Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"I do now."

"You stay away from Alex Guidry. I want your promise on that, Breeze."

He pulled on his fingers and stared at the street.

"I talked with Harpo Scruggs Sunday night," I said. "He's making noise about your testifying against the Giacanos and Ricky Scarlotti."

"Why ain't you got him in jail?"

"Sooner or later, they all go down."

"Ex-cop, ex-prison guard, man killed niggers in Angola for fun? They go down when God call 'em. What you done about Ida, it ain't lost on me. T'ank you."

Then he went back in the house.

I ATE LUNCH AT home that day. But Bootsie didn't sit at the kitchen table with me. Behind me, I heard her cleaning the drainboard, putting dishes in the cabinets, straightening canned goods in the cupboard.

"Boots, in all truth, I don't believe Megan Flynn has any romantic interest in an over-the-hill small-town homicide cop," I said.

"Really?"

"When I was a kid, my father was often drunk or in jail and my mother was having affairs with various men. I was alone a lot of the time, and for some reason I didn't understand

I was attracted to people who had something wrong with them. There was a big, fat alcoholic nun I always liked, and a half-blind ex-convict who swept out Provost's Bar, and a hooker on Railroad Avenue who used to pay me a dollar to bring a bucket of beer to her crib."

"So?"

"A kid from a screwed-up home sees himself in the faces of excoriated people."

"You're telling me you're Megan Flynn's pet bête noire?"

"No, I'm just a drunk."

I heard her moving about in the silence, then she paused behind my chair and let the tips of her fingers rest in my hair.

"Dave, it's all right to call yourself that at meetings. But you're not a drunk to me. And she'd better not ever call you one either."

I felt her fingers trail off my neck, then she was gone from the room.

TWO DAYS LATER HELEN and I took the department boat out on a wide bay off the Atchafalaya River where Cisco Flynn was filming a simulated plane crash. We let the bow of the boat scrape up onto a willow island, then walked out on a platform that the production company had built on pilings over the water. Cisco was talking to three other men, his eyes barely noting our presence.

"No, tell him to do it again," he said. "The plane's got to come in lower, right out of the sun, right across those trees. I'll do it with him if necessary. When the plane blows smoke, I want it to bleed into that red sun. Okay, everybody cool?"

It was impressive to watch him. Cisco used authority in a way that made others feel they shared in it. He was one of their own, obviously egalitarian in his attitudes, but he could take others across a line they wouldn't cross by themselves.

He turned to me and Helen.

"Watch the magic of Hollywood at work," he said. "This scene is going to take four days and a quarter of a million dollars to shoot. The plane comes in blowing black smoke, then we film a model crashing in a pond. We've got a tail section mounted on a mechanical arm that draws the wreckage underwater like a sinking plane, then we do the rescue dive in the LSU swimming pool. It edits down to two minutes of screen time. What d'you think about that?"

"I ran you through the National Crime Information Center. You and Swede Boxleiter took down a liquor store when you were seventeen," I said.

"Boy, the miracle of computers," he said. He glanced out at a boat that was moored in the center of the bay. It was the kind used for swamp tours, wide across the beam, domed with green Plexiglas, its white hull gleaming.

"Where were you Sunday evening, Cisco?" I said.

"Rented a pontoon plane and took a ride out on the Gulf."

"I have to pass on relevant information about you to a homicide investigator in San Antonio."