In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

"Yes, up the Mekong. Some villagers tried to run away from a barrage. They got caught out in the rice field. When we buried them, their faces all looked like they had been inside a terrible wind."

"Then you know it's the innocent about whom we need to be most concerned?"

Before I could answer I saw Cholo and the man without a shirt staring down at my body, their faces beaded with rain. Julie pulled the drawstring tight on the ball bag and heaved it over his shoulder.

"Get in the Caddy, you guys," he said.

"What happened, Julie?" Cholo said. He wore tennis shoes without socks, a tie-dyed undershirt, and a urine-yellow bikini knotted up tightly around his scrotum. Hair grew around the edges of his bikini like tiny pieces of copper wire.

"He got in the way of the ball," Julie said.

"The guy's got a real goose egg in his hair," the shirtless man said. "Maybe we ought to take him to a hospital or something."

"Leave him alone," Julie said.

"We just gonna leave him here?" Cholo said.

"Unless you want to sit around out here in the rain," Julie said.

"Hey, come on, Feet," Cholo said.

"What's the problem?" Julie said.

"He's not a bad guy for a cop. Y'all go back, right?"

"He's got diarrhea of the mouth. Maybe he learned a lesson this time," Julie said.

"Yeah, but that don't mean we can't drop the guy off at the hospital. I mean, it ain't right to leave him in the fucking rain, Julie."

"You want to start signing your own paychecks? Is that what you're telling me, Cholo?"

"No, I didn't say that. I was just trying to act reasonable. Ain't that what you're always saying? Why piss off the locals?"

"We're not pissing off anybody. Even his own department thinks he's a drunk and a pain in the ass. He got what he deserved. Are you guys coming or not?" Julie said.

He opened the trunk of the purple Cadillac limousine and threw the ball bag clattering inside. The porn actor followed him, wiping his chest and handsome face with his balled-up shirt. Cholo hesitated, stared after them, then pulled the first-base pad loose from its anchor pins and rested it across the side of my face to protect it from the rain. Then he ran after the others.

The blue strip of sky in the north was now filled with torn pieces of smoke. I could hear a loud snap each time a shell burst over the distant line of trees.

"What were you going to tell me?" I said to the general.

"That it's the innocent we need to worry about. And when it comes to their protection, we shouldn't hesitate to do it under a black flag."

"I don't understand."

"I feel perhaps I've deceived you."

"How?"

"Perhaps I gave you the indication that you had been chosen as part of some chivalric cause."

"I didn't think that, general."

His face was troubled, as though his vocabulary was inadequate to explain what he was thinking. Then he looked out into the rain and his eyes became melancholy.

"My real loss wasn't in the war," he said. "It came later." He turned slowly and looked into my face. "Yellowjack took not only my life but also the lives of my wife and daughter, Mr. Robicheaux."

He waited. The rain felt like confetti blowing against my skin. I searched his eyes, and my heart began to beat against my ribs.