Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

They want my journal. After they get it, somebody close to you will snap one into your brain pan.

Rough way to put it.

He picked my hand up by the wrist, drew it toward his rib cage.

Put your thumb in the hole, Dave. That's the exit wound. Emile caught me four times through the back.

I apologize, Sonny. I let you down.

Lose the guilt. I knew the score when I smoked Emile's brother.

We should have kept you in lockdown. You 'd be alive now.

Who says I'm not? Stay on that old-time R and B, Streak. Don't stray where angels fear to tread. Hey, that's just a joke.

Wait, I said.

When I reached out to touch him, my eyes opened as though I had been slapped. I was standing in front of the window fan, whose blades were spinning in the mist that blew into the room. My hand was extended, lifeless, as though it were suspended in water. The yard was empty, the trees swollen with wind.

The sheriff had dreamed of star shells popping above the frozen white hills of North Korea. I had lied and sought to dispel his fear, as we always do when we see death painted on someone's face.

Now I tried to dispel my own.

At my foot was a solitary strand of brown seaweed.

Chapter 29

”i SLEPT UNTIL seven, then showered, dressed, and ate breakfast in the kitchen. I could feel the day slowly come into focus, the predictable world of blue skies and wind blowing through the screens and of voices on the dock gradually becoming more real than the experience of the night before.

I told myself the gargoyles don't do well in sunlight.

Vanity, vanity.

Involuntarily I kept touching my wrist, as though I could still feel Sonny's damp fingers clamped around it.

“Were you walking around last night?” Bootsie said.

“A little touch of the mosquito.”

“You have anxiety about going back, Dave?”

“No, it's going to be just fine.”

She leaned over the back of my chair, folded her arms under my neck, and kissed me behind the ear. Her shampoo smelled like strawberries.

“Try to come home early this afternoon,” she said.

“What's up?”

“You never can tell,” she said.

Then she pressed her cheek against mine and patted her hand on my chest.

A half hour later Clete Purcel sat across from me in my office at the department.

“A strand of seaweed?” he said.

“Yep.”