Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

She started to step toward him, but I moved in front of her, my eyes fastened on hers. The anger in her gaze shifted to me, like a person breaking glassware indiscriminately, then I saw it die in her face. I walked with her toward the

ranch house, the backs of my fingers touching her hand. She widened the space between us.

"Next time don't interfere," she said.

"Those kids would have taken our weight."

"Oh yeah? . . . Well . . . I'm sure you're right . . . You swinging dicks are always right. . . Let's close it down here. I've had my share of the tomato patch for today."

She walked ahead of me through the open front door of the house into the living room, where Clay Mason sat in a deep deer-hide chair amid a litter of shattered glass, antique firearms stripped from the walls, splayed books, and overturned furniture. On one stucco wall, pinned inside a broken viewing case, was a sun-faded flag of the Texas republic.

Mason's hands were folded on top of his cane, his eyes narrow and liquid with resentment.

"Don't get up . . . I just need to use your John . . . Such a gentleman . . .," she said, and continued on into the back of the house, without ever slowing her step.

"Looks like you're going to skate," I said.

"My family earned every goddamn inch of this place. We'll be here when the rest of you are dust."

An upper corner of the Texas flag had fallen loose from the blue felt backboard it was pinned to. I reached through the broken glass and smoothed the cloth flat and replaced the pin. Faded strips of butternut cloth, inscribed in almost illegible ink with the names of Civil War battles, were sewn around the flag's borders.

"This flag belonged to the Fourth Texas. Those were John Bell Hood's boys," I said.

"My great-grandfather carried that flag."

"It was your family who lived on the ranch next to the LaRoses', west of the Pecos, wasn't it? Jerry Joe Plumb told me how y'all slant drilled and ran wets across the river."

"Do you read newspapers? There's a revolution being fought here. Everything you're doing helps those men out there kill Mayan Indians."

"Men like you always have a banner, Dr. Mason. The truth is, you live vicariously through the suffering of other people."

"Get out. . ." He flicked at the air with the backs of his fingers, as though he were dispelling a bad odor.

I tried to think of a rejoinder, but I had none. Clay Mason had spent a lifetime floating above the wreckage he had precipitated, seemingly immune to all the Darwinian and moral laws that affected the rest of us, and my rhetoric sounded foolish compared to the invective he had weathered for decades.

I stepped across the broken glass on the oak floor toward the open doorway. Outside, the soldiers were loading up in the six-bys.

"Hold on, Streak," Helen said behind me. "It looks like our friend flushed the candy store down the commode. Except it backed up on him. Guess what got stuck under the rim?"

She dipped the tip of her little finger into a child's balloon and held the white powder up in a column of sunlight, then wiped her finger on a piece of tissue paper.

"It's a little wet. Can you call that fat guy in, see if he wants to do the taste test?" she said.

CHAPTER 36

I SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING but I didn't.

The morning after our return from Guadalajara the sheriff opened the door to my office and leaned inside.

"That was Lafayette P.D. You'd better get over there. Sabelle Crown's pinned inside a car on the Southern Pacific tracks."

"What happened?"

"She was abducted from the city golf course by this guy Zerrang. What was she doing on a golf course?"

"She feeds the pigeons there."

"Anyway, Zerrang must have taken her somewhere. Evidently it was pretty bad. When he was finished, he left her unconscious in her car on the train tracks. Why's Zerrang after Sabelle Crown?"