Free DR10 - Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Page A

behind her, a voice
shouted out, "Goddamnit, I didn't say you could leave. Now, you
listen, hon. I don't know if the problem is because your brains are
between your legs or because you think you've got a cute twat, but the
next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you'd better not open
your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don't you ever
contradict me in front of other people again."
    Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless,
the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner
bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the
door.
    I turned to go.
    "There's a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We're three million
over budget already. That's other people's money we're talking about.
They get mad about it," Cisco said.
    "I remember that first film you made. The one about the
migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie."
    "Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it
in a big way."
    "The guy in that trailer is a shithead."
    "Aren't we all?"
    "Your old man wasn't."
    I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees
to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a
miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.
     
    THAT NIGHT, AS BOOTSIE and I prepared
to go to bed, dry
lightning flickered behind the clouds and the pecan tree outside the
window was stiffening in the wind.
    "Why do you think Jack Flynn was killed?" Bootsie asked.
    "Working people around here made thirty-five cents an hour
back then. He didn't have a hard time finding an audience."
    "Who do you think did it?"
    "Everyone said it came from the outside. Just like during the
Civil Rights era. We always blamed our problems on the outside."
    She turned out the light and we lay down on top of the sheets.
Her skin felt cool and warm at the same time, the way sunlight does in
the fall.
    "The Flynns are trouble, Dave."
    "Maybe."
    "No, no maybe about it. Jack Flynn might have been a good man.
But I always heard he didn't become a radical until his family got
wiped out in the Depression."
    "He fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was at the battle of
Madrid."
    "Good night," she said.
    She turned toward the far wall. When I spread my hand on her
back I could feel her breath rise and fall in her lungs. She looked at
me over her shoulder, then rolled over and fit herself inside my arms.
    "Dave?" she said.
    "Yes?"
    "Trust me on this. Megan needs you for some reason she's not
telling you about. If she can't get to you directly, she'll go through
Clete."
    "That's hard to believe."
    "He called tonight and asked if I knew where she was. She'd
left a message on his answering machine."
    "Megan Flynn and Clete Purcel?"
     
    I WOKE AT SUNRISE the next morning and
drove through the leafy
shadows on East Main and then five miles up the old highway to Spanish
Lake. I was troubled not only by Bootsie's words but also by my own
misgivings about the Flynns. Why was Megan so interested in the plight
of Cool Breeze Broussard? There was enough injustice in the world
without coming back to New Iberia to find it. And why would her brother
Cisco front points for an obvious psychopath like Swede Boxleiter?
    I parked my truck on a side road and poured a cup of coffee
from my thermos. Through the pines I could see the sun glimmering on
the water and the tips of the flooded grass waving in the shallows. The
area around the lake had been the site of a failed Spanish colony in
the 1790s. In 1836 two Irish immigrants who had survived the Goliad
Massacre during the Texas Revolution, Devon Flynn and William Burke,
cleared and drained the acreage along the lake and built farmhouses out
of cypress trees that were rooted in the water like boulders. Later the
train stop there became known as Burke's Station.
    Megan and Cisco's ancestor had been one of those Texas
soldiers who had surrendered to the Mexican army with the expectation
of boarding a prison ship bound for New Orleans, and instead