Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

I yelled or think I yelled, He's already hit, but it was too late. She fired twice, pop, pop, the barrel streaking the darkness. The first round hit him high in the chest, the second in the mouth.

But Guidry's night in Gethsemane was not over. He stumbled toward the barn, his lower face like a piece of burst fruit, and swung his pistol back in Helen's direction and let off one shot that whined away across the bayou and made a sound like a hammer striking wood.

She began firing as fast as her finger could pull the trigger, the ejected shells pinging off the trunk of the rain tree, until I came behind her and fitted my hands on both her muscular arms.

"He's down. It's over," I said.

"No, he's still there. He let off another round. I saw the flash," she said, her eyes wild, the tendons in her arms jumping as though she were cold.

"No, Helen."

She swallowed, breathing hard through her mouth, and wiped the sweat off her nose with her shoulder, never releasing the two-handed grip on the Beretta. I shined the light out across the grass onto the north side of the barn.

"Oh, shit," she said, almost like a plea.

"Call it in," I said.

"Dave, he's lying in the same, I mean like, his arms are out like—"

"Get on the radio. That's all you have to do. Don't regret anything that happened here tonight. He dealt the play a long time ago."

"Dave, he's on the left side of where Flynn died. I can't take this stuff. I didn't know the guy was hit. Why didn't you yell at me?"

"I did. I think I did. Maybe I didn't. He should have thrown away the piece."

We stood there like that, in the blowing wind and dust and the raindrops that struck our faces like marbles, the vault of sky above us exploding with sound.

* * *

TWENTY-SEVEN

THE ARGENTINE DWARF WHO CALLED himself Ruben Esteban could not have been more unfortunate in his choice of a hotel.

Years ago in Lafayette, twenty miles from New Iberia, a severely retarded, truncated man named Chatlin Ardoin had made his living as a newspaper carrier who delivered newspapers to downtown businesses or sold them to train passengers at the Southern Pacific depot. His voice was like clotted rust in a sewer pipe; his arms and legs were stubs on his torso; his face had the expression of baked corn bread under his formless hat. Street kids from the north side baited him; an adman, the nephew of the newspaper's publisher, delighted in calling him Castro, driving him into an emotional rage.

The two-story clapboard hotel around the corner from the newspaper contained a bar downstairs where newsmen drank after their deadline. It was also full of hookers who worked the trade through the late afternoon and evening, except on Fridays, when the owner, whose name was Norma Jean, served free boiled shrimp for family people in the neighborhood. Every afternoon Chatlin brought Norma Jean a free newspaper, and every afternoon she gave him a frosted schooner of draft beer and a hard-boiled egg. He sat at the end of the bar under the air-conditioning unit, his canvas bag of rolled newspapers piled on the stool next to him, and peeled and ate the egg and drank the beer and stared at the soap operas on the TV with an intensity that made some believe he comprehended far more of the world than his appearance indicated. Norma Jean was thoroughly corrupt and allowed her girls no latitude when it came to pleasing their customers, but like most uneducated and primitive people, she intuitively felt, without finding words for the idea, that the retarded and insane were placed on earth to be cared for by those whose souls might otherwise be forfeit.

A beer and a hard-boiled egg wasn't a bad price for holding on to a bit of your humanity.

Fifteen years ago, during a hurricane, Chatlin was run over by a truck on the highway. The newspaper office was moved; the Southern Pacific depot across from the hotel was demolished and replaced by a post office; and Norma Jean's quasi-brothel became an ordinary hotel with a dark, cheerless bar for late-night drinkers.

Ordinary until Ruben Esteban checked into the hotel, then came down to the bar at midnight, the hard surfaces of his face glowing like corn bread under the neon. Esteban climbed on top of a stool, his Panama hat wobbling on his head. Norma Jean took one look at him and began screaming that Chatlin Ardoin had escaped from the grave.

Early Wednesday morning Helen and I were at the Lafayette Parish Jail. It was raining hard outside and the corridors were streaked with wet footprints. The homicide detective named Daigle took us up in the elevator. His face was scarred indistinctly and had the rounded, puffed quality of a steroid user's, his black hair clipped short across the top of his forehead. His collar was too tight for him and he kept pulling at it with two fingers, as though he had a rash.

"You smoked a guy and you're not on the desk?" he said to Helen.

"The guy already had a hole in him," I said. "He also shot at a police officer. He also happened to put a round through someone's bedroom wall."

"Convenient," Daigle said.

Helen looked at me.

"What's Esteban charged with?" I asked.

"Disturbing the peace, resisting. Somebody accidentally knocked him off the barstool when Norma Jean started yelling about dead people. The dwarf got off the floor and went for the guy's crotch. The uniform would have cut him loose, except he remembered y'all's bulletin. He said getting cuffs on him was like trying to pick up a scorpion," Daigle said. "What's the deal on him, again?"

"He sexually mutilated political prisoners for the Argentine Junta. They were buds with the Gipper," I said.