DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (48 page)

     
"School of the
Americas?" I said to the fat man in the Sam Browne belt. I tried to smile.

     
He wore tinted
prescription glasses and stood taller than I. His eyes looked at me indolently,
then moved to Helen, studying her figure.

     
"What you
want?" he said.

     
"How about
cutting these guys some slack? They're not traffickers, they're just
camposinos,
right?" I said.

     
"We decide what
they are. You go on with the woman . . . Is
guapa,
huh? Is maybe lesbian
but
puta
is
puta."
He held out his palms and cupped them, as
though he were holding a pair of cantaloupes.

     
"What'd you
say?" Helen asked.

     
"He didn't say
anything," I said.

     
"Yeah he did.
Say it again, you bucket of bean shit, and see what happens."

     
The officer turned
away, a wry smile on his mouth, a light in the corner of his eye.

     
She started to step
toward him, but I moved in front of her, my eyes fastened on hers. The anger in
her gaze shifted to me, like a person breaking glassware indiscriminately, then
I saw it die in her face. I walked with her toward the ranch house, the backs
of my fingers touching her hand. She widened the space between us.

     
"Next time don't
interfere," she said.

     
"Those kids
would have taken our weight."

     
"Oh yeah? . . .
Well . . . I'm sure you're right . . . You swinging dicks are always right. . .
Let's close it down here. I've had my share of the tomato patch for
today."

     
She walked ahead of
me through the open front door of the house into the living room, where Clay
Mason sat in a deep deer-hide chair amid a litter of shattered glass, antique
firearms stripped from the
walls, splayed books, and overturned
furniture. On one stucco wall, pinned inside a broken viewing case, was a
sun-faded flag of the Texas republic.

     
Mason's hands were
folded on top of his cane, his eyes narrow and liquid with resentment.

     
"Don't get up .
. . I just need to use your John . . . Such a gentleman . . .," she said,
and continued on into the back of the house, without ever slowing her step.

     
"Looks like
you're going to skate," I said.

     
"My family
earned every goddamn inch of this place. We'll be here when the rest of you are
dust."

     
An upper corner of
the Texas flag had fallen loose from the blue felt backboard it was pinned to.
I reached through the broken glass and smoothed the cloth flat and replaced the
pin. Faded strips of butternut cloth, inscribed in almost illegible ink with
the names of Civil War battles, were sewn around the flag's borders.

     
"This flag
belonged to the Fourth Texas. Those were John Bell Hood's boys," I said.

     
"My
great-grandfather carried that flag."

     
"It was your
family who lived on the ranch next to the LaRoses', west of the Pecos, wasn't
it? Jerry Joe Plumb told me how y'all slant drilled and ran wets across the
river."

     
"Do you read
newspapers? There's a revolution being fought here. Everything you're doing
helps those men out there kill Mayan Indians."

     
"Men like you
always have a banner, Dr. Mason. The truth is, you live vicariously through the
suffering of other people."

     
"Get out. .
." He flicked at the air with the backs of his fingers, as though he were
dispelling a bad odor.

     
I tried to think of a
rejoinder, but I had none. Clay Mason had spent a lifetime floating above the
wreckage he had precipitated, seemingly immune to all the Darwinian and moral
laws that affected the rest of us, and my rhetoric sounded foolish compared to
the invective he had weathered for decades.

     
I stepped across the
broken glass on the oak floor toward the open doorway. Outside, the soldiers
were loading up in the six-bys.

     
"Hold on,
Streak," Helen said behind me. "It looks like our friend
flushed the candy store down the commode. Except it backed up on
him. Guess what got stuck under the rim?"

     
She dipped the tip of
her little finger into a child's balloon and held the white powder up in a
column of sunlight, then wiped her finger on a piece of tissue paper.

     
"It's a little
wet. Can you call that fat guy in, see if he wants to do the taste test?"
she said.

I
 
SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING but I didn't.

     
The morning after our
return from Guadalajara the sheriff opened the door to my office and leaned
inside.

     
"That was
Lafayette P.D. You'd better get over there. Sabelle Crown's pinned inside a car
on the Southern Pacific tracks."

     
"What
happened?"

     
"She was
abducted from the city golf course by this guy Zerrang. What was she doing on a
golf course?"

     
"She feeds the
pigeons there."

     
"Anyway, Zerrang
must have taken her somewhere. Evidently it was pretty bad. When he was
finished, he left her unconscious in her car on the train tracks. Why's Zerrang
after Sabelle Crown?"

     
"He wants her
father," I said.

     
"I don't get
it."

     
"Mookie Zerrang
works for Persephone Green and Jimmy Ray Dixon. Jimmy Ray knows sooner or later
Aaron's going to kill him."

     
"What for?"

     
"I think it has
to do with Sabelle."

     
"To tell you the
truth, Dave, I really don't give a damn about any of these people's
motivations. It's like figuring out why shit stinks. I
just wish they'd stay the hell out of our parish. Get over there,
will you?"

     
The sheriff brushed
something out of his eye, then he said, "Except why would this guy torture
a woman, then leave her on the train tracks? Why didn't he just kill her and
put her out of her misery?"

     
"Because he
hurts a lot more people this way," I said.

     
Helen Soileau and I
drove in a cruiser on the four-lane to Lafayette. Emergency flares burned
inside the fog when we arrived at the railroad crossing where the freight
locomotive had struck Sabelle's gas-guzzler broadside and pushed it fifty yards
down the rails in a spray of sparks.

     
We parked on the
shoulder of the road and walked through the weeds to the car's wreckage by the
side of the tracks. It lay upside down, the engine block driven through the
firewall, the roof mashed against the steering column. Lafayette firemen had
covered the outside metal, the engine, and gas tank with foam and were trying
to wedge open the driver's window with a hydraulic jack.

     
A paramedic had
worked his way on his stomach through the inverted passenger's window, and I
could hear him talking inside. A moment later he crawled back out. His shirt
and both of his latex gloves were spotted with blood.

     
He sat in the grass,
his hands on his thighs. A fireman put a plug of tobacco in the paramedic's
mouth to bite off, then helped him up by one arm.

     
"How's it
look?" I said.

     
"The car didn't
burn. Otherwise, that lady don't have a whole lot of luck," he replied. He
looked into my eyes and saw the unanswered question still there. He shook his
head.

     
I took off my coat,
slipped my clip-on holster off my belt, and squeezed through the passenger's
window into the car's interior. I could smell gas and the odor of musty
cushions and old grease and burnt electrical wires.

     
Sabelle's head and
upper torso were layered with crumpled metal, so that she had virtually no
mobility. I couldn't see the lower portion of her body at all. She coughed, and
I felt the spray touch my face like a warm mist.

     
"What'd he do to
you, kiddo?" I said.

     
"Everything."

     
"Those guys out
there are the best. They'll have you out of here
soon."

     
"When I close my
eyes I can feel the world turning. If I don't open them quickly, I won't get
back . . . I betrayed Daddy, Dave."

     
"It's not your
fault."

     
"Mookie Zerrang
knows where he is."

     
"There's still
time to stop it. If you'll trust me."

     
Her eyes went out of
focus, then settled on mine again. One cheek was marbled with broken veins. The
rent metal around her head looked like an aura fashioned out of warped pewter.

     
She told me where to
look.

     
"Jimmy Ray Dixon
was your pimp in New Orleans, wasn't he? Then he took you north, to work for
him in Chicago."

     
"I made my own
choices. I got no kick coming."

     
"Your father
murdered Ely Dixon, didn't he?"

     
"Wipe my nose,
Streak. My hands are caught inside something."

     
I worked my
handkerchief from my back pocket and touched at her upper lip with it. She
coughed again, long and hard this time, gagging in her throat, and I tried to
hold her chin so she wouldn't cut it on a strip of razored metal that was
wrapped across her chest. The handkerchief came away with a bright red flower
in the middle of it.

     
"I have to go
now," I said.

     
"Tell Daddy I'm
sorry," she said.

     
"You're the best
daughter a father could have, Sabelle."

     
I thought her eyes
wrinkled at the corners. But they didn't. Her eyes were haunted with fear, and
my words meant nothing.

     
I backed out of the
passenger window onto the grass. I could smell water in a ditch, the loamy odor
of decayed pecan husks in an orchard, taste the fog on my tongue, hear the
whirring sound of automobile tires out on the paved road. I walked away just as
a team of firemen and uniformed Lafayette cops used the Jaws of Life to wrench
open one side of the wrecked car. The sprung metal sounded just like a human
scream.

H
elen and I drove down I-10 toward the Atchafalaya River. It was
misting, and the fields and oak and palm trees along the roadside
were gray and wet-looking, and up ahead I could see the orange and
blue glow of a filling station inside the fog that rolled off the river.

     
"What are you
worrying about?" Helen said.

     
I touched the brake
on the cruiser.

     
"I've got to do
something," I said.

     
"What?"

     
"Maybe Zerrang
didn't head right for the Basin. Maybe there's another way to pull his
plug."

     
"You don't look
too happy about it, whatever it is," she said.

     
"How would you
like to save Buford LaRose's career for him?" I said.

     
I called his house
from the filling station pay phone. Through the glass I could see the willows
on the banks of the Atchafalaya, where we were to meet two powerboats from the
St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department.

     
"Buford?" I
said.

     
"What is
it?"

     
"Sabelle Crown's
dead."

     
"Oh man, don't
tell me that."

     
"She was
tortured, then left on a train track in her car by Mookie Zerrang."

     
I could hear him take
the receiver away from his ear, hear it scrape against a hard surface. Then I
heard him breathing in the mouthpiece again.