Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

He craned out over the railing, looked down the dirt road, measured the sun's height in the sky.

“Come on out back,” he said.

I followed him around the side of the house. He paused by the back porch, slipped a pair of toe less canvas shoes over his feet, and pulled a cane sickle out of a tree stump where chickens had been butchered.

“See where the coulee go, out back of the old privy?” he said, walking ahead of me. “Yesterday they was running the grader along the edge of the coulee. The bank started caving, and the guy turned the grader out in the field and didn't do no more work here. Last night the moon was up and I seen something bright in the dirt.”

The coulee ran like a ragged wound in the earth to the edge of a cane field, where it had been filled in years ago so the cultivated acreage would not be dissected by a water drainage. The sides were eaten and scrolled with crawfish holes, the bottom thick with cattails and reeds, webs of dead algae, cane husks, and through the cattails a chain of stagnant pools that trembled with insects.

Luke looked back over his shoulder at the dirt road, then slid down the side of the coulee and stepped across a pool to the opposite bank.

“See where the machine crushed down the dirt?” he said. “It look like a bottom lip hanging down, don't it?” He smiled up at me. “Mr. Dave, you gonna tell this to somebody?”

I squatted down on my haunches and didn't answer. He smiled again, blew out his breath, as though he were making an irrevocable commitment for both of us, then began working the tip of the sickle into the bank, scaling it away, watching each dirt clod that rolled down to his feet.

“What I found last night I stuck back in them holes,” he said. He sliced at the bank, and a curtain of dirt cascaded across his canvas shoes. “Lookie there,” he said, his fingers grabbing at three dull pieces of metal that toppled and bounced into the water.

He stooped, his knees splayed wide, shoved his wrists into the reeds and the water that was clouding with gray puffs of mud, worked his fingers deeper into the silt, then held up an oblong, coin like piece of silver and dropped it into my palm.

“What you call that?” he said.

I rubbed my thumb across the slick surface, the embossed cross and archaic numbers and lettering on it.

“It's Spanish or Portuguese, Luke. I think these were minted in Latin America, then shipped back to Europe,” I said.

“Aint Bertie been right all along. Jean Lafitte buried his treasure here.”

“Somebody did. What was the advice you wanted?”

“The wall of this coulee's probably full of them coins. But we talked Aint Bertie into giving up her claim.”

“This whole area is going to be covered with cement and buildings,”

I said. “The guys doing it don't care about the dead people buried here. Why should they care about the coins?”

“That's what I been thinking. No point bothering them.”

“I couldn't argue with that. How about I buy you some breakfast up on the highway, Luke?”

“I'd like that real fine. Yes, suh, I was fixing to ax you the same thing.”

Clete came into the office right after lunch. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks low on his hips and a dark blue short-sleeve silk shirt. He kept glancing back toward the glass partition into the hallway.

“Da I need a passport to get into this place?” he said. He got up, opened the door, and looked into a uniformed deputy's face. “Can I help you with something?”

He returned to his chair, looked hard at the glass again, his face flushed.

“Ease up, Clete,” I said.

“I don't like people staring at me.” The soles of his loafers tapped up and down on the floor.

“You want to tell me what it is?”

“Erru'le Pogue's trying to set you up.”

“Oh?”

“You're going to step right into it, too.” He paced in front of my desk and kept snapping his fingers and hitting his hands together. “I shouldn't have come in here.”