Free In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Page A

delusional."
          "A lot of people do. I just didn't think I'd get the same kind of bullshit from you."
          "I'd appreciate it if you didn't use profanity around my home."
          "I apologize. But that Confederate officer was saying something. It didn't make sense to me, but I thought it might to you."
          I filled one of the rabbit bowls with alfalfa pellets and latched the screen door on the hutch. I looked at Elrod Sykes. His face was absolutely devoid of guile or any apparent attempt at manipulation; in fact, it reminded me of someone who might have just been struck in the head by a bolt of lightning.
          "Look, Elrod, years ago, when I was on the grog, I believed dead people called me up on the telephone. Sometimes my dead wife or members of my platoon would talk to me out of the rain. I was convinced that their voices were real and that maybe I was supposed to join them. It wasn't a good way to be."
          He poured the foam out of his bottle, then flicked the remaining drops reflectively at the bark of a pecan tree.
          "I wasn't drunk," he said. "This guy with the bad arm and one leg, he said to me, 'You and your friend, the police officer in town, must repel them.' He was standing by the water, in the fog, on a crutch. He looked right in my face when he said it."
          "I see."
          "What do you think he meant?"
          "I'm afraid I wouldn't know, partner."
          "I got the notion he thought you would."
          "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I think you're imagining all this and I'm not going to pursue it any further. Instead, how about your clarifying something Ms. Drummond said earlier?"
          "What's that?"
          "Why is it a problem to your director, this fellow Mikey, if you come out to my place?"
          "She told you that?"
          "That's what the lady said."
          "Well, the way he put it was 'Stay out of that cop's face, El. Don't give him reason to be out here causing us trouble. We need to remember that a lot of things happened in this part of the country that are none of our business.' "
          "He's worried about the dead black man you found?" I said. "That doesn't make too much sense."
          "You got another one of these?" he said, and held up his empty bottle.
          "Why is he worried about the black man?"
          "When Mikey worries, it's about money, Mr. Robicheaux. Or actually about the money he needs to make the kind of pictures he wants. He did a mini-series for television on the Holocaust. It lost ten million dollars for the network. Nobody's lining up to throw money at Mikey's projects right now."
          "Julie Balboni is."
          "You ever heard of a college turning down money from a defense company because it makes napalm?"
          He opened and closed his mouth as though he were experiencing cabin pressure in an airplane. The moon was up now, and in the glow of light through the tree branches the skin of his face looked pale and grained, stretched tight against the bone. "Mr. Robicheaux . . . Dave . . . I'm being honest with you, I need a drink."
          "We'd better go inside and get you one, then. I'll make you a deal, though. Maybe you might want to think about going to a meeting with me. I don't necessarily mean that you belong there. But some people think it beats waking up like a chainsaw every morning."
          He looked away at a lighted boat on the bayou.
          "It's just a thought. I didn't mean to be intrusive," I said. "Let's go inside."
          "You ever see lights out in the cypress trees at night?"
          "It's swamp gas. It ignites and rolls across the water's surface like ball lightning."
          "No, sir, that's not what it is," he said. "They had lanterns hanging on some of their ambulances. The horses got mired in the bogs. A lot of those soldiers had maggots in their wounds. That's the only reason