Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

I braked the truck to the side of the road, my heart beating, and looked through the back window. The woman stood on the shoulder of the road, silhouetted against a light that shone on the face of the billboard. Don't buy into this, I told myself. It's not her. Your wife is dead and all the delusions and misery you inject into your life will not change that inalterable fact.

Then I put the truck in reverse and began backing toward the figure on the side of the road.

She glanced back over her shoulder once and began running. I accelerated faster, swerving on and off the pavement, until I was abreast of her. Through the rain-streaked glass her face stared at me, beaded with water, eyeshadow running down her cheeks, her mouth glossy with lipstick. I closed and opened my eyes, like a man coming out of darkness into light, her face forming and reforming in the rain.

I shoved open the passenger door and held up my badge holder. "Get in," I said.

She hesitated a moment, then sat down in the passenger seat and slammed the door behind her. She gave me a hard look in the glow of the dash panel. Her cheeks were pitted and heavily made up, her clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and booze. "Thanks for the ride. My old man threw me out," she said.

"Where do you want to go?" I asked.

"First bar we pass," she said. "For a minute you scared me. I had trouble with a couple of black guys last night. You stopped just 'cause you saw me in the rain?"

"I thought you were somebody else," I said.

She gave me a look. "There's a bar past the curve. Right by the motel," she said.

I put on my turn indicator and began to slow the truck. I knew the bar. It was a ramshackle, sullen place owned by a man who ran dog fights.

"I left my purse at the house. The sonofabitch I live with has probably drunk it up by now," she said.

I stopped in the parking lot and waited. She took a cigarette from her shirt pocket and lit it with a plastic butane lighter. She continued rubbing the striker wheel under her thumb. "Look, I can't drink in there for free. You want some action or not?" she said.

"Get out," I said.

"I can really pick them," she said. She stepped out into the storm and slammed the truck door as hard as she could.

Lesson? Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.

The one-car fatality at West Cote Blanche Bay seemed to lack any plausible explanation. The witness, an elderly Cajun hired to pick litter out of the ditches along the roadside, had seen an expensive, large car parked next to a compact in a grove of pine trees. Children had been lighting fireworks all evening, shooting Roman candles and rockets over the bay. Then he had heard firecrackers in the trees, just before the compact had driven away. When he looked again at the grove of pines, the large car started up and drove out onto a pier, snapping the supports on the guardrail into sticks, finally plunging off the end of the pier into the water.

Helen Soileau had arrived at the bay only a few minutes before me. She walked with me up a shell ramp and introduced me to the witness. As with most elderly Cajun men, his handshake was as light as air. "How many firecrackers did you hear?" I asked him.

"Two, maybe tree," he replied.

He was a tiny man, dressed in neat khakis, with cataracts and a supple face that resembled brown tallow. He seemed nervous and kept glancing over his shoulder at the bay and at the splintered guardrail on the pier and at the wrecker that so far had not been able to pull the sunken car off a submerged pipeline, all of it lit in the glare of searchlights mounted on a firetruck.

"Is anything wrong?" I asked.

"I seen a big man behind the wheel. Seen him go crashing right off the end of the pier t

here. I cain't swim, me. I keep t'inking maybe there was air inside the car. Maybe if I'd brung hep sooner "

"You have no reason to feel bad about anything, sir. Who was in the compact?"

"Just somebody driving a li'l car. It was an old one. I ain't sure what kind."

"Was a man or woman driving?"

His shook his head, his face blank.

"What color was the car?" I asked.

"I just ain't paid it much mind, no."

"You see a license tag?" I asked.

"No, suh."