Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Page B

pipe. Bullets were ricocheting and sparking all around us. What’s the use? I’ve got some guests. Is there anything else?”
    “Guests?”
    “Billy Holtzner’s daughter and her boyfriend.”
    I looked out the French doors again. I saw a glassy reflection between the fingers of the man’s right hand.
    “Introduce me.”
    “It’s Sunday. They’re just getting up.”
    “Yeah, I can see.”
    “Hey, wait a minute.”
    But I opened the French doors and stepped outside. The man with the ponytail, who looked Malaysian or Indonesian, cupped the candle stub melted to the table, popping the waxy base loose, and held it behind his thigh. Holtzner’s daughter had eyes that didn’t fit her fried hair. They were a soapy blue, mindless, as devoid of reason as a drowsy cat’s when small creatures run across its vision.
    A flat, partially zippered leather case rested on a metal chair between her and her boyfriend.
    “How y’all doing?” I asked.
    Their smiles were self-indulgent rather than warm, their faces suffused by a chemical pleasure that was working in their skin like flame inside tallow. The woman lowered her wrist into her lap and the sunlight fell like a spray of yellow coins on the small red swelling inside her forearm.
    “The officer from the set,” the man said.
    “It is,” the woman said, leaning sideways in her chair to see behind me. “Is that blond lady here? The one with the blackjack. I mean that guy’s head. Yuck.”
    “We’re not in trouble, are we?” the man said. He smiled. The gap in his front teeth was large enough to insert a kitchen match in.
    “You from the U.K.?” I said.
    “Just the accent. I travel on a French passport,” he said, smiling. He removed a pair of dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.
    “Y’all need any medical attention here?”
    “No, not today, I don’t think,” the man said.
    “Sure? Because I can run y’all down to Iberia General. It’s no trouble.”
    “That’s very kind of you, but we’ll pass,” the man said.
    “What’s he talking about?” the woman said.
    “Being helpful, that sort of thing, welcoming us to the neighborhood,” the man said.
    “Hospital?” She scratched her back by rubbing it against her chair. “Did anybody ever tell you you look like Johnny Wadd?”
    “Not really.”
    “He died of AIDS. He was very underrated as an artist. Because he did porno, if that’s what you want to call it.” Then her face went out of focus, as though her own words had presented a question inside herself.
    “Dave, can I see you?” Cisco said softly behind me.
    I left Billy Holtzner’s daughter and the man with the ponytail without saying goodbye. But they never noticed, their heads bent toward each other as they laughed over a private joke.
    Cisco walked with me through the shade trees to my truck. He had slipped on a golf shirt with his gym shorts, and he kept pulling the cloth away from the dampness of his skin.
    “I don’t have choices about what people around me do sometimes,” he said.
    “Choose not to have them here, Cisco.”
    “I work in a bowl of piranhas. You think Billy Holtzner is off the wall? He twists noses. I can introduce you to people who blow heads.”
    “I didn’t have probable cause on your friends. But they shouldn’t take too much for granted.”
    “How many cops on a pad have you covered for? How many times have you seen a guy popped and a throw-down put on his body?”
    “See you, Cisco.”
    “What am I supposed to feel, Dave? Like I just got visited by St. Francis of Assisi? In your ear.”
    I walked to my truck and didn’t look back at him. I heard the woman braying loudly in the back yard.
     
    WHEN I WENT DOWN to the bait shop to open up Monday morning, Cool Breeze Broussard was waiting for me at a spool table, the Cinzano umbrella ruffling over his head. The early sun was dark red through the trunks of the cypresses.
    “It gonna be another hot one,” he said.
    “What’s the haps,