DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  I pulled the truck diagonally across the road, leaped from the seat, and aimed the.45 across the hood, straight at Jack Gates's face. He stomped on the brakes, and the TransAm bucked sideways in a chuckhole and fishtailed against the trunk of an oak tree, pinwheeling a hubcap down the center of the road. He stared at me momentarily through the open passenger's window, a blue revolver balanced in one hand on top of the steering wheel, his metal-capped teeth glinting in the sun's hot early light, the engine throttling open and subsiding and then throttling open again under the hood.

  "Give it up, Jack," I said. "Gouza's a psychotic sack of shit. Let him take his own fall for a change."

  The rooster tail of dust from behind the car drifted across his window, and in the second it took for me to lose eye contact with him, he aimed the revolver quickly out the window and popped off two rounds. The first one was low and kicked up dirt three feet in front of the truck, but the second one whanged off the hood and showered leaves out of the tree behind me.

  Then he dropped the transmission into reverse and floored the TransAm back down the road, the tires burning into the dirt, spinning with circles of black smoke. He veered from side to side, clipping bark out of the tree trunks, bursting a taillight, ripping loose his bumper. But evidently he had an eye for detail and had remembered passing a collapsed wire gate and a faint trace of a side road that led through a sugarcane field, because he slammed on his brakes, slid in a half circle, then roared over the downed gate--cedar posts, barbed wire, and all.

  I ran up the incline by the far side of the road, through a stand of pine trees, splashed across a coulee, and came out on the edge of the field just as the TransAm spun around the corner, rippled back a fender on a parked tractor, and mowed through the short cane toward a flat-topped levee that led back to the main parish road.

  He hadn't expected to see me on foot in the field. He started to cut the steering wheel toward me, to drive me back into the trees or the coulee, then he changed his mind, spinning the wheel in the opposite direction with one hand and firing blindly out the window with the other. In the instant that the TransAm flashed by me, his face looked white and round and small through the window, like a spectator's in a theater, as though he had suddenly become aware that he was witnessing his own denouement.

  I went to one knee in the wet grass and began firing. I tried to keep the sights below the level of his window jamb to allow for the elevation caused by the recoil, but in reality it was unnecessary. The eight hollow-point rounds, which flattened to the size of quarters with impact, destroyed his automobile. They pocked silvery holes in the doors, spiderwebbed the windows, blew divots of upholstery into the air, exploded a tire off the rim, gashed a geyser of steam out of the radiator, and whipped a single streak of blood across the front windshield.

  His foot must have locked down on the accelerator, because the TransAm was almost airborne when it roared along the lip of an irrigation ditch and sliced through the fence surrounding a Gulf States Power Company substation.

  The front end crashed right into the transformers, and the tiers of transmission wires and ceramic insulators crumpled in a crackling net on the car's roof.

  But he was still alive. He let the revolver drop outside the window, then started to push open the door with the palms of his hands like a man trying to extricate himself from the rubble of a collapsed building.

  "Don't get out, Jack! Don't touch the ground!"

  He sat back down on the seat, his face bloodless and exhausted, then the sole of one shoe came to rest on the damp earth.

  The voltage contorted his face as if he were having an epileptic seizure. His body stiffened, shook, and jerked; spittle flew from his mouth; electricity seemed to leap and dance off his capped teeth. Then his car horn and radio began blaring simultaneously, and a scorched odor, like hair and feces burning in an incinerator, rose from his clothes and head in dirty strings of smoke.

  I turned and walked back to the road. The grass was wet against my trouser legs and swarming with insects, the sun hot and yellow above the treeline in the marsh. The drawbridge was down now, and ambulances, firetrucks, and sheriff's cars were careening toward me, emergency lights blazing, under the long canopy of oaks. My saliva tasted like copper pennies; my right ear was a block of wood. The.45, the receiver locked open on the empty clip, felt like a silly appendage hanging from my hand.

  Paramedics, cops, and firemen were rushing past me now.

  I kept walking down the road, by the bayou's edge, toward my house. Bream were feeding close into the lily pads, denting the water in circles like raindrops. The cypress roots along the far bank were gnarled and wet among the shadows and ferns, and I could see the delicate prints of egrets in the damp sand. I pulled the clip from the automatic, stuck it in my back pocket, and let the receiver slam back on the empty chamber. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my right ear, but it felt like it was full of warm water that would not drain.

  The sheriff came up behind me and gently put his hand inside my arm.

  "When they deal the hand, we shut down their game," he said. "If it comes out any different, we did something wrong. You know where I learned that?"

  "It sounds familiar."

  "It should."

  "We could have used Gates to get Joey Gee."

  "Yeah, so we'll catch up with Fluck and use him. Six of one, half dozen of the other."

  I nodded silently.

  "Right?" he said.

  "sure."

  "It's just a matter of time."

  "Yeah, that's all it is," I agreed, and looked away into the distance, where I could almost feel the sun's heat cooking the tin roof on the bait shop.

  CHAPTER 15

  I locked up the bait shop and let no one in it for the rest of the day. I thought about the events of that morning for a long time. Things had worked out for Joey Gouza in better ways than he could have ever planned. I had been responsible for springing him on the phony assault-and-battery charges filed by Drew Sonnier; Weldon's long-sought-after film evidence had turned out to be worthless; Eddy Raintree, a superstitious nimwit as well as a pervert, who would have probably ratted out Joey Gee for an extra roll of toilet paper in his cell, had had his face blown into a bloody mist by Jewel Fluck while he was locked in my handcuffs; then Gates had gotten to Fluck, and I in turn had killed Gates, the only surviving person who could implicate Joey in the Garrett murder.

  I wondered if Joey Gee got up in the morning and said a prayer of thanks that I had wandered into his life.

  In the meantime one of his hired sociopaths had terrified my daughter, then he had ordered his chief button man to deliver a human head and severed finger to our family business.

  I suspected that today had proved special for Joey, a day in which he took an extra pleasure in chopping up lines with his whores, sipping iced rum drinks with them by the pool, or maybe inviting them out to the clubhouse at the track for lobster-steak dinners and rolls of six-dollar parimutuel tickets. I suspected at this moment that Joey Gee did not have a care in the world.

  After I wrote up my report at the office, I went back home and sat in the shade on the dock by myself, staring at the sun's hot yellow reflection on the bayou, the dragonflies that seemed to hang motionless over the cattails and lily pads. Even in the shade I was sweating heavily inside my clothes. Then I unlocked the bait shop and used the phone inside to call Clete Purcel. The heat was stifling, and the plastic bag that hung from the post in the center of the room had clouded with moisture.

  When I had finished talking with Clete, the damp outline of my hand looked like it had been painted on the phone receiver.

  I worked in the yard the rest of the afternoon, and when it rained at four o'clock, I sat on the gallery by myself and watched the water drip out of the pecan trees and tick in the dead leaves and ping on top of Tripod's cage. Then at sunset I went back into the bait shop with a hat box, and five minutes later I was on my way to New Orleans.

  "You look tired," Bootsie s
aid at the breakfast table the next morning.

  "Oh, I'm just a little slow this morning," I said.

  "What time did you come in last night?"

  "I really didn't notice."

  "How's Clete?"

  "About the same."

  "Dave, what are you two doing?"

  I kept my eyes on Alafair, who was packing her lunch kit for a church group picnic.

  "Be sure to put a piece of cake in there, Alf," I said.

  She turned around and grinned.

  "I already did," she said.

  "Do you want to talk about it later?" Bootsie said.

  "Yeah, that's a good idea."

  Ten minutes later Alafair raced out the screen door to catch the church bus. Bootsie watched her leave, then came back into the kitchen.

  "I just saw Batist carrying some lumber into the shop.

  What's he doing?" she asked.

  "A few repairs."

  "Did that man Gates do something in our shop? Is that why you wouldn't let anybody in it yesterday?"

  "It just wasn't a day for business-as-usual."

  "What's Clete's involvement with this?"

  "It was Gouza's goons who put him in the hospital. That makes him involved, Boots."

  She took the dishes off the table and put them in the sink.

  She gazed out the window into the backyard.

  "When you go to see Clete, it always means a shortcut," she said.

  "You don't know everything that's happened."

  "I'm not the problem, Dave. What bothers me is I think you're hiding something from the people you work with."

  "Joey Gouza ordered this man Gates to throw Gouza's brother-in-law into an airplane propeller. Then he sent this same man to our house with a-"

  "What?"

  I caught my breath and pinched my temples with my fingers.

  "Gouza has a furnace instead of a brain," I said. "He's left his mark on our home, and I can't touch him. Do you think I'm going to abide that?"

  She rinsed the plates in the sink and continued to look out the window.

  "Two of the men who murdered the deputy are dead," she said. "One day it'll be Joey Gouza's turn. Can't you just let events take their course? Or let other people handle things for a while?"

  "There's another factor, Boots. Gouza's a paranoid.

  Maybe today he feels wonderful, he's hit the daily double, the dragons are dead. But next week, or maybe next month, he'll start thinking again about the individuals who've hurt or humiliated him most, and he'll be back in our lives. I'm not going to let that happen."

  She dried her hands on a dish towel, then used it to mop off the counter. She brushed back her hair with her fingers, straightened the periwinkles in a vase. Her eyes never looked at mine. She turned on the radio on the windowsill, then turned it off and took a pair of scissors out of a drawer.

  "I'm going to cut some fresh flowers. Are you going to the office now?" she said.

  "Yes, I guess so."

  "I'll put your lunch in the icebox. I have to run some errands in town today."

  "Boots, listen a minute."

  She popped open a paper bag to place the cut flowers in and went out the back door.

  That afternoon the sheriff came into my office with my report on Gates's shooting in his hands. He sat down in the chair across from me and put on his rimless glasses.

  "I'm still trying to puzzle a couple of things out here, Dave. It's like there's a blank space or two in your report," he said.

  "How's that?"

  "I'm not criticizing it. You were pretty used up when you wrote this stuff down. But let me see if I understand everything here. You went down a little early to open up your bait shop?"

  "That's right."

  "That's when you saw Gates?"

  "That's correct."

  "You called the dispatcher, then you went after him in your truck?"

  "Yeah, that's about it."

  "So it was already first light when you saw him?"

  "It was getting there."

  "It had to be, because the sun was up when you nailed him."

  "I'm not following you, sheriff."

  "Maybe it's just me. But why would a pro like Gates come around your house at sunrise when he could have laid for you at night?"

  "Who knows?"

  "Unless he didn't mean to hurt you, unless he was there for some other reason-"

  "Like Clete once told me, trying to figure out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet."

  He looked down at the report again, then folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

  "There's something that really disturbs me about this, Dave. I know there's an answer, but I can't seem to put my hand on it."

  "Sometimes it's better not to think about things too much. Just let events unfold." I placed my hands behind my neck, yawned, and tried to look casually out the window.

  "No, what I mean is, Gouza just got off the hook in Iberia Parish. Is this guy crazy enough to send a hit man after another one of our people, right to his house, right at the break of day? It doesn't fit, does it?"

  "I wish Gates were here to tell us. I don't know what else to say, sheriff."

  "Well, I'm just glad you didn't get hung out there. I'll see you later. Maybe you ought to go home and get some sleep. You look like you haven't slept since World War II."

  He went out the door. I tried to complete the paperwork that was on my desk, but my eyes burned and I couldn't concentrate or keep my thoughts straight in my head. Finally I shoved it all into a bottom drawer and fiddled absently with a chain of paper clips on top of my desk blotter.

  Had I lied to the sheriff, I asked myself? Not exactly. But then I hadn't quite told the truth, either.

  Was my report dishonest? No, it was worse. It concealed the commission of a homicide.

  But some situations involve a trade-off. In this case the fulfillment of a professional obligation would require that my home and family become the center of a morbid story that would live in the community for decades, and Joey Gouza would succeed in inflicting a level of psychological damage on my daughter, in particular, that might never be undone. Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

  I left the office and drove home on the oak-lined dirt road that followed the bayou past my dock. The first raindrops were starting to fall out of a sunny sky, as they did almost every summer afternoon at three o'clock, and I could feel the air becoming close, suddenly cooler, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the bream and goggle-eye perch started feeding on the bayou's surface by the edge of the lily pads. I passed the collapsed wire gate that Jack Gates had shredded when he had pointed the TransAm into the sugarcane field, and I avoided looking at the trashed substation and the bullet-pocked car that a wrecker had winched loose from the transformers and left upside down amid a litter of broken cane stalks. But I wasn't going to brood upon the death of Jack Gates; I had already turned over yesterday to my Higher Power, and I was determined not to relive it. My problems with Bootsie as well as the sheriff were sufficient to keep my mind occupied today. And if that was not enough, a man ahead of me in a pickup truck was stapling Bobby Earl posters on the tree trunks along the road.

  By the time I turned in to my drive, he had just smoothed one to the contours of a two-hundred-year-old live oak at the edge of my yard and hammered staples into each of the corners. I closed the truck door and walked over to him, my hands in my back pockets. I even tried to smile. He looked like an innocuous individual hired out of a labor office.

  "Say, podna, that tree's on my property and I don't want any nail holes in it."

  A foot above my head was Bobby Earl's chiseled face, with stage lights shining up into it so that his features had the messianic cast of a Billy Graham. Below was his most Oft-quoted statement, LET ME BE
YOUR VOICE, LET ME SPEAK YOUR THOUGHTS. Then farther down was some information about a rally and barbecue with Dixieland bands on Friday night in Baton Rouge.

  "Sorry," the man with the hammer and staples said. "Me guy just said to stick 'em up on all the trees."

  "Which guy?"

  "The guy who give me the signs."

  "Well, just don't nail any more up till you get around that next corner, okay?"

  "Sure."