the Garden District, past Audubon Park and Tulane, is wonderful anytime. Or you can try it another way, which I don't recommend. Those who feed at the bottom of the food chain-the hookers, pimps, credit card double-billers, Murphy artists, stalls and street dips-usually work out of bars and strip joints and do a relatively minor amount of damage. They're given to the classical hustle and con and purloined purse rather than to physical injury. One rung up are the street dealers. Not all of them, but most, are black, young, dumb, and carry a Jones themselves. The rock they deal in the projects almost guarantees drug-induced psychosis; anything else they sell has been stepped on so many times you might as well try to get high huffing baby laxative or fixing with powdered milk. In another category are people who simply deal in criminal finance. They're usually white, older, have few arrests and own legitimate businesses of some kind. They fence stolen property, operate chop shops, and wash stolen and counterfeit money, which sells for ten to twenty cents on the dollar, depending on its origins or quality. Then there is the edge of the Quarter, where, if you're drunk or truly unlucky, you can wander out of a controlled and cosmetic libertine environment into a piece of moral moonscape-Louis Armstrong Park or the St. Louis cemeteries will do just fine-where kids will shoot a woman through the face at point-blank range for amounts of money you could pry out of a parking meter with a screwdriver. The murders receive national attention when the victim is a foreign tourist. Otherwise, they go on with unremarkable regularity, to the point that Louisiana now has the highest murder rate per capita in the United States.

Those at the top of the chain-dealers who form the liaison between Colombia and the wetlands, casino operators who front points for a Mafia-owned amusement company in Chicago-seldom do time or even have their names publicly connected with the forces they serve. They own newspaper people and literally employ the governor's children. Floating casino owners with state legislators on a pad work their shuck on morning television shows like good-natured Rotarians; Mafiosi who some think conspired to kill John Kennedy tend their roses and dine unnoticed in downtown restaurants.

It's not exaggeration.

I took the tour, thinking I could find information in the streets of New Orleans that had eluded me at home, and came up empty. But what should I have expected? Back alley hypes, graduates of City Prison, and prostitutes with AIDS (one of whom, with a haunted look in her eyes, asked me if the stories were true about this place called Lourdes) were people whose idea of a successful scam was to drill holes in their electric meters and pour honey inside so ants would foul and retard the mechanism or, more indicatively of the fear that defined their lives, wondered daily if the Mexican tar and water they watched bubbling in a heated spoon was not indeed the keyhole to the abyss where all the hungry gargoyles and grinding sounds of their childhoods awaited them.

It rained at dusk and I sat under the pavilion at the Cafe du Monde and ate a plate of beignets with powdered sugar and drank coffee au lait. I was tired and wet and there was a hum, a pinging sound in my head, the way your eardrums feel when you've stayed under water too long at a depth beyond your tolerance. St. Louis Cathedral and the park in Jackson Square were gray in the rain, and a cold mist was blowing under the eaves of the pavilion. A young college couple with a portable stereo crossed against the light and ran breathlessly out of the rain into the cafe and sat at a table next

to me. They ordered, and the boy peeled the cellophane off a musical tape and stuck it in his machine. Anybody who grew up in south Louisiana during the fifties would remember those songs: ”Big Blue Diamond,“