Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"His uncle was a guy named Harpo Delahoussey. He did security work at y'all's cannery, the one that burned."

"Yes, I remember."

"We think Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a black man named Willie Broussard and almost drowned Jack Flynn's daughter."

He set down the tiny screwdriver and the exposed brass mechanisms of the spinning reel. The tips of his delicate fingers were bright with machine oil. The wind blew his white-gold hair on his forehead.

"But you use the father's name, not the daughter's. What inference should I gather from that, sir? My family has a certain degree of wealth and hence we should feel guilt over Jack Flynn's death?"

"Why do you think he was killed?"

"That's your province, Mr. Robicheaux, not mine. But I don't think Jack Flynn was a proletarian idealist. I think he was a resentful, envious troublemaker who couldn't get over the fact his family lost their money through their own mismanagement. Castle Irish don't do well when their diet is changed to boiled cabbage."

"He fought Franco's fascists in Spain. That's a peculiar way to show envy."

"What's your purpose here?"

"Your daughter is haunted by something in the past she can't tell anybody about. It's connected to the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I wonder if it's Jack Flynn's death that bothers her."

He curled the tips of his fingers against his palm, as though trying to rub the machinist's oil off them, looking at them idly.

"She killed her cousin when she was fifteen. Or at least that's what she's convinced herself," he said. He saw my expression change, my lips start to form a word. "We had a cabin in Durango at the foot of a mountain. They found the key to my gun case and started shooting across a snowfield. The avalanc

he buried her cousin in an arroyo. When they dug her out the next day, her body was frozen upright in the shape of a cross."

"I didn't know that, sir."

"You do now. I'm going in to eat directly. Would you care to join us?"

When I walked to my truck I felt like a man who had made an obscene remark in the midst of a polite gathering. I sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the front of the Terrebonne home. It was encased in shadow now, the curtains drawn on all the windows. What historical secrets, what private unhappiness did it hold? I wondered if I would ever know. The late sun hung like a shattered red flame in the pine trees.

* * *

TWENTY

I REMEMBER A CHRISTMAS DAWN five years after I came home from Vietnam. I greeted it in an all-night bar built of slat wood, the floor raised off the dirt with cinder blocks. I walked down the wood steps into a deserted parking area, my face numb with alcohol, and stood in the silence and looked at a solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss, the cattle acreage that was gray with winter, the hollow dome of sky that possessed no color at all, and suddenly I felt the vastness of the world and all the promise it could hold for those who were still its children and had not severed their ties with the rest of the human family.

Monday morning I visited Megan at her brother's house and saw a look in her eyes that I suspected had been in mine on that Christmas morning years ago.

Had her attackers held her underwater a few seconds more, her body would have conceded what her will would not: Her lungs and mouth and nose would have tried to draw oxygen out of water and her chest and throat would have filled with cement. In that moment she knew the heartbreaking twilight-infused beauty that the earth can offer, that we waste as easily as we tear pages from a calendar, but neither would she ever forget or forgive the fact that her reprieve came from the same hands that did Indian burns on her skin and twisted her face down into the silt.

She was living in the guest cottage at the back of Cisco's house, and the French doors were open and the four-o'clocks planted as borders around the trees were dull red in the shade.

"What's that?" she said.

I lay a paper sack and the hard-edged metal objects inside it on her breakfast table.

"A nine-millimeter Beretta. I've made arrangements for somebody to give you instruction at the firing range," I said.

She slipped the pistol and the unattached magazine out of the sack and pulled back the slide and looked at the empty chamber. She flipped the butterfly safety back and forth.

"You have peculiar attitudes for a policeman," she said.

"When they deal the play, you take it to them with fire tongs," I said.

She put the pistol back in the sack and stepped out on the brick patio and looked at the bayou with her hands in the back pockets of her baggy khaki pants.

"I'll be all right after a while. I've been through worse," she said.