Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"You found this guy on your own?" I said.

"I started calling hospitals when you first contacted us. Wait till you see his face. People tend to remember it."

"Can you get on the cell phone and make sure Breedlove isn't allowed any phone calls in the next few minutes?" I said.

"I did that early this morning."

"You're a pretty good cop, Mr. Nash."

He grinned, then his eyes focused out the window on a snowshoe rabbit that was hopping through grass by an irrigation ditch. "By the way, I told you only what was on his sheet. About twenty years ago a family camping back in the hills was killed in their tents. The man done it was after the daughter. When I ran Jubal Breedlove in on a drunk charge, I found the girl's high school picture in his billfold."

Less than an hour later we were at the clinic in Raton. Jubal Breedlove lay in a narrow bed in a semi-private room that was divided by a collapsible partition. His face was tentacled with a huge purple-and-straw-berry birthmark, so that his eyes looked squeezed inside a mask. Helen picked up his chart from the foot of the bed and read it.

"Boxleiter put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, didn't he?" she said.

"What?" he said.

"Swede slung your blood all over the apartment. He might as well have written your name on the wall," I said.

"Swede who? I was robbed and stabbed behind a bar in Clayton," he said.

"That's why you waited until the wound was infected before you got treatment," I said.

"I was drunk for three days. I didn't know what planet I was on," he replied. His hair was curly, the color of metal shavings. He tried to concentrate his vision on me and Helen, but his eyes kept shifting to John Nash.

"Harpo wouldn't let you get medical help down in Louisiana, would he? You going to take the bounce for a guy like that?" I asked.

"I want a lawyer in here," he said.

"No, you don't," Nash said, and fitted his hand on Breedlove's jaws and gingerly moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as though examining the function of Breedlove's neck. "Remember me?"

"No."

He moved his hand down on Breedlove's chest, flattening it on the panels of gauze that were taped across Breedlove's knife wound.

"Mr. Nash," I said.

"Remember the girl in the tent? I sure do." John Nash felt the dressing on Breedlove's chest with his fingertips, then worked the heel of his hand in a slow circle, his eyes fixed on Breedlove's. Breedlove's mouth opened as though his lower Up had been jerked downward on a wire, and involuntarily his hands grabbed at Nash's wrist.

"Don't be touching me, boy. That'll get you in a lot of trouble," Nash said.

"Mr. Nash, we need to talk outside a minute," I said.

"That's not necessary," he replied, and gathered a handful of Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his palm with it. "Because everything is going to be just fine here. Why, look, the man's eyes glisten with repentance already."

WE HAD ONE SUSPECT in Trinidad, Colorado, now a second one in New Mexico. I didn't want to think about the amount of paperwork and the bureaucratic legal problems that might lie ahead of us. After we dropped John Nash off at the sheriffs office, we ate lunch in a cafe by the highway. Through the window we could see a storm moving into the mountains and dust lifting out of the trees in a canyon and flattening on the hardpan.

"What are you thinking about?" Helen asked.

"We need to get Breedlove into custody and extradite him back to Louisiana," I said.

"Fat chance, huh?"

"I can't see it happening right now."

"Maybe John Nash will have another interview with him."

"That guy can cost us the case, Helen."