Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"That's one way of looking at it. Here's my card if you want to put a net over this guy," I said.

When we left, rain that looked like lavender horse tails was falling across the sun. The sheriff drove the cruiser with the window down and ashes blew from his pipe onto his shirt. He slapped at them angrily.

"I want that guy in the hat on a respirator," he said.

"We don't have a crime on that houseboat, skipper. It's not even in our jurisdiction."

"The intended victim is. That's enough. He's a vulnerable old man. Remember when you lived through your first combat and thought you had magic? A dangerous time."

A half hour later a state trooper pulled over a red pickup truck with a Texas tag on the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line.

THE SHERIFF AND I stood outside the holding cell and looked at the man seated on the wood bench against the back wall. His western-cut pants were ironed with sharp creases, the hard points of his ox-blood cowboy boots buffed to a smooth glaze like melted plastic. He played with his Stetson on his index finger.

The sheriff held the man's driver's license cupped in his palm. He studied the photograph on it, then the man's face.

"You're Harpo Scruggs?" the sheriff asked.

"I was when I got up this morning."

"You're from New Mexico?"

"Deming. I got a chili pepper farm there. The truck's a rental, if that's what's on your mind."

"You're supposed to be dead," the sheriff said.

"You talking about that fire down in Juarez? Yeah, I heard about that. But it wasn't me."

His accent was peckerwood, the Acadian inflections, if they had ever existed, weaned out of it.

"You terrorize elderly clergymen, do you?" I said.

"I asked the man for a can of gas. He pointed a shotgun at me."

"You mind going into a lineup?" the sheriff asked.

Harpo Scruggs looked at his fingernails.

"Yeah, I do. What's the charge?" he said.

"We'll find one," the sheriff said.

"I don't think y'all got a popcorn fart in a windstorm," he said.

He was right. We called Mout' Broussard's home and got no answer. Neither could we find the USL student who had witnessed the execution of the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin. The father of the two brothers was drunk and contradictory about what he had seen and heard when his sons were lured out of the house.

It was 8 p.m. The sheriff sat in his swivel chair and tapped his fingers on his jawbone.

"Call Juarez, Mexico, and see if they've still got a warrant," he said.

"I already did. It was like having a conversation with impaired people in a bowling alley."

"Sometimes I hate this job," he said, and picked up a key ring off his desk blotter.

Ten minutes later the sheriff and I watched Harpo Scruggs walk into the parking lot a free man. He wore a shirt with purple and red flowers on it, and it swelled with the breeze and made his frame look even larger than it was. He fitted on his hat and slanted the brim over his eyes, took a small bag of cookies from his pocket and bit into one of them gingerly with his false teeth. He lifted his face into the breeze and looked with expectation at the sunset.

"See if you can get Lila Terrebonne in my office tomorrow morning," the sheriff said.

Harpo Scruggs's truck drove up the street toward the cemetery. A moment later Helen Soileau's unmarked car pulled into the traffic behind him.