James Lee Burke Robicheaux 11 Purple_Cane

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It was all about control and order.
The same way with life, his father had said. People didn't respect
authority anymore. You had to find a leader, a man you could respect, and put
your faith in him, just as he placed his faith in you. His father called it a
reciprocity of personal honor.
Axel's sunporch and guest room were covered with electric trains. The
tracks ran across floors and tables and sections of plywood screwed down on
sawhorses. The tracks wound through papier-mache mountains and tiny forests,
past water towers and freight depots and miniature communities; there were toy
brakemen and gandy walkers along the tracks and switches that diverted
locomotives past each other at the last possible moment, and warning bells and
flashing lights at the crossings.
When Axel cranked up all his trains at once, the smells of warm metal
and oil and overheated electrical circuits reminded him of the clean acrid
smell of gunpowder at the range.
Two kills with a department-issue M-16, a third kill shared with
Burgoyne.
He thought he might feel bad about the first barricaded suspect he
popped.
He didn't. The guy had every opportunity to come out of the building.
Instead, he turned on the gas jets and was going to take his child out with
him. Just as the guy was about to light the match, Axel, in a prone position
on a rooftop, sucked in his breath, exhaled slowly, and drilled a round
through a glass pane and nailed him through both temples.
You believed in what you did. You trusted the man you took orders from.
And you didn't look back. That's what his father had said.
It must have been grand to be around during World War II. Working people
made good money and for fun went bowling and played shuffleboard in a tavern
and didn't snort lines off toilet tanks; you walked a girl home from a cafe
without gang bangers yelling at her from a car; blacks lived in their own part
of town. Kids collected old newspapers and coat hangers and automobile tires
and hauled them on their wagons down to the fire-house for the war effort. The
enemy was overseas. Not in the streets of your own city.
Axel's occasional girlfriend, a barmaid named Cherry Butera, said he'd
been depressed since Jimmy Burgoyne was killed in that shooting on the
Atchafalaya. He'd taken a couple of vacation days, and he and the girlfriend
had driven down to Grand Isle. A storm was tearing up the Gulf and the sky had
turned green and the surf was wild and yellow with churning sand.
"There's a Nazi sub out there. The Coast Guard sunk it with planes in
'42," he said. "I wish I'd been alive back then."
"What for?" she asked.
"I would have been there. I would have been part of all that," he
replied.
They drove back to New Orleans in the rain and drank beer in a small
pizza joint two blocks from his house. Banana trees thrashed against the side
of the building, and the shadows from the neon signs in the windows cascaded
like water down Axel's face.
"Somebody's following me," he said.
"You're blaming yourself because you weren't there when Jimmy was
killed," his girlfriend said.
He looked at her a moment, then his eyes disconnected from hers and
looked at nothing. He peeled the gold and green label off his beer bottle and
rolled it into tiny balls.
"I saw somebody outside my window. He was behind us on the road
tonight," he said.
"The road was empty, hon. The bad guys are afraid of you. Everybody
knows that."
"I wish Jimmy was here. I wish he wasn't dead," he said.
At 11 p.m. they went out the back of the cafe and walked down the alley
toward his car. Rain blew in a vortex from a streetlight out by the sidewalk,
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and the palm trees between the garages filled with wind and raked against the
wood walls.
The man waiting in the shadows wore a wide hat and a black raincoat with
the collar up. The piece of lumber he held in his hands was thick and square
and probably three feet long. Leaves clung wetly to his shoulders and hat, so
that he looked like an extension of the hedge when he stepped into the alley.
He swung the piece of lumber with both hands, as he would a baseball bat, into
Axel's face.
Axel crashed backwards into a row of garbage cans, his forehead veined
with blood and water. Then the man in the wide hat leaned over and drove the
piece of lumber into Axel's throat and the side of his head.
The man stood erect, water sluicing off his hat brim, his face a dark
oval against the streetlight at the end of the alley.
"Haul freight, unless you want the same," he said to the woman.
She turned and ran, twisting her face back toward the hatted man, her
flats splashing through puddles that were iridescent with engine oil. The
hatted man tossed the piece of lumber in the hedge, then picked up a whiskey
bottle and broke it against the side of a garage.
He stooped over Axel's body, the streetlight glinting on the jagged
shell of the bottle, his extended arm probing downward into the darkness,
soundlessly, like a man doing a deed he had conceived in private and now
performed without heat or surprise.
"It'D take a real sonofabitch to do something like that, Dave," Magelli said.
"It wasn't Clete."
"How do you know?"
"Check out Jim Gable's chauffeur. He's an ex-carnival man named Micah.
His face is disfigured."
"Why don't you let Purcel cover his own ass for a change?"
"Jennings is a rogue cop. He brought this down on himself. Lay off of
Clete," I said.
"Tell it to Jennings. The doctor had the mirrors taken out of his
hospital room."
18
A WEEK PASSED, and I didn't hear anything more from Dana Magelli. The night
Jennings had been attacked Clete was picking up a bail skip for Wee Willie
Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in Baton Rouge, which didn't mean he couldn't have
attacked Jennings after he dumped the skip in Willie and Nig's office. But
Clete Purcel had boundaries, even though they were a little arbitrary, and
they didn't include mutilating a half-conscious man who was already on the
ground.
I wanted to empty my head and caseload and go to Key West with Bootsie
and Alafair and fish for three weeks. I was tired of other people's problems,
of breaking up domestic arguments, of hosing vomit out of a cruiser, of
washing spittle off my face, of cutting slack to junkies because they had the
virus, only later to have one try to bite me when I cuffed him.
I was tired of seeing the despair in the faces of black parents when I
told them their children had overdosed on meth or heroin or had been gunned
down in a robbery. Or vainly trying to reassure a store owner of his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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