Free DR08 - Burning Angel by James Lee Burke Page B

the backs of my fingers. It's throbbing like I've got blood poisoning or something.”
    “Get out of the bar, Clete.”
    “You always knoW how to say it.” I couldn't sleep that night. The rain stopped and a heavy mist settled in the trees outside our bedroom window, and I could hear night-feeding bass flopping back in the swamp. I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the curtains puffing in the breeze. “What is it, Dave?” Bootsie said behind me in the dark. “I had a bad dream, that's all.”
    “About what?” She put her hand on my spine. “A captain I knew in Vietnam. He was a stubborn and inflexible man. He sent a bunch of guys across a rice field under a full moon. They didn't come back.”
    “It's been thirty years, Dave.”
    “The dream was about myself. I'm going into town. I'll call you later,” I said. I took two paper bags from the kitchen pantry, put a clean shirt in one of them, stopped by the bait shop, then drove up the dirt road through the tunnel of oak trees and over the drawbridge toward New Iberia.
    It was still dark when I reached the parish jail. Kelso was drinking a cup of coffee and reading a comic book behind his desk. His face looked like a walrus's in the shadows from his desk lamp, the moles on his neck as big as raisins.
    “I want to check Marsallus out,” I said.
    “Check him out? Like a book from the library, you're saying?”
    “It's the middle of the night. Why make an issue out of everything?”
    He stretched and yawned. His thick glasses were full of light. “The guy's a twenty-four kick-out, anyway, isn't he?”
    “Maybe.”
    “I think you ought to take him to a shrink.”
    “What'd he do?”
    “He's been having a conversation in his cell.”
    ((C V
    So?
    “There ain't anybody else in it, Robicheaux.”
    “How about bringing him out, Kelso, then you can get back to your reading.”
    “Hey, Robicheaux, you take him to the wig mechanic, make an appointment for yourself, too.”
    A few minutes later Sonny and I got in my truck and drove down East Main. He was dressed in his sharkskin slacks and a jailhouse denim shirt. There were low pink clouds in the east now and the live oaks along the street were gray and hazy with mist.
    “There's a shirt in that bag by the door,” I said.
    “What's this in the other one? You carrying around a junkyard, Dave?”
    He lifted the rusted chain and ankle cuff out of the bag.
    I didn't answer his question. “I thought you might enjoy some takeout from Victor's rather than eat at the slam,” I said, parking in front of a small cafeteria on Main across from the bayou. “You want to go get it?”
    “You're not afraid I'll go out the back door?”
    “There isn't one.” I put eight one-dollar bills in his hand. “Make mine scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, and coffee.”
    I watched him walk inside, tucking my borrowed tropical shirt inside his rumpled slacks. He was grinning when he came back out and got in the truck.
    “There is a back door, Streak. You didn't know that?” he said.
    “Huh,” I said, and drove us across the drawbridge, over the Teche, into City Park. The bayou was high and yellow with mud, and the wake from a tug with green and red running lights washed over the banks into the grass. We ate at a picnic table under a tree that was alive with mockingbirds.
    “You ever see a leg iron like that before, Sonny?”
    “Yeah, in the museum at Jackson Square.”
    “Why would you make it your business to know that Jean Lafitte operated a barracoon outside New Iberia?”
    “Delia told me. She was into stuff like that.” Then he wiped his face with his hand. “It's already getting hot.”
    “I read your notebook. It doesn't seem to have any great illumination in it, Sonny.”
    “Maybe I'm a lousy writer.”
    “Why do these bozos want to kill people over your notebook?”
    “They're called cleanup guys. They hose a guy and everything around him right off the planet.”
    “I'll put it to you,