Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

It was a hot, windblown day when Jimmie picked me up at the dock. A storm was building, and in the south the sky was the blue-black of gunmetal, the inland waters yellow with churned sand, the waves capping as far as the eye could see. Jimmie had the top down on the convertible, and he grinned from behind his shades when he saw me walking toward him with my duffel bag over my shoulder. A bucket of iced-down Pearl and Jax sat on the backseat, the long-neck bottles sweating in the sunlight.

"You look like a happy man," I said.

"Ida's getting out of the life. I'm moving her out of that house tonight. We're going to Mexico," he said. He reached in back and slid a beer out of the ice. He cracked off the cap with a bottle opener that hung from a cord around his neck and handed the bottle to me. "You don't have anything to say?"

"It's a little more than I can think my way through right now. How do you get somebody out of the life?" I said.

"I went to the cops. This is a free country. People can't make other people work in whorehouses," he said.

I didn't speak until after he started the engine and began backing out of the parking area, the sun hot on the leather seats, the palm trees clattering in the wind. "The cops who get free ones are on the side of the good guys now?" I said.

"There was one little bump in the road," he said. "Remember the hundred and twelve bucks Ida and I gave this guy Lou Kale? He says the guys he works for consider that the interest, so Ida still owes the principal. I don't quite know what to do about that."

He lifted a beer out of a wire holder on the dashboard and drank it while he steered with one hand, his sunglasses patterned with the reflected images of trees, sky, and asphalt, all of it rushing at him, like a film strip out of control, as he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

That evening Jimmie went off with Ida in the car, supposedly to confront Lou Kale about the one hundred twelve dollars Kale had obviously stolen. I walked down on the amusement pier and ate a burrito for supper. The thunderheads in the south rippled with electricity and I could see the lights of freighters on the horizon and I wondered if Jimmie was actually serious about going to Mexico with Ida Durbin. In three weeks the fall term would be starting at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, in Lafayette, where we were both enrolled. We were three weeks away from normalcy and football games on crisp Saturday afternoons, the booming sounds of marching bands, the innocence of the freshman sock hop in the school gym, the smell of leaves burning and barbecues in the city park across the street from the campus. In my mind's eye I saw my self-deluded half brother sinking in quicksand, while Ida Durbin sat astride his shoulders.

My own mother had long ago disappeared into a world of low-rent bars and lower-rent men. Big Aldous, our father, had died in an oil well blowout when I was eighteen. Jimmie'd had little or no parental authority in his life, and I had obviously proved a poor substitute for one. I threw my burrito in a trash can, went to a beer joint down the beach, and drank until 2:00 a.m. while hailstones the size of mothballs pelted the surf.

I woke before dawn, trembling all over, the distorted voices and faces of the people from the bar more real than the room around me. I couldn't remember how I had gotten back to the motel. Water was leaking through the ceiling, and a garbage can was tumbling end over end past the empty carport. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking, my throat so dry I couldn't swallow. The window curtains were open, and a network of lightning bloomed over the Gulf, all the way to the top of the sky. Inside the momentary white brilliance that lit the clouds and waves I thought I saw a green-black lake where the naked bodies of the damned were submerged to their chests, their mouths crying out to any who would hear.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had just booked my first passage on the SS Delirium Tremens.

I buried my head under a pillow and fell into a sweaty dream. Thunder shook the walls and sheets of rain whipped against the windows. I thought I heard the door open and wind and a sudden infusion of dampness blow into the room. Maybe Jimmie had returned, safe and sound, and all my fears about him had been unjustified, I told myself in my sleep. But when I looked up, the room was quiet, his bed made, the carport empty. I felt myself descending into a vortex of nausea and fear, accompanied by a dilation of blood vessels in the brain that was like a strand of piano wire being slowly tightened around my head with a stick.

When I woke a second time, I could hear no sound except the rain hitting on the roof. The thunder had stopped, the power in the motel was out, and the room was absolutely black. Then a tree of lightning crackled over the Gulf and I saw a man seated in a chair, no more than two feet from me. He wore sideburns and a striped western shirt, with pearl-colored snap buttons. His cheeks were sunken, pooled with shadow, his mouth small, filled with tiny teeth. A nickel-plated automatic with white grips rested on his thigh.

He leaned forward, his eyes examining me, his breath moving across my face. "What's your name?" he said.

"Dave," I said. "Dave Robicheaux."

"If you ain't Jimmie, you're his twin. Which is it?" he said.

"Tell me who you are," I said.

He touched the pistol barrel to the center of my forehead. "I ask the questions, hoss. Lay back down," he said.

I saw a swelling above his left eye, a cut in his lip, a clot of blood in one nostril. He pulled back the receiver on the pistol and snicked a round into the c

hamber. "Put your hands on top of the covers," he said.

With one hand he felt my knuckles and the tops of my fingers, his eyes fastened on my face. Then he stood up, dropped the magazine from the butt of the automatic, and ejected the round in the chamber. He reached over, picked up the cartridge from the rug, and snugged it in his watch pocket. "You got a lot of luck, kid. When you get a break, real slack, like you're getting now, don't waste it. You heard it from the butter and egg man," he said.

Then he was gone. When I looked out the window I saw no sign of him, no automobile, not even footprints in the muddy area around the room's entrance. I lay in bed, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach, my skin crawling with a sense of violation and the stale odor of copulation from the bedcovers.

Unbelievably, I closed my eyes and fell asleep again, almost like entering an alcoholic blackout. When I woke it was midmorning, the sun shining, and I could hear children playing outside. Jimmie was packing an open suitcase on top of his bed. "Thought you were going to sleep all day," he said.

"A guy was looking for you. I think it was that pimp from Post Office Street," I said.

"Lou Kale? I don't think so," Jimmie replied.

"He had a gun," I said. "What do you mean you don't think so?"

"He didn't want to pay back the hundred and twelve bucks he stole. He pulled a shiv on me. So I cleaned his clock. I took the money off him, too," he said. He dropped his folded underwear in the suitcase and flattened it down, his eyes concentrated on his work. I couldn't believe what he had just said.

"Where's Ida?" I asked.

"Waiting for me at the bus depot. Get dressed, you got to drive me down there. We'll be eating Mexican food in ole Monterrey tonight. Hard to believe, isn't it?" he said. He touched at the tops of his swollen hands, then grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders. "Quit worrying! Guys like Kale are all bluff."