Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"I don't know if you'll want me in your house after you hear what I have to say," I said.

He laughed and closed the door behind me. "Go ahead. I know a determined man when I see one. But excuse me just a minute. I have to use the bathroom," he said.

He went into a hallway and closed a door behind him, then I heard him urinating into a toilet bowl. Through the French doors I could see the long slope of his backyard tapering down to the bayou, a yellow bulldozer parked by the area we had excavated during our search for Junior Crudup's remains. Much of the dirt had been filled in, smoothed and tamped down, so that the lawn was now a mottled brown and green, in patterns like camouflage.

I heard Lejeune washing his hands, then he came back into the living room.

"I couldn't stick you with Junior Crudup's death, so I tried to sic a psychological nightmare by the name of Max Coll on you," I said.

"Ah, a mea culpa because you've put me at risk. Let me clarify something for you "

"If I can finish, please. Using Coll was a gutless act on my part. If I had wanted you smoked, I should have done it myself instead of exploiting a head case

"I admire your candor, Mr. Robicheaux. But I'm not bothered by Coil's presence in the community. I walked in on him and he fled. If this fellow is indeed a soldier for the IRA, which is what I've been told, then I understand why the British are still in control of northern Ireland."

"Wait a minute. You saw Coll?"

"I just told you that." He stared at me, his eyes probing mine.

"Was he armed?"

"He might have been. It's hard to say. I didn't bother to ask."

"Where did he go?"

"Out the back door. I've reported all this."

"You might drop by the church today and light a candle, maybe offer a prayer of thanks that a guy like Father Jimmie Dolan is a minister in the Catholic Church," I said.

"As always with you, Mr. Robicheaux, I have no idea what you're talking about. But if this man Coll comes back around, he'll rue the day he left his little shanty back in the peat bogs or wherever he comes from.... Am I losing your attention?"

"Hubris has always been my undoing, Mr. Lejeune. Maybe it will be different with you. Anyway, my badge has been pulled and I'm done. Run your happy warrior act on somebody else," I said.

When I got back home I put on sweat pants and a hooded jersey, tied on my running shoes, and jogged down East Main, past the Shadows and the plantation caretaker's house across the street, which now served as a bed-and-breakfast, and crossed the drawbridge into City

Park. I ran along the winding paved road through the live oak trees, my clothes soggy with mist, then cut across the closely clipped grass and ran along the edge of the bayou. In our area the sugar mills are fired up twenty-four hours a day during the cane-grinding season, and in the distance I could see a huge red glow on the horizon, like fire trapped inside a thunderhead, and I could hear the heavy thumping sound of the machines, like the reverberation of giant feet stamping upon the earth. There was not another soul inside the park, and for just a moment my heart quickened and I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

I sat down on a bench, my palms propped on my thighs, my breath coming hard in my throat. What was it Theodosha had said? We were alike because we both lived in the cities of the dead? I wiped the sweat off my face with my jersey and fought to get my breath back, widening my eyes, concentrating on the details around me, as though my ability to remain among the quick depended on my perception of them.

Is this the way it comes? I thought not with a clicking sound and a brilliant flash of light on a night trail in Vietnam, or with a high-powered round fired by a sniper in a compact automobile, but instead with a racing of the heart and a shortening of the breath in a black-green deserted park smudged by mist and threaded by a tidal stream.

My head hammered with sound that was like helicopter blades thropping overhead, and for just a moment I was back on a slick piled with wounded and dying grunts, AK-47 rounds vectoring out of the jungle canopy down below, the inside of the airframe crawling with smoke.

I put my head down between my knees, my hands on the pavement, the world spinning around me.

I looked up and saw from out of the mist a pink Cadillac convertible headed toward me, one with wire wheels, tail fins, Frenched headlights, and grillwork that was like a chromium smile, the radio blaring with 1950s Jerry Lee Lewis rock 'n' roll.

The Cadillac passed me and behind the wheel I saw a man with an impish face, the features cartoonlike, as though they had been sketched with a charcoal pencil, the hair shaved on the sides and left long and curly on the neck.

"Gunner?" I said out loud.

But the driver did not hear me, and the Cadillac wound its way out of the park, the only piece of bright color inside the failing light.

Gunner Ardoin in New Iberia? I asked myself. No, I had let my imagination run away with itself. The year was 2002, not 1957, and the rock 'n' roll days of pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, Jerry Lee Lewis, and American innocence were over.

At 10:00 P.M. I turned on the local news. The lead story involved a homicide inside a Franklin residence. The television camera panned on a tree-lined street and a Victorian home where paramedics were exiting a side door with a gurney on which a figure inside a body bag was strapped down. The reporter at the scene said the victim had been shot once in the temple and once in the mouth and, according to the coroner, had been dead approximately twelve hours. The victim's name was William Raymond Guillot.

Chapter 27.