Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"How about a steak and eggs and those stewed tomatoes?" I said.

"Anything else?"

"How about some fried potatoes?"

"What else?"

"How come a Mexican would carry a M-1 carbine on a pipe truck?" I asked.

He leaned on the bar. I could smell soap and sweat in his clothes. "Where you seen it?" he asked.

"Coming north of the river."

"You ever heard of no God or law west of the Pecos?"

"No."

"It means you see wets, you forget it."

"I don't understand."

"It's a subject you'd best carry on the end of a shit fork," he said.

An hour later the sky was empty and dry and pale behind the hills and you could see the sage for miles when Jude LaRose pulled up next to the sidewalk in a wood-paneled Ford station wagon, leaned over and popped open the passenger door and looked at me from under the brim of his Stetson with those blue eyes you didn't eyer forget. He was a handsome man in every respect—tall, with a flat stomach, his gray hair cropped GI, his skin sun-browned the shade of a cured tobacco leaf—but I never saw beautiful eyes like that on a man before or since. They were the dark blue you see in patches of water down in the Keys, when the day's hot and bright before a storm and a cloud of perfect blue darkness floats across the reef, and you almost think you can dip your hand into the color and rub it on your skin, like you would ink, but for some reason, down below that perfect piece of color, down in those coral canyons, you know a school of hammerheads are shredding the bonito into pink thread.

I sat down next to him, with my duffle between my legs, and closed the door. The seats were made from rolled yellow leather, and the light from the mahogany dashboard shone on the leather and reflected up in Jude's face.

"They want you?" he asked.

"Sir?"

"You know what I mean."

"There're ain't any warrant."

"What was it?"

"A man whipped me with his belt behind Provost's saloon. Another man held me while he done it."

"What else?"

"I caught him later that night. When he was by himself. It worked out different this time."

He unsnapped the button on his shirt pocket and took a Camel out and fitted it in his mouth without ever letting go of my eyes.

"You're not lying about the warrant, are you?" he said.

"I wouldn't lie about something like that."

"What would you lie about?"

"Sir?"

When we drove away I saw the little black girl who had been laying steaks on the mesquite fire run out from the side of the building and wave at the station wagon.

That night I slept on a bare mattress on the floor of a stucco cottage full of garden tools behind the main house. I dreamed I was on a flat-wheeler freight, high up on a trestle above a canyon, and the trestle's supports were folding under the train's weight and the wheels were squealing on the rail as they gushed sparks and fought to gain traction.

The main house was three-story purple brick, with white balconies and widow's walks and poplar trees planted as windbreaks around the yard. There was a bunkhouse with a tar paper roof for the fieldhands, rows of feeder lots and corrugated water tanks and windmills for the livestock, a red barn full of baled hay you could stuff a blimp in, a green pasture with hot fences for Jude's thoroughbreds, a scrap yard that was a museum of steam tractors and Model T flatbed trucks, a