Sunset Limited (31 page)

“It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it, you arrogant shithead.”

I waited silently. The receiver felt warm and moist in my hand.

“Go to the barn where Flynn died. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. Leave the muff diver at home,” he said.

“You don’t make the rules, Guidry. Another thing, call her that again and I’m going to break your wagon.”

I hung up, then dialed Helen’s home number.

“You don’t want to check in with the St. Mary sheriff’s office first?” she said.

“They’ll get in the way. Are you cool on this?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“We take Guidry down clean. No scratches on the freight.”

“The guy who said he’d dig up my grave and piss in my mouth? To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t touch him with a baton. But maybe you’d better get somebody else for backup, bwana.”

“I’ll meet you at the end of East Main in twenty minutes,” I said.

I went into the bedroom and took my holstered 1911 model U.S. Army .45 from the dresser drawer and clipped it onto my belt. I wiped my palms on my khakis unconsciously. Through the screen window the oak and pecan trees seemed to tremble in the heat lightning that leaped between the clouds.

“Streak?” Bootsie said.

“Yes?”

“I overheard your conversation. Don’t worry about Helen. It’s you that man despises,” she said.

HELEN AND I DROVE down the two-lane through Jeanerette, then turned off on an oak-lined service road that led past the barn with the cratered roof and sagging walls where Jack Flynn died. The moon had gone behind a bank of storm clouds, and the landscape was dark, the blackberry bushes in the pasture humped against the lights of a house across the bayou. The leaves of the oaks along the road nickered with lightning, and I could smell rain and dust in the air.

“Guidry’s going to do time, isn’t he?” Helen said.

“Some anyway.”

“I partnered with a New Orleans uniform who got sent up to Angola. First week down a Big Stripe cut his face. He had himself put in lockdown and every morning the black boys would spit on him when they went to breakfast.”

“Yeah?”

“I was just wondering how many graduates of the parish prison will be in Guidry’s cell house.”

Helen turned the cruiser off the road and drove past the water oaks through the weeds and around the side of the barn. The wind was up now and the banana trees rattled and swayed against the barn. In the headlights we could see clusters of red flowers in the rain trees and dust swirling off the ground.

“Where is he?” Helen said. But before I could speak she pointed at two pale lines of crushed grass where a car had been driven out in the pasture. Then she said, “I got a bad feeling, Streak.”

“Take it easy,” I said.

“What if Scruggs is behind this? He’s been killing people for forty years. I don’t plan to walk blindfolded into the Big Exit.” She cut the lights and unsnapped the strap on her nine-millimeter Beretta.

“Let’s walk the field. You go to the left, I go to the right… Helen?”

“What?”

“Forget it. Scruggs and Guidry are both pieces of shit. If you feel in jeopardy, take them off at the neck.”

We got out of the cruiser and walked thirty yards apart through the field, our weapons drawn. Then the moon broke behind the edge of a cloud and we could see the bumper and front fender of an automobile that was parked close behind a blackberry thicket. I circled to the right of the thicket, toward the rear of the automobile, then I saw the tinted windows and buffed, soft-yellow exterior of Alex Guidry’s Cadillac. The driver’s door was partly open and a leg in gray pants and a laced black shoe was extended into the grass. I clicked on the flashlight in my left hand.

“Put both hands out the window and keep them there,” I said.

But there was no response.

“Mr. Guidry, you will put your hands out the window, or you will be in danger of being shot. Do you hear me?” I said.

Helen moved past a rain tree and was now at an angle to the front of the Cadillac, her Beretta pointed with two hands straight in front of her.

Guidry rose from the leather seat, pulling himself erect by hooking his arm over the open window. But in his right hand I saw the nickel-plated surfaces of a revolver.

“Throw it away!” I shouted. “Now! Don’t think about it! Guidry, throw the piece away!”

Then lightning cracked across the sky, and out of the corner of his vision he saw Helen take up a shooter’s position against the trunk of the rain tree. Maybe he was trying to hold the revolver up in the air and step free of the car, beyond the open door, so she could see him fully, but he stumbled out into the field, his right arm pressed against the wound in his side and the white shirt that was sodden with blood.

But to Helen, looking into the glare of my flashlight, Guidry had become an armed silhouette.

I yelled or think I yelled,
He’s already hit
, but it was too late. She fired twice,
pop, pop
, the barrel streaking the darkness. The first round hit him high in the chest, the second in the mouth.

But Guidry’s night in Gethsemane was not over. He stumbled toward the barn, his lower face like a piece of burst fruit, and swung his pistol back in Helen’s direction and let off one shot that whined away across the bayou and made a sound like a hammer striking wood.

She began firing as fast as her finger could pull the trigger, the ejected shells pinging off the trunk of the rain tree, until I came behind her and fitted my hands on both her muscular arms.

“He’s down. It’s over,” I said.

“No, he’s still there. He let off another round. I saw the flash,” she said, her eyes wild, the tendons in her arms jumping as though she were cold.

“No, Helen.”

She swallowed, breathing hard through her mouth, and wiped the sweat off her nose with her shoulder, never releasing the two-handed grip on the Beretta. I shined the light out across the grass onto the north side of the barn.

“Oh, shit,” she said, almost like a plea.

“Call it in,” I said.

“Dave, he’s lying in the same, I mean like, his arms are out like—”

“Get on the radio. That’s all you have to do. Don’t regret anything that happened here tonight. He dealt the play a long time ago.”

“Dave, he’s on the left side of where Flynn died. I can’t take this stuff. I didn’t know the guy was hit. Why didn’t you yell at me?”

“I did. I think I did. Maybe I didn’t. He should have thrown away the piece.”

We stood there like that, in the blowing wind and dust and the raindrops that struck our faces like marbles, the vault of sky above us exploding with sound.

TWENTY-SEVEN

THE ARGENTINE DWARF WHO CALLED himself Ruben Esteban could not have been more unfortunate in his choice of a hotel.

Years ago in Lafayette, twenty miles from New Iberia, a severely retarded, truncated man named Chatlin Ardoin had made his living as a newspaper carrier who delivered newspapers to downtown businesses or sold them to train passengers at the Southern Pacific depot. His voice was like clotted rust in a sewer pipe; his arms and legs were stubs on his torso; his face had the expression of baked corn bread under his formless hat. Street kids from the north side baited him; an adman, the nephew of the newspaper’s publisher, delighted in calling him Castro, driving him into an emotional rage.

The two-story clapboard hotel around the corner from the newspaper contained a bar downstairs where newsmen drank after their deadline. It was also full of hookers who worked the trade through the late afternoon and evening, except on Fridays, when the owner, whose name was Norma Jean, served free boiled shrimp for family people in the neighborhood. Every afternoon Chatlin brought Norma Jean a free newspaper, and every afternoon she gave him a frosted schooner of draft beer and a hard-boiled egg. He sat at the end of the bar under the air-conditioning unit, his canvas bag of rolled newspapers piled on the stool next to him, and peeled and ate the egg and drank the beer and stared at the soap operas on the TV with an intensity that made some believe he comprehended far more of the world than his appearance indicated. Norma Jean was thoroughly corrupt and allowed her girls no latitude when it came to pleasing their customers, but like most uneducated and primitive people, she intuitively felt, without finding words for the idea, that the retarded and insane were placed on earth to be cared for by those whose souls might otherwise be forfeit.

A beer and a hard-boiled egg wasn’t a bad price for holding on to a bit of your humanity.

Fifteen years ago, during a hurricane, Chatlin was run over by a truck on the highway. The newspaper office was moved; the Southern Pacific depot across from the hotel was demolished and replaced by a post office; and Norma Jean’s quasi-brothel became an ordinary hotel with a dark, cheerless bar for late-night drinkers.

Ordinary until Ruben Esteban checked into the hotel, then came down to the bar at midnight, the hard surfaces of his face glowing like corn bread under the neon. Esteban climbed on top of a stool, his Panama hat wobbling on his head. Norma Jean took one look at him and began screaming that Chatlin Ardoin had escaped from the grave.

Early Wednesday morning Helen and I were at the Lafayette Parish Jail. It was raining hard outside and the corridors were streaked with wet footprints. The homicide detective named Daigle took us up in the elevator. His face was scarred indistinctly and had the rounded, puffed quality of a steroid user’s, his black hair clipped short across the top of his forehead. His collar was too tight for him and he kept pulling at it with two fingers, as though he had a rash.

“You smoked a guy and you’re not on the desk?” he said to Helen.

“The guy already had a hole in him,” I said. “He also shot at a police officer. He also happened to put a round through someone’s bedroom wall.”

“Convenient,” Daigle said.

Helen looked at me.

“What’s Esteban charged with?” I asked.

“Disturbing the peace, resisting. Somebody accidentally knocked him off the barstool when Norma Jean started yelling about dead people. The dwarf got off the floor and went for the guy’s crotch. The uniform would have cut him loose, except he remembered y’all’s bulletin. He said getting cuffs on him was like trying to pick up a scorpion,” Daigle said. “What’s the deal on him, again?”

“He sexually mutilated political prisoners for the Argentine Junta. They were buds with the Gipper,” I said.

“The what?” he said.

Ruben Esteban sat on a wood bench by himself in the back of a holding cell, his Panama hat just touching the tops of his jug ears. His face was triangular in shape, dull yellow in hue, the eyes set at an oblique angle to his nose.

“What are you doing around here, podna?” I said.

“I’m a chef. I come here to study the food,” he answered. His voice sounded metallic, as though it came out of a resonator in his throat.

“You have three different passports,” I said.

“That’s for my cousins. We’re a—how you call it?—we’re a team. We cook all over the world,” Esteban said.

“We know who you are. Stay out of Iberia Parish,” Helen said.

“Why?” he asked.

“We have an ordinance against people who are short and ugly,” she replied.

His face was wooden, impossible to read, the eyes hazing over under the brim of his hat. He touched an incisor tooth and looked at the saliva on the ball of his finger.

“Governments have protected you in the past. That won’t happen here. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Esteban?” I said.

”
Me cago en la puta de tu madre
,” he answered, his eyes focused on the backs of his square, thick hands, his mouth curling back in neither a sneer nor a grimace but a disfigurement like the expression in a corpse’s face when the lips wrinkle away from the teeth.

“What’d he say?” Daigle asked.

“He probably doesn’t have a lot of sentiment about Mother’s Day,” I said.

“That’s not all he don’t have. He’s got a tube in his pants. No penis,” Daigle said, and started giggling.

Outside, it was still raining hard when Helen and I got in our cruiser.

“What’d Daigle do before he was a cop?” Helen asked.

“Bill collector and barroom bouncer, I think.”

“I would have never guessed,” she said.

Ruben Esteban paid his fine that afternoon and was released.

THAT NIGHT I SAT in the small office that I had fashioned out of a storage room in the back of the bait shop. Spread on my desk were xeroxed copies of the investigator’s report on the shooting and death of Alex Guidry, the coroner’s report, and the crime scene photos taken in front of the barn. The coroner stated that Guidry had already been hit in the rib cage with a round from a .357 magnum before Helen had ever discharged her weapon. Also, the internal damage was massive and probably would have proved fatal even if Helen had not peppered him with her nine-millimeter.

One photo showed the bloody interior of Guidry’s Cadillac and a bullet hole in the stereo system and another in the far door, including a blood splatter on the leather door panel, indicating the original shooter had fired at least twice and the fatal round had hit Guidry while he was seated in the car.

Another photo showed tire tracks in the grass that were not the Cadillac’s.

Two rounds had been discharged from Guidry’s .38, one at Helen, the other probably at the unknown assailant.

The photo of Guidry, like most crime scene photography, was stark in its black and white contrasts. His back lay propped against the barn wall, his spine curving against the wood and the earth. His hands and lower legs were sheathed in blood, his shattered mouth hanging open, narrowing his face like a tormented figure in a Goya painting.

The flood lamps were on outside the bait shop, and the rain was blowing in sheets on the bayou. The water had overflowed the banks, and the branches of the willows were trailing in the current. The body of a dead possum floated by under the window, its stomach yellow and swollen in the electric glare, the claws of feeding blue-point crabs affixed to its fur. I kept thinking of Guidry’s words to me in our last telephone conversation:
It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it
.