Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"The what?" he said.

Ruben Esteban sat on a wood bench by himself in the back of a holding cell, his Panama hat just touching the tops of his jug ears. His face was triangular in shape, dull yellow in hue, the eyes set at an oblique angle to his nose.

"What are you doing around here, podna?" I said.

"I'm a chef. I come here to study the food," he answered. His voice sounded metallic, as though it came out of a resonator in his throat.

"You have three different passports," I said.

"That's for my cousins. We're a—how you call it?—we're a team. We cook all over the world," Esteban said.

"We know who you are. Stay out of Iberia Parish," Helen said.

"Why?" he asked.

"We have an ordinance against people who are short and ugly," she replied.

His face was wooden, impossible to read, the eyes hazing over under the brim of his hat. He touched an incisor tooth and looked at the saliva on the ball of his finger.

"Governments have protected you in the past. That won't happen here. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Esteban?" I said.

"Me cago en la puta de tu madre," he answered, his eyes focused on the backs of his square, thick hands, his mouth curling back in neither a sneer nor a grimace but a disfigurement like the expression in a corpse's face when the lips wrinkle away from the teeth.

"W

hat'd he say?" Daigle asked.

"He probably doesn't have a lot of sentiment about Mother's Day," I said.

"That's not all he don't have. He's got a tube in his pants. No penis," Daigle said, and started giggling.

Outside, it was still raining hard when Helen and I got in our cruiser.

"What'd Daigle do before he was a cop?" Helen asked.

"Bill collector and barroom bouncer, I think."

"I would have never guessed," she said.

Ruben Esteban paid his fine that afternoon and was released.

THAT NIGHT I SAT in the small office that I had fashioned out of a storage room in the back of the bait shop. Spread on my desk were xeroxed copies of the investigator's report on the shooting and death of Alex Guidry, the coroner's report, and the crime scene photos taken in front of the barn. The coroner stated that Guidry had already been hit in the rib cage with a round from a .357 magnum before Helen had ever discharged her weapon. Also, the internal damage was massive and probably would have proved fatal even if Helen had not peppered him with her nine-millimeter.

One photo showed the bloody interior of Guidry's Cadillac and a bullet hole in the stereo system and another in the far door, including a blood splatter on the leather door panel, indicating the original shooter had fired at least twice and the fatal round had hit Guidry while he was seated in the car.

Another photo showed tire tracks in the grass that were not the Cadillac's.

Two rounds had been discharged from Guidry's .38, one at Helen, the other probably at the unknown assailant.

The photo of Guidry, like most crime scene photography, was stark in its black and white contrasts. His back lay propped against the barn wall, his spine curving against the wood and the earth. His hands and lower legs were sheathed in blood, his shattered mouth hanging open, narrowing his face like a tormented figure in a Goya painting.

The flood lamps were on outside the bait shop, and the rain was blowing in sheets on the bayou. The water had overflowed the banks, and the branches of the willows were trailing in the current. The body of a dead possum floated by under the window, its stomach yellow and swollen in the electric glare, the claws of feeding blue-point crabs affixed to its fur. I kept thinking of Guidry's words to me in our last telephone conversation: It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it.

What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field where Guidry was hit with the .357?

Then I saw Megan Flynn's automobile park by the boat ramp and Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her head.

She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair. Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted gallery and living room of my house.