Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"So why tell me about it?"

"I try to do things in the daylight, at least when it involves people I used to trust."

"He's saying you're being treated better than you deserve," Helen said.

"The guy who soared on gilded wings out the hotel window? I think the Jersey Bounce was too easy. You saying I did it? Who cares?" Cisco replied.

"Rough words," I said.

"Yeah?" He picked up a pair of field glasses from a table and tossed them at me. "Check out the guys who are on that boat. That's reality out there. I wish it would go away, but I'm stuck with it. So give me a break on the wiseacre remarks."

I focused the glasses through an open window on a linen-covered table where Billy Holtzner and his daughter and two Asian men were eating.

"The two Chinese are the bean counters. When the arithmetic doesn't come out right, they count the numbers a second time on your fingers. Except your fingers aren't on your hands anymore," he said.

"I'd get into a new line of work," I said.

"Dave, I respect you and I don't want you to take this wrong. But don't bother me again without a warrant and in the meantime kiss my royal ass," Cisco said.

"You only try to get men to kiss your ass?" Helen said.

He walked away from us, both of his hands held in the air, as though surrendering to an irrational world, just as a twin-engine amphibian roared across the swamp at treetop level, a pipe in the stern blowing curds of black smoke across the sun.

THAT EVENING I JOGGED to the drawbridge on the dirt road while heat lightning veined the clouds and fireflies glowed and faded like wet matches above the bayou's surface. Then I did three sets each of push-ups, barbell curls, dead lifts, and military presses in the back yard, showered, and went to bed early.

On the edge of sleep I heard rain in the trees and Bootsie undressing in the bathroom, then I felt her weight next to me on the bed. She turned on her side so that her stomach and breasts were pressed against me, and put one leg across mine and her hand on my chest.

"You're drawn to people who have problems. My problem is I don't like other women making overtures to my husband," she said.

"I think that's a problem I can live with," I replied.

She raised her knee and hit me with it. Then her hand touched me and she lifted her nightgown and sat on my thighs and leaned over me and looked into my face.

Outside the window, I could see the hard, thick contours of an oak limb, wrapped with moonlight, glistening with rain.

THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday. At false dawn I woke from a dream that lingered behind my eyes like cobweb. The dream was about Megan Flynn, and although I knew it did not signify unfaithfulness, it disturbed me just as badly, like a vapor that congeals around the heart.

In the dream she stood on a stretch of yellow hardpan, a treeless purple mountain at her back. The sky was brass, glowing with heat and dust. She walked toward me in her funny hat, her khaki clothes printed with dust, a tasseled red shawl draped around her shoulders.

But the red around her shoulders was not cloth. The wound in her throat had drained her face of blood, drenching her shirt, tasseling the ends of her fingers.

I went down to the dock and soaked a towel in the melted ice at the bottom of the cooler and held it to my eyes.

It was just a dream, I told myself. But the feeling that went with it, that was like toxin injected into the muscle tissue, wouldn't go away. I had known it in Vietnam, when I knew someone's death was at hand, mine or someone for whom I was responsible, and it had taken everything in me to climb aboard a slick that was headed up-country, trying to hide the fear in my eyes, the dryness in my mouth, the rancid odor that rose from my armpits.

But that had been the war. Since then I'd had the dream and the feelings that went with it only once—in my own house, the night my wife Annie was murdered.

TWENTY YEARS AGO ALEX Guidry had owned a steel-gray two-story frame house outside Franklin, with a staircase on the side and a second-floor screened porch where he slept in the hot months. Or at least this is what the current owner, an elderly man named Plo Castile, told me. His skin was amber, wizened, as hairless as a manikin's, and his eyes had the blue rheumy tint of oysters.

"I bought this property fo'teen years ago from Mr. Alex. He give me a good price, 'cause I already owned the house next do'," he said. "He slept right out yonder on that porch, at least when it wasn't cold, 'cause he rented rooms sometimes to oil-field people."

The yard was neat, with two palm trees in it, and flowers were planted around the latticework at the base of the main house and in a garden by a paintless barn and around a stucco building with a tin roof elevated above the walls.

"Is that a washhouse?" I said.

"Yes, suh, he had a couple of maids done laundry for them oil-field people. Mr. Alex was a good bidness-man."

"You remember a black woman named Ida Broussard, Mr. Plo?"