Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"Do what you feel comfortable with, No Duh. Nobody's going to twist you," I said.

"Go play with your worms. Blimpo out there gets off on this. I hope in the next life both yous come back a guy like me, see how you like it," he replied.

CHAPTER 32

as a police officer you accept the fact that, in all probability, you will become the instrument that delivers irreparable harm to a variety of individuals. Granted, they design their own destinies, are intractable in their attitudes, and live with the asp at their breasts; but the fact remains that it is you who will appear at some point in their lives, like the headsman with his broad ax on the medieval scaffold, and serve up a fate to them that has the same degree of mercy as that dealt out by your historical predecessor.

An image or two: A soft-nosed .45 round that skids off a brick wall and topples before it finds its mark; a baton swung too high that crushes the windpipe; or salting the shaft on a killer of children, a guy you could never nail legitimately, a guy who asks to see you on his last night, but instead of finding peace you watch him vomit his food into a stainless steel chemical toilet and weep uncontrollably on the side of his bunk while a warden reads his death warrant and two opaque-faced screws unlock the death cage.

So the job becomes easier if you think of them in either clinical or jailhouse language that effectively separates them from the rest of us: sociopaths, pukes, colostomy bags, lowlifes, miscreants, buckets of shit, street mutts, recidivists, greaseballs, meltdowns, maggots, gorillas in the mist. Any term will do as long as it indicates that the adversary is pathologically different from yourself.

Then your own single-minded view of the human family is disturbed by a chance occurrence that leads you back into the province of the theologian.

Early Monday morning three land surveyors in a state boat set up a transit instrument on a sandspit in the flooded woods across from the bait shop and began turning angles with it, measuring the bayou frontage with a surveyor's chain, and driving flagged laths at odd intervals into the mudbank.

"You mind telling me what y'all are doing?" I said from the end of the dock.

The transit operator, in folded-down hip waders and rain hat, swiped mosquitoes out of his face and replied, "The state don't have a recent plat."

"Who cares?"

"You got a problem with it, talk to my boss in Lafayette. You think we're putting a highway through your house?"

I thought about it. "Yeah, it's a possibility," I said.

I called his supervisor, a state civil engineer, and got nowhere. Then I called the sheriff's department, told Wally I'd be in late, and drove to Lafayette.

I was on Pinhook Road, down in the old section, which was still tree lined and unmarked by strip malls, when I saw Karyn LaRose three cars ahead of me, driving a waxed yellow Celica convertible. One lane was closed and the traffic was heavy at the red light, but no one honked, no one tried to cut off another driver.

Except Karyn.

She pulled onto the shoulder, drove around a construction barrier, a cloud of dust drifting off her wheels through the windows of the other cars, and then cut back into the line just before the intersection.

She changed the angle on her rearview mirror and looked at her reflection, tilted up her chin, removed something from the corner of her mouth with her fingernail, oblivious to everyone around her. The oak limbs above her flickered with a cool gold-green light. She threw back her hair and put on her sunglasses and tapped her ring impatiently on the steering wheel, as though she were sitting reluctantly on a stage before an audience that had not quite earned her presence.

An elderly black woman, bent in the spine like a knotted turnip, with glasses as thick as quartz, was laboring down a sidestreet with a cane, working her way toward the bus stop, waving a handkerchief frantically at the bus that had just passed, her purse jiggling from her wrist. She wore a print cotton dress and untied, scuffed brown shoes that exposed the pale, calloused smoothness of her lower foot each time she took a step.

Karyn stared at her from behind her sunglasses, then turned out of the traffic and got out of her convertible and listened without speaking while the old woman gestured at the air and vented her frustration with the Lafayette bus system. Then Karyn knelt on one knee and tied the woman's shoes and held her cocked elbow while the old woman got into the passenger seat of the convertible, and a moment later the two of them drove through the caution light and down the boulevard like old friends.

I'm sure she never saw me. Nor was her act of kindness a performance for passers-by, as it was already obvious she didn't care what they thought of her. I only knew it was easier for me to think of Karyn LaRose in one-dimensional terms, and endowing her with redeeming qualities was a complexity I didn't need.

Twenty minutes later the state engineer told me an environmental assessment was being made of the swamp area around my dock and bait shop.

"What's that mean?" I said.

"Lyndon Johnson didn't like some of his old neighbors and had their property turned into a park . . . That's a joke, Mr. Robicheaux . . . Sir, I'd appreciate your not looking at me like that."

Helen Soileau happened to glance up from the watercooler when I came through the back door of the department from the parking lot. She straightened her back and tucked her shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs and grinned.

"What's funny?" I said.

"I've got a great story for you about Aaron."

"He's not my idea of George Burns, Helen. Let me get my mail first."

I picked up my messages and my mail from my pigeonhole and stopped by the cold drink machine for a Dr Pepper. On the top of the stack was an envelope addressed to me in pencil, postmarked in Lafayette, with no zip code. I had no doubt who had sent it.

I sat down in a chair by the cold drink machine and opened the envelope with one finger, like peeling away a bandage on a wound. The letter was printed on a paper towel.