Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"You going to hang around town?" I asked.

"Ain't got no pressing bidness nowheres else."

"They used you, Breeze."

"I got Alex Guidry fired, ain't I?"

"Does it make you feel better?"

He looked at bis hands. They were wide, big-boned, lustrous with callus.

"What you want here?" he asked.

"The old man who made your wife cook for him, Harpo Delahoussey? Did he have a son?"

"What people done tole you over in St. Mary Parish?"

"They say he didn't."

He shook his head noncommittally.

"You don't remember?" I said.

"I don't care. It ain't my bidness."

"A guy named Harpo may have executed a couple of kids out in the Basin," I said.

"Those dagos in New Orleans? You know what they do to a black man snitch them off? I'm suppose to worry about some guy blowing away some po'-white trash raped a black girl?"

"When those men took away your wife twenty years ago, you couldn't do anything about it. Same kind of guys are still out there, Breeze. They function only because we allow them to."

"I promised Mout' to go crabbing with him in the morning. I best be getting my sleep," he said.

But when I got into my truck and looked back at him, he was still in the swing, staring at his hands, his massive shoulders slumped like a bag of crushed rock.

IT WAS HOT AND dry Friday night, with a threat of rain that never came. Out over the Gulf, the clouds would vein and pulse with lightning, then the thunder would ripple across the wetlands with a sound like damp cardboard tearing. In the middle of the night I put my hands inside Bootsie's nightgown and felt her body's heat against my palms, like the warmth in a lampshade. Her eyes opened and looked into mine, then she touched my hardness with her fingertips, her hand gradually rounding itself, her mouth on my cheek, then on my lips. She rolled on her back, her hand never leaving me, and waited for me to enter her.

She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and moist in my ear.

She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on her skin.

"What's worrying you?" she asked.

"Nothing."

She kicked me in the calf.

"Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt," I said.

"Advice about love and money. Give it to anyone except friends."

"You're right. You were about Megan, too. I'd thought better of her."

She ran her fingernails through my hair and rested one ankle across mine.

SUNDAY MORNING I WOKE at dawn and went down to the bait shop to help Batist open up. I was never sure of his age, but he had been a teenager during World War II when he had worked for Mr. Antoine, one of Louisiana's last surviving Confederate veterans, at Mr. Antoine's blacksmith shop in a big red barn out on West Main. Mr. Antoine had willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never knew a more loyal or decent person.

We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers, and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.