Free Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Page B

said.
    She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist. “Look, I’m not feeling too good. Y’all got what you need?” she said.
    “Did they use a credit card to pay for the room?” I asked.
    “It’s a trick pad. My manager pays the owner. Look, believe it or not, I got another life besides this shit. How about it?”
    She tried to look boldly into my face, but her eyes broke and she picked up the crushed model of a spaceship from its box on the floor and held it in her lap and studied it resentfully.
    “Who hit you, Ruby?” I asked.
    “A guy.”
    “You have a kid?”
    “A little boy. He’s nine. I bought him this, but it got rough in here last night.”
    “These cops, duffers, whatever they were, they had to have names,” I said.
    “Not real ones.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The one who burned the pictures, the other guy called him Harpo. I go, ‘Like that guy in old TV movies who’s a dummy and is always honking a horn?’ The guy called Harpo goes, ‘That’s right, darlin’, and right now I’m gonna honk your horn.’”
    She tried to fit the plastic parts of the model back together. Her right cheek was pinched while she tried to focus, and the bruise on it knotted together like a cluster of blue grapes. “I can’t fix this. I should have put it up in the closet. He’s coming over with my aunt,” she said. She pushed hard on a plastic part and it slid sharply across the back of her hand.
    “How old a man was Harpo?” I asked.
    “Like sixty, when they start acting like they’re your father and Robert Redford at the same time. He has hair all over his back… I got to go to the bathroom. I’m gonna be in there a while. Look, you want to stay, maybe you can fix this. It’s been a deeply fucked-up day.”
    “Where’d you buy it?” I asked.
    “K&B’s. Or maybe at the Jackson Brewery, you know, that mall that used to be the Jax brewery… No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Brewery.” She bit a hangnail.
    Clete and I drove to a K&B drugstore up St. Charles. It was raining, and the wind blew the mist out of the trees that arched over the streetcar tracks. The green-and-purple neon on the drugstore looked like scrolled candy in the rain.
    “Harpo was the name of the cop who took Cool Breeze Broussard’s wife away from him,” I said.
    “That was twenty years ago. It can’t be the same guy, can it?”
    “No, it’s unlikely.”
    “I think all these people deserve each other, Streak.”
    “So why are we buying a toy for Ruby Gravano’s son?”
    “I seldom take my own advice. Sound like anybody else you know, big mon?”
----
    ON WEDNESDAY I DROVE a cruiser down the old bayou road toward Jeanerette and Lila Terrebonne’s home. As I neared the enormous lawn and the oak-lined driveway, I saw the production crew at work on the set that had been constructed to look like the quarters on a corporation farm, and I kept driving south, toward Franklin and the place where my father and I had discovered a crucifixion.
    Why?
    Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as long as you deny its existence. Maybe because I knew that somehow the death of Cisco and Megan Flynn’s father was about to come back into our lives.
    The barn was still there, two hundred yards from the Teche, hemmed in by banana trees and blackberry bushes. The roof was cratered with a huge hole, the walls leaning in on themselves, the red paint nothing more than thin strips that hadn’t yet been weathered away by wind and sun.
    I walked through the blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn. The nail holes were sealed over with dust from the cane fields and water expansion in the wood, but I could still feel their edges with the tips of my fingers and, in my mind’s eye, see the outline of the man whose tormented face and broken body and blood-creased brow greeted my father and me on that fiery dawn in 1956.
    No grass grew around the area where Jack Flynn died. (But there was no sunlight there, I told