Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

”It's not a profound concept, Dave. If they don't make things, they dispose of things. You said they had an incinerator. Who besides Satan needs an incinerator in a climate like this?“

”They do something with electrical transformers,“ I said.

His eyes looked like slits, his skin webbed like dry clay.

”If they're incinerating the oil in the transformers, they're probably emitting PCB's into the environment. PCB's not only go into the air, they go into the food chain. Anticipate a change in local cancer statistics,“ he said.

Back at my office I called the EPA in Washington, D.C.” then newspapers and wire services in Seattle and Helena, Montana. Blue Sky Electric had changed its corporate name at least seven times and had been kicked out of or refused admission to thirteen states. Each time it departed an area, it left behind a Superfund cleanup that ran into millions of dollars. The great irony was that the cleanup was contracted by the same corporation that owned the nonunion railroad that transported the transformers to Blue Sky Electric.

The last place they had tried to set up business was in Missoula, where they had been driven out of town by a virtual lynch mob.

Now they had found a new home with the Bertrand family, I thought.

“What are you going to do?” Helen said.

“Spit in the punch bowl.”

I called the Daily Iberian, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Sierra Club, an ACLU lawyer who delighted in filing class action suits on behalf of minorities against polluters, and a RICO prosecutor with the U.S. attorney general's office.

After work, Rufus Arceneaux stopped me on the way to my truck in the parking lot. His armpits were dark with sweat rings, his breath as rank as an ashtray.

“I need to talk with you,” he said.

“Do it on the clock.”

“This is private. I got no deep involvement with the Bertrands. I did a little security for them, that's all.”

“What are you telling me, Roof?”

“Any kind of shit coming down on their head, problems with the grease balls it's got nothing to do with me. I'm out. Understand what I'm saying?”

“No.”

I could smell the fear in his sweat. He walked away from me, his GI haircut as slick as a peeled onion against the late sun.

That evening I helped Batist bail and chain-lock our rental boats and close up the bait shop. The air was dry and hot, the sky empty of clouds and filled with a dull white light like a reflection off tin. My hands, my chest, seemed to burn with an energy I couldn't free myself from.

“What's got your burner on, Streak?” Bootsie said in the living room.

“Rufus Arceneaux's trying to disassociate himself from the Her-trands.

He knows something's about to hit the fa

n.”

“I don't un-” she began.

“Clete and I shook up Patsy Dapolito. He said he could hurt Johnny Carp in ways I hadn't thought about.”

“That psychopath is after Julia and Moleen?”

“I don't know,” I said. I went into the bedroom, picked up my .45 in its holster, and drove into New Iberia.

It was dusk when I turned into Moleen's drive and parked by his glassed-in back porch. Every light was on in the house, but I saw Moleen out on his sloping lawn, raking pine needles into a pile under a tree. Behind him a shrimp boat with green and red running lights on was headed down Bayou Teche toward the Gulf.

“Is there some reason I should have been expecting you?” he said.

“Patsy Dap.”