Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"Wrong time of day and too much rain," I said.

"Oh, yeah?" she said.

She lifted the fly rod into the air, whipping the popping bug over her head, then laying it on the edge of the lily pads. She flicked her wrist so the bug popped audibly in the water, then a goggle-eye perch rose like a green-and-gold bubble out of the silt and broke the surface, its dorsal fin hard and spiked and shiny in the sunlight, the hook and feathered balsa-wood lure protruding from the side of its mouth.

Alafair held the fly rod up as it quivered and arched toward the water, retrieving the line with her left hand, guiding the goggle-eye between the islands of floating hyacinths, until she could lift it wet and flopping into the bottom of the pirogue.

"Not bad," I said.

"You had another week off. Why'd you

go back to work?" she said.

"Long story. See you inside."

"No, wait," she said, and set her rod down in the pirogue and paddled across the bayou to the concrete boat ramp. She stepped out into the water with a stringer of catfish and perch wrapped around her wrist, and climbed the wood steps onto the dock. In the last two years all the baby fat had melted off her body, and her face and figure had taken on the appearance of a mature woman's. When she worked with me in the bait shop, most of our male customers made a point of focusing their attention everywhere in the room except on Alafair.

"A lady named Ms. Flynn was here. Bootsie told me what happened to her father. You found him, Dave?" she said.

"My dad and I did."

"He was crucified?"

"It happened a long time ago, Alf."

"The people who did it never got caught? That's sickening."

"Maybe they took their own fall down the road. They all do, one way or another."

"It's not enough." Her face seemed heated, pinched, as though by an old memory.

"You want some help cleaning those fish?" I asked.

Her eyes looked at me again, then cleared. "What would you do if I said yeah?" she asked. She swung the stringer so it touched the end of my polished loafer.

"MEGAN WANTS ME TO get her inside the jail to take pictures?" I said to Bootsie in the kitchen.

"She seems to think you're a pretty influential guy," she replied.

Bootsie was bent over the sink, scrubbing the burnt grease off a stove tray, her strong arms swollen with her work; her polo shirt had pulled up over her jeans, exposing the soft taper of her hips. She had the most beautiful hair I had ever seen in a woman. It was the color of honey, with caramel swirls in it, and its thickness and the way she wore it up on her head seemed to make the skin of her face even more pink and lovely.

"Is there anything else I can arrange? An audience with the Pope?" I said.

She turned from the drainboard and dried her hands on a towel.

"That woman's after something else. I just don't know what it is," she said.

"The Flynns are complicated people."

"They have a way of finding war zones to play in. Don't let her take you over the hurdles, Streak."

I hit her on the rump with the palm of my hand. She wadded up the dish towel and threw it past my head.

We ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the back yard. Beyond the duck pond at the back of our property my neighbor's sugarcane was tall and green and marbled with the shadows of clouds. The bamboo and periwinkles that grew along our coulee rippled in the wind, and I could smell rain and electricity in the south.

"What's in that brown envelope you brought home?" Bootsie asked.

"Pictures of a mainline sociopath in the Colorado pen."