A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"There's no break. When your collarbone's broken, there's a knot like a baseball."

"Who's the hooker?"

"You got me. The ones I knew five years ago are probably hags now. Actually, they were hags then."

"You're pretty slick, Clete."

"What can I say?" He grinned at me. "But one word of advice, noble mon. Think about going back to Bayou Teche and let New Orleans go down the drain by itself. For some reason, Dave, having you in town makes me think of a man walking into a clock shop with a baseball bat."

She had always loved roses and four-o'clocks. The flower beds in her lawn and the shaded areas around the coulee at her home on Spanish Lake had been bursting with them. Now she grew purple and gold four-o'clocks along the wall of her patio on Camp Street. They had already dropped their winter seeds like big black pepper grains on the worn bricks, but her yellow and hybrid blue roses still bloomed as big as fists. The western sky was streaked with magenta through the oak trees, and leaves floated across the tunnels of underwater light in the swimming pool. The air was heavy with the smoky taste of the meat fire in the hibachi, cool and bittersweet with the smell of fall, like the odor of burning sugarcane stubble, of pecans when they mold inside their husks under the tree.

She turned the steaks on the grill with a fork, her eyes watering in the smoke, and smiled at me. She wore leather sandals, faded designer jeans, and a black shirt with red flowers sewn into it. Her honey-colored hair was full of lights, and where it was trimmed on her neck it looked thick and stiff and soft and lovely to the touch, all at the same time.

She saw me press my hand to my shoulder again.

"Is there something wrong, Dave?" she said.

"No, I just have a little flare-up when the weather is about to change. I think it's going to rain. You know how it is this time of year. The leaves turn, then we have a real hard rain and we sort of click into winter."

"It's too early for that," she said. "Besides, winter is never that bad here, anyway."

"No, it's not. Boots, can I use your phone to call New Iberia? I need to check in on Alafair."

"Sure, hon."

Alafair's voice made me want to leave New Orleans that night. Or maybe it made me want to escape even more the brooding premonition that seemed to hang between me and Bootsie like a secret both of us knew, but neither of us would broach.

She didn't have to tell me about the Baylor medical center in Houston: I had seen it in her eyes. It's a detached look, as if the person has stepped briefly around a corner and seen to the end of a long, gray street on which there are no other people. I'd flown in a dustoff loaded with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochrome M's to indicate morphine injections, and the two who died before we reached battalion aid had had that look in their eyes, as though the hot wind through the doors, the steely blat-blat of the propeller blades, the racing green landscape below, were now all part of somebody else's filmstrip.

"It's bad, isn't it, Boots?" I said. I sat in the scrolled-iron patio chair by the pool and looked at the tops of my hands when I said it.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"What's the name for it?"

"Lupus," she said. Then she said. "Systemic lupus. The full Latin name means 'red wolf.' Sometimes people get a butterfly mask on their face. I don't have that kind, though. It just lives inside me."

I felt myself swallow, and I looked away from her eyes.

"You know what it is, then?" she said. She pushed the meat to the side of the grill and sat down across from me. Her hair was wreathed in smoke and the lighted turquoise shimmer off the pool.

"I've heard about it. I don't know a lot," I said.

"It attacks the connective tissue. It starts in the hands sometimes and spreads through the joints. In the worst cases, when it's untreated, people look like they're wrapped in strips of plastic."

I started to speak, but I couldn't.

"I didn't have medical insurance, no savings, nothing but the vending machine business," she said. "I couldn't just walk out on the business at twenty cents on the dollar."

I saw a flicker of anger in her eyes, a spark, a recrimination that wanted to have its way. But it was only momentary.

Then she reached forward and touched me on the knee as though it were I who should be con

soled.

"Dave, there're probably a hundred different degrees of lupus. Today it can be controlled. This new doctor I have in Houston has started me on a different kind of medication, with steroids and some other things. My problem is I ignored some warning signs, some swelling in my fingers in cold weather and stiffness in the joints, and I have some kidney damage. But I'm going to pull it off."

"How long have you known?" I said. My voice sounded weak, as though I had borrowed it from someone else.