Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"Interesting stuff," she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. "Bloomberg goes

down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction, anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this one."

"Why would it be otherwise?"

She leaned on the desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard against the cuffs of her sleeves.

"Because you've got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose," she said.

That night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent's. But even though he himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and rural shitholes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his conception of America.

He knew how to turn into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter's flame.

With luck he would always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst, like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies thundered past it.

That's the way it went down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle, with leather sling and cloth bandoliers, propped in the wire like a monument to his own denouement.

Even in my sleep I knew the dream was not about Vietnam.

The next day I called Angola and talked to an assistant warden. Aaron Crown was in an isolation unit, under twenty-three-hour lockdown. He had just been arraigned on two counts of murder.

"You're talking about first-degree murder? The man was attacked," I said.

"Stuffing somebody upside down in a barrel full of oil and clamping down the top isn't exactly the system's idea of self-defense," he replied.

I called Buford LaRose's campaign office in New Iberia and was told he was giving a speech to a convention of land developers in Baton Rouge at noon.

I took the four-lane into Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya swamp. The cypress and willows were thick and pale green on each side of the elevated highway, the bays wrinkled with wind in the sunlight. Then the highway crossed through meadowland and woods full of palmettos, and up ahead I saw the Mississippi bridge and the outline of the capitol building and the adjacent hotel where Buford was speaking.

He knew his audience. He was genteel and erudite, but he was clearly one of them, respectful of the meretricious enterprises they served and the illusions that brought them together. They shook his hand after his speech and touched him warmly on the shoulders, as if they drew power from his legendary football career, the radiant health and good looks that seemed to define his future.

At the head table, behind a crystal bowl filled with floating camellias, I saw Karyn LaRose watching me.

The dining room was almost empty when Buford chose to recognize me.

"Am I under arrest?"

"Just one question: Why did Crown leave his rifle behind?"

"A half dozen reasons."

"I've been through your book with a garden rake. You never deal with it."

"Try he panicked and ran."

"It was the middle of the night. No one else was around."

"People tend to do irrational things when they're killing other people."

The waiters were clearing the tables and the last emissary from the world of Walmart had said his farewell and gone out the door.

"Take a ride up to Angola with me and confront Crown," I said.

He surprised me. I saw him actually think about it. Then the moment went out of his eyes. Karyn got up from her chair and came around the table. She wore a pink suit with a corsage pinned above the breast.

"Crown might get a death sentence for killing those two inmates," I said, looking back at Buford.

"Anything's possible," he replied.