Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“Did you hold a gun on Burgoyne?”

“Yes.”

“You got a cop killed, Da

ve.”

“They had that kid staked out like a goat under a tree stand.”

The sheriff was breathing hard through his nostrils. His face was dark, his candy-striped snap-button shirt tight across his chest.

“I can’t quite describe how angry this makes me,” he said.

“You wanted the truth.”

“You’re damn right I do. Stay right there.”

He went out the door and down the corridor, then came back five minutes later, his blood pressure glowing in his face, the lines around his eyes like white thread.

“I’ve got Don Ritter and an IAD man in New Orleans on the line,” he said, and hit the button on his conference phone.

“What are you doing, skipper?” I said.

He held up his hand for me to be quiet. “Ritter?” he said, standing erect in the middle of the office.

“What can I do for you, Sheriff?” Ritter’s voice said through the speaker.

“Listen and keep your mouth shut. You set up a prisoner from my jail to be murdered and you almost got one of my people killed. You set foot in my parish again and I’m going to find a way to bury your sorry ass on Angola Farm. In the meantime, you’d better pray I don’t get my hands on you … Is that IAD man still there?”

There was a pause, then a second voice said through the speaker, “Yes, sir, I’m right here.”

“If the media want to buy that pig flop you people put out about y’all cleaning up your act, that’s their business. But you either get to the bottom of this or I’m going to put an open letter on the Internet and notify every law enforcement agency in the country of the kind of bullshit you pass off as police work. By the way, spell your full name for me,” the sheriff said.

After the sheriff hung up, his throat was blotched with color.

“Hypertension is going to put me in a box,” he said.

“I wish it had worked out different. I never got a clear shot.”

He drank a glass of water and took a deep breath, then his eyes settled on my face.

“Burgoyne’s brains splattered on you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“It happened to me in Korea. The guy was a prisoner I was taking back to the rear. I used to get up in the middle of the night and take showers and wash my hair and swim in the ocean and all kinds of crazy stuff. What’s the lesson? Better him than me.”

His hand rested on the end of my shoulder and he kept massaging it like a baseball coach working a stiff place out of his pitcher’s arm.

That night a fisherman on Calcasieu Lake, over by the Texas border, saw a man park a white automobile by the water’s edge and start to walk away. Then the man looked back at the car as though he had forgotten something, or as though he’d had an argument with someone and could not quite bear to leave the other party with the last word. The man gathered an armload of creek wood and dry weeds and yellowed newspaper and sifted it through the windows on the seats, his face averted from the dust. He brushed his hands and shirt clean and took an emergency flare from the glove box and popped it alight. Then he methodically fired the inside of the car and stepped back from his work just before flames curled out over the roof. He tossed the flare hissing into the lake and walked down the road.

The next morning, which was Friday, the car was identified as the one stolen from NOPD by Johnny Remeta.

But he had dumped it over on the Texas border, I told myself. Which meant he was probably fleeing Louisiana and did not want to add a federal beef for interstate transportation of stolen property to the charges already pending against him.

Good. I was sick of Johnny Remeta.

I tried to forget that he had a 160 I.Q. That he was just the kind of perp who would burn a stolen car on the state line to let people think he was gone.