Free The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke Page B

castrated. But I still haven’t decided if that’s the right thing or not. So, yeah, I guess in a way you could say I’ve made some progress.”
    The room was so quiet Otis thought all the air had been sucked out of it. After the meeting, he followed the accountant to his car. It had just rained and the night air was pungent with the smell of magnolia blossoms, pulsing with the sounds of tree frogs.
    “Hey?” Otis said.
    “Yeah?” the accountant said.
    “Have a good one, bud,” Otis said.
    “You trying to tell me something?” the accountant said.
    “I just did,” Otis replied.
    Now he was walking downstairs with a loaded rifle cradled against his chest. He could hear Thelma talking to Melanie in the kitchen, telling her she was sure that at least two of the men in the green boat were her attackers. Then she began to tell Melanie for the first time, in detail, what they had done to her.
    Otis stepped out on the mushiness of the St. Augustine grass that grew like a deep blue-green carpet on his lawn. Four houses down the street, on the opposite side, he could see a flashlight’s beam moving behind the second-story windows of a home where Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate president, had once stayed. But he didn’t see the green boat and he wondered if he was watching the same vandals or a new group. He crossed Tom Claggart’s yard, walking on the dirty rim of water that covered the sidewalk and extended almost to Tom’s gallery. Suddenly he was bathed in white light from a battery-powered lantern that Tom had chosen, just at that moment, to carry out on the gallery.
    “Turn that thing off!” Otis said.
    “You got those guys spotted?” Tom asked.
    “I’m not sure. Go back inside, Tom.”
    “I got some guys coming over. We can close off the block and rip the whole problem out by its roots. Get my drift?”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    Tom clicked off his lantern. “Bang on the door if you need the cavalry,” he said. “My friends don’t take prisoners.”
    Otis sloshed into the street until his foot touched the curbing that bordered the neutral ground. But even on top of the neutral ground the water level was above his ankles and he could see the V-shaped wake of a cottonmouth moccasin swimming toward a mound of oak limbs that was draped over an automobile.
    He positioned himself behind the trunk of a palm tree and stared at the house from which he could hear glass breaking and furniture being overturned. In his mind’s eye he saw himself crashing through the front door, advancing up the stairs, and taking them out one by one, the exit wounds stippling the wallpaper with their blood, the impact of their bodies hitting the floor like bags of sand.
    No, it had to be an eye for an eye, he thought. Thelma had identified only two of the four men as her attackers. He could not kill arbitrarily, if in fact he was capable of killing at all. It was easier to think about than to do it. When the test came, could he pull the trigger? Was he willing to join the ranks of men like Tom Claggart and his friends?
    But if the looters threatened him, if they were armed or they refused to halt, that would be another matter, wouldn’t it?
    A house burst into flame on the next block, orange sparks twisting high in the sky. In the distance he could hear gunfire and he could see a helicopter trying to land on a hospital roof, and he wondered if snipers were shooting at it. His hands were damp on the stock of the rifle, his eyes stinging with sweat. When he swallowed, his saliva tasted as metallic as blood.
    He stepped off the far side of the neutral ground and began working his way down the street, past automobiles whose windows had been broken and their stereos ripped from their dashboards. He waded up onto the lawn of the house the looters were ransacking and watched the flashlight beam go from room to upstairs room. Then the light shone down a staircase, its beam bouncing off the downstairs hallway as the person carrying