Jackson Posey's chest was heaving when he looked down at his work. He flung the slapjack aside. "Damn!" he said. He paced up and down, staring back at the camp, then at the lights burning in the Lejeune house. Woodrow was so frightened his teeth knocked together in the back of his mouth.

Posey steadied his foot against Junior's shoulder and tried to shove his body over the edge of the hole. But Junior's body fell sideways and Boss Posey couldn't move it with his foot. In fact, Woodrow could not believe how weak Posey was.

"Get a holt of his feet," Posey said.

"Suh?"

"Pick up his feet or join him. Which way you want it?"

Woodrow gathered up Junior's ankles while Boss Posey lifted his arms, and the two of them flung Woodrow's friend over the rim of the hole. The thump it made when it hit the bottom was a sound Woodrow would hear in his sleep the rest of his life.

"Go over there and set on the ground," Posey said.

Posey mounted the bulldozer and started the engine. With the lights off he lowered the blade and pushed the huge pile of clay into the hole, backing off it, packing it down, scraping it flat, until the hole was only a dimple in the landscape. When he cut the engine Woodrow could hear the first drops of rain pinging on the steel roof over the driver's seat.

"Junior transferred out of here tonight. Ain't none of this happened. That's right, ain't it, Woodrow?"

"If you say so, boss."

"There's a half inch of whiskey left in that bottle. You want it?"

"No, suh."

"Have a Camel," Posey said, and shook two loose from his pack. "Go ahead and take it. It's a new day tomorrow. Don't never forget that. Sun gonna be breakin' and a new day shakin'. That's what my daddy always used to say."

How'd you come by this little farm here?" I asked Woodrow.

"Mr. Lejeune sold it to me. Give me a good price wit' out no interest," he replied.

"To shut you up?"

"He sent a black man to me wit' the offer. Never saw Mr. Le-Jeune." Woodrow stared at me with his flat, sightless eyes that could have been large painted buttons sewn on his face. Lightning jumped in the clouds over the Gulf.

I slipped my business card between his fingers. "Let me know if I can do anything for you," I said.

His hand folded around the card. "Whatever happened to Mr. Lejeune's li'l girl, the one named T'co?" he asked.

"Theodosha? She's around."

"My cousin, the maid for Mr. and Miz Lejeune? She always worried about that li'l girl. She said tings wasn't right in that house."

I asked him what he meant but he refused to explain.

"How long were you inside?" I said as I was leaving.

"Five years."

"What'd you go down for?"

"Fifty-tree-dol'ar bad check," he replied.

Chapter 18.

As I drove back toward New Iberia a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf and marched across the southern tip of Vermilion Parish, thrashing the sugarcane in the fields, the rain twisting in my headlights. I could not shake the tale told me by Woodrow Reed, nor the sense of needless death and cruelty and loss that it instilled in the listener. I turned on my radio and tried to find a station that was playing music, but my radio went dead, although it had been working fine earlier.

I tried to get Helen again on my cell phone, but I couldn't raise the wireless service and gave it up and tossed the cell phone on the seat. I passed flooded rice fields wrinkled with wind and lighted farmhouses that looked like snug islands inside the storm. Then I passed a billboard on a curve and my lights flashed across a woman standing by the side of the road.

She wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned tan raincoat that whipped back in the wind. Her hair was honey colored, tapered on her neck, her skin almost luminous in the glare of headlights. Hey, G.I." give a girl a ride? I thought I heard a voice say.

Tags: James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net