“What?” the kid said.
“Can we use your rest room?”
“Yeah, sure. You want any gas?”
“No.” Lester got back in the car, leaving the kid standing there, and backed the car around the side of the station, out of the light, to the men’s room door.
Tee Beau was awake now, staring out into the darkness. In the headlights I could see a tree-lined coulee, with canebrakes along its banks, behind the station. Lester cut the engine, got out of the car again, unlocked the back door, and helped Boggs out into the light rain by one arm. Boggs kept breathing through his nose and letting the air out with a shudder.
“I’ll unlock one hand and give you five minutes,” Lester said. “You give me any more trouble, you can ride the rest of the way in the trunk.”
“I ain’t giving you no trouble. I told them all day I was sick.”
Lester took his handcuff key out of his pocket.
“Check the rest room first,” I said.
“I’ve been here before. There’s no windows. Lay off me, Robicheaux.”
I let out my breath, opened my door, and started to get out.
“All right, all right,” Lester said. He walked Boggs to the rest room door, opened it, flipped on the light, and looked inside. “It’s a box, like I said. You want to look?”
“Check it.”
“Bullshit,” he said. He unlocked Boggs’s right hand from the manacle attached to the waist chain. As soon as Boggs’s hand was free, he combed his hair back over his head with his fingers, looked back at the car, then walked inside the rest room with the short, mincing steps that the leg chain would allow him. He clicked the bolt behind him.
This time I got out of the car.
“What’s the matter with you?” Lester said.
“You’re doing too many things wrong.” I came around the front of the car toward him. The headlights were still on.
“Look, I’m in charge of this assignment. You don’t like the way I handle it, you write up a complaint when we get back.”
“Boggs has killed three people. He killed the bar owner with a baseball bat. Does that tell you something?”
“Yeah, that maybe you’re a little bit obsessive. You think that might be the problem here?”
I unsnapped the holster on my .45 and banged on the rest room door with my fist.
“Open it up, Boggs,” I yelled.
“I’m on the toilet,” he said.
“Open the door!”
“I can’t reach it. I got the shits, man. What’s going on?” Boggs said.
“You’re fucking unbelievable,” Lester said.
I hit the door again.
“Come on, Boggs,” I said.
“I’m going to get some cigarettes. You can do what you want to,” Lester said, and walked toward the front of the station.
I stepped back from the door, rested my palm on the butt of the .45, and kicked the door hard under the knob. It didn’t give. I saw Lester turn and stare at me. I kicked it again, and this time the lock splintered out of the jamb and the door crashed back on its hinges.
My eyes saw the paper towel dispenser torn apart on the wall and the paper towels scattered all over the floor even before I saw Boggs, his knees squatted slightly in a shooting position, the links of chain crimped tightly into his body, one manacled hand frozen against his side like a bird’s claw, his right arm outstretched with a nickel-plated revolver. His spearmint-green eyes were alive with excitement, and his mouth was smiling, as though we were in this joke together.
I got the .45 halfway out of my holster before he fired. The report was no louder than a firecracker, and I saw sparks from the barrel fly out into the darkness. In my mind’s eye I was twisting sideways, raising my left arm in front of my face, and clearing my holster with the .45, but I do not think I was doing any of these things. Instead, I’m sure that my mouth opened wide in disbelief and fear as the round struck me high up in the chest like a fist that was wrapped in chain mail. My breath exploded out of my lungs, my knees caved, my chest burned as though someone had cored through sinew and bone with a machinist’s drill. The .45 fell uselessly from my hand into the weeds, and I felt my left arm go limp, the muscles in my neck and shoulder collapsing as though all the linkage were severed. Then I was stumbling backward in the rain toward the coulee, my hand pressed over a wet hole in my shirt, my mouth opening and closing like a fish’s.
Lester had a .38 strapped to his ankle. He had once told me that a cop he knew in Miami Beach carried his weapon in the same fashion. His knee came up in the air, his hand dropped toward his shoe, and in the light from the filling station front window his face looked absolutely white, frozen, beaded with raindrops, just before Jimmie Lee Boggs doubled him over with a round through the stomach.
But I wasn’t thinking about Lester, nor in honesty can I say that I cared about him at that moment. Amid the pistol shots and the pop of lightning on the horizon, I heard a black medic from my outfit say, Sucking chest wound, motherfucker. Close it, close it, close it. Chuck got to breathe through his mouth. Then I crashed backward through a canebrake and tumbled down the slope of the coulee through the reeds and tangle of underbrush. I rolled on my back, my ears thundering with bugles and distant drums, and my breath came out of my mouth in a long sigh. The limbs of oak trees arched over the top of the coulee, and through the leaves I could see lightning flicker across the sky.
My legs were in the water, my back covered with mud, the side of my face matted with black leaves. I felt the warmness from the wound spread from under my palm into my shirt.
“Get in there, you sonofabitch,” Boggs said up in the darkness.
“Mr. Boggs,” I heard Tee Beau say.
“Get the car keys and open the trunk,” Boggs said.
“Mr. Boggs, they ain’t no need to do that. That boy too scared to hurt us.”
“Shut up and get the guns out of the trunk.”
“Mr. Boggs…”
I heard a sound like someone being shoved hard into a wall, then once again the report of the pistol, like a small, dry firecracker popping.
I swallowed and tried to roll on my side and crawl farther down the coulee. A bone-grinding, red-black pain ripped from my neck all the way down to my scrotum, and I rolled back into the ferns and the thick layer of black leaves and the mud that smelled as sour as sewage.
Then I heard the unmistakable roar of a shotgun.
“Try some Pepto Bismol for it,” Boggs said, and laughed in a way that I had never heard a human being laugh before.
I slipped my palm away from my chest, put both of my hands behind me in the mud, dug the heels of my shoes into the silt bottom of the stream, and began to push myself toward a rotted log webbed with dried flotsam and morning glory vines. I could breathe all right now; my fears of a sucking chest wound had been groundless, but it seemed that all my life’s energies had been siphoned out of me. I saw both Tee Beau and Boggs silhouetted on the rim of the coulee. Boggs held the pistol-grip twelve-gauge from the car trunk at port arms across his chest.
“Do it,” he said, took the nickel-plated revolver from his blue jeans pocket, and handed it to Tee Beau.
“Suh, let’s get out of here.”
“You finish it.”
“He dying down there. We ain’t got to do no more.”
“You don’t get a free pass, boy. You’re leaving here dirty as I am.”
“I cain’t do it, Mr. Boggs.”
“Listen, you stupid nigger, you do what I tell you or you join the kid up in the can.”
In his oversized clothes Tee Beau looked like a small stick figure next to Boggs. Boggs shoved him with one hand, and Tee Beau skidded down the incline through the wet brush, the branches whipping back across his coat and pants. The pistol was flat against his thigh. He splashed through the water toward me.
I ran my tongue across my lips and tried to speak, but the words became a tangle of rusty nails in my throat.
He knelt in fr
ont of me, his face spotted with mud, his eyes round and frightened in his small face.
“Tee Beau, don’t do it,” I whispered.
“He done killed that white boy in the bat’room,” he said. “He put that shotgun up against Mr. Benoit face and blowed it off.”
“Don’t do it. Please,” I said.
“Close your eyes, Mr. Dave. Don’t be moving, neither.”
“What?” I said, as weakly as a man would if he were slipping forever beneath the surface of a deep, warm lake.
He cocked the pistol, and his bulging eyes stared disjointedly into mine.
Some people say that you review your whole life in that final moment. I don’t believe that’s true. You see the folds in a blackened leaf, mushrooms growing thickly around the damp roots of an oak tree, a bullfrog glistening darkly on a log; you hear water coursing over rocks, dripping out of the trees, you smell it blowing in a mist. Fog can lie on your tongue as sweet and wet as cotton candy, the cattails and reeds turning a silver-green more beautiful than a painting in one flicker of lightning across the sky. You think of the texture of skin, the grainy pores, the nest of veins that are like the lines in a leaf. You think of your mother’s powdered breasts, the smell of milk in her clothes, the heat in her body when she held you against her; then your eyes close and your mouth opens in that last strangled protest against the cosmic accident that suddenly and unfairly is about to end your life.
He was crouched on one knee when he pulled the trigger. The pistol went off ten inches from my face, and I felt the burnt powder scald my skin, the dirt explode next to my ear. My heart twisted in my chest.
I heard Tee Beau rise to his feet and brush his knees.
“I done it, Mr. Boggs,” he said.
“Then get up here.”
“Yes suh, I’m moving.”
I remained motionless, my hands turned palm upward in the stream. The night was filled with sound: the crickets in the grass, the rumble of thunder out on the Gulf, the cry of a nutria farther up the coulee, Tee Beau laboring up through the wet brush.
Then I heard the car doors slam, the engine start, and the tires crunching over the gravel out onto the two-lane road.
It rained hard once more during the night. Just before dawn the sky cleared, and the stars were bright through the oak branches overhead. The sun came up red and hot above the tree line in the east, and the fog that clung to the bottom of the coulee was as pink as blood diffused in water. My mouth was dry, my breath foul in my own nostrils. I felt dead inside, disconnected from all the ordinary events in my life, my body trembling with spasmodic waves of shock and nausea, as though I lay once again on the side of a trail in Vietnam after a bouncing Betty had filled my head with the roar of freight trains and left me disbelieving and voiceless in the scorched grass. I heard early morning traffic on the road and car tires cutting into the gravel; then a car door opened and someone walked slowly along the side of the filling station.
“Oh Lawd God, what somebody done done,” a Negro man said.
I tried to speak, but no sound would come out of my voice box.
A small Negro boy in tattered overalls, with the straps hanging by his sides, stared down at me from the lip of the coulee. I raised my fingers off my chest and fluttered them at him. I felt one side of my mouth try to smile and the web of dried mud crack across my cheek. He backed away from the coulee and clattered through the cane, his voice ringing in the hot morning air.
Books by James Lee Burke
DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS
The Glass Rainbow
Swan Peak
The Tin Roof Blowdown
Pegasus Descending
Crusader’s Cross
Last Car to Elysian Fields
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
Purple Cane Road
Sunset Limited
Cadillac Jukebox
Burning Angel
Dixie City Jam
In the Electric Mix with Confederate Dead
A Stained White Radiance
A Morning for Flamingos
Black Cherry Blues
Heaven’s Prisoners
The Neon Rain
BILLY BOB HOLLAND NOVELS
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Bitterroot
Heartwood
Cimarron Rose
HACKBERRY HOLLAND NOVELS
Feast Day of Fools
Rain Gods
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
OTHER FICTION
Jesus Out to Sea
White Doves at Morning
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict and Other Stories
Two for Texas
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Half of Paradise
Acclaim for James Lee Burke’s
Black Cherry Blues
Winner of the Edgar Award as best novel of the year
“Remarkable…. Not to be missed…. A skilled and entertaining work…. The plot crackles with events and suspense.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A superior story… vivid… distinctive… full of low-lifes and rich crooks, sadism and corruption…. Burke shows that ‘serious’ literary craftsmanship is compatible with the hard-boiled genre…. You can’t help believing this dialogue is real.” —Chicago Tribune
“Wonderful writing…. Don’t miss this book.” —Detroit Free Press
“A stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms…. Burke’s fictional terrain—stretching from the Louisiana’s bayous to Montana’s red cliffs and pine-dotted hills—is uniquely his own…. He writes from the heart and the gut.” —Houston Chronicle
“This is a story that stays in the memory…. One of the best of a new breed of U.S. detective novelists… a first-class novelist in any genre… Burke knows how to pace a story, keep the action moving and the characters memorable.” —Toronto Globe and Mail
“Wonderful… marvelously plotted…. Burke is a superior writer…. This thriller hits you like a bucket of ice water on a hot day.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The writing is so good that it hurts…. A dark novel of the bayou from a master storyteller.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Wonderfully quirky and vivid…. Burke is a master of contrast, pushing graceful descriptive passages up against flinty dialogue and gritty action scenes. He grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.” —Seattle Times
“Brutal, romantic, sprawling, anecdotal, gripping—describing James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues requires a lot of adjectives. It’s as good a novel as any I’ve read in some time; it ripples with a rough-edged vitality rarely found in crime novels. Yet it is so much more than simply a crime novel…. Storytellers of Burke’s caliber don’t come along every day.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Dark and beautiful…. The atmosphere of menace is almost palpable…. The story crackles with sudden violence…. Burke transcends the genre, inviting comparison with the work of Raymond Chandler.” —Orlando Sentinel
“Evocative…. Enthralling…. James Lee Burke can write some of the best scenes of violence in American literature. He can also toss out a simile or metaphor or a brief descriptive phrase that can stop a reader cold.” —Washington Post Book World
“If there is a better writer of thrillers, I haven’t read him.” —James Hall
“What a book! What a story!… An on-the-edge-of-your-seat detective story jam-packed with some of the most exciting prose in modern fiction.” —Nashville Banner
“James Lee Burke is flat-out the best mystery writer in America, a master of both description and dialogue…. His novels can be read on multiple levels. On the surface, they are action-based and filled with catchy dialogue and evocative, controlled descriptions of nature. Below that, Burke is looking for water from a deeper well, diving and dividing for themes that are topical and timeless.” —Portland Oregonian
“A master at blending metaphor and mayhem to animate a region and its people.” —C
hicago Sun-Times
“A disturbing and powerful novel that pulls out all the emotional stops…. No other writer is so adept at portraying life at the raw edge.” —Wichita Eagle-Beacon
“Remarkable…. Both a compelling mystery and a beautifully drawn psychological study of a man in torment.” —Miami Herald
“James Lee Burke is one of the ablest crime novelists of the day, a remarkable combination of poetic sensibility and hard-muscled storyteller.” —Arizona Republic
“Burke spins a socko story…. He combines Elmore Leonard’s camera-sharp imagery and expert ear for dialect with Robert Stone’s dark plunging treks into greed, fear, and evil… Burke is not just a writer to watch for. He’s a grandmaster.” —Toronto Star
“Excellent…. James Lee Burke tells the story with style and grace, his knowledge of Cajun and Montana talk bringing his characters into vivid focus…. You have to love his hero, the supporting cast, and the problems that must be solved.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“A true literary artist who just happens to be plying his trade in the commercial world of crime fiction…. Nobody has ever described the south Louisiana landscape better or with greater awe and affection…. The Robicheaux novels are not to much mysteries as journeys to Dixie’s heart of darkness.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune
“He’s the best.” —John Sandford
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Black Cherry Blues Page 33
