Read Online Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page A

stopped wearing, a yellow shirt tied across her middle, and yellow tennis shoes. She touched the raindrops out of her eyes with her fingers and glanced around the restaurant until she saw the sign over the women’s room. She walked right past my table, her damp wrist almost brushing my shoulder, and I tried not to look at her back, her thighs, the way her hips creased and her posterior moved when she walked; but that kind of resolution and dignity seemed to be more and more wanting in my life.

    I paid my check, put on my rain hat, draped my seersucker coat over my arm, and ran past the idling Honda to my truck. Just as I started the engine the girl ran from the restaurant and got into the Honda with a package of cigarettes in her hand. The driver backed around so that he was only ten feet from my cab and rolled his window down.

    I felt my mouth drop open. I stared dumbfounded at the boiled pigskin face, the stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose up through one eyebrow, the sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, the big shoulders that made his shirt look as though it were about to rip.

    Cletus Purcel.

    He grinned and winked at me.

    “What’s happening, Streak?” he said into the rain, then rolled up the window, and splashed out onto Pinhook Road.

    My old homicide partner from the First District in the French Quarter. Bust ‘em or smoke ‘em, he used to say. Bury your fist in their stomachs, leave them puking on their knees, click off their light switch with a slapjack if they still want to play.

    He had hated the pimps, the Nicaraguan and Colombian dealers, the outlaw bikers, the dirty-movie operators, the contract killers jl the mob brought in from Miami, and if left alone with him, they would gladly cut any deal they could get from the prosecutor’s office.

    But with time he became everything that he despised. He took freebies from whores, borrowed money from shylocks, fought the shakes every morning with cigarettes, aspirin, and speed, and finally took ten thousand dollars to blow away a potential government witness in a hog lot.

    Then he had cleaned out his and his wife’s bank account, roared the wrong way down a one-way street into the New Orleans airport, bounced over a concrete island, and abandoned his car with both doors open in front of the main entrance. He just made the flight to Guatemala.

    A month later I received a card from him that had been postmarked in Honduras.

    Dear Streak,

    Greetings from Bongo-Bongo Land. I’d like to tell you I’m off the sauce and working for the Maryknolls. I’m not. Guess what skill is in big demand down here? A guy that can run through the manual of arms is an automatic captain. They’re all kids. Somebody with a case of Clearasil could take the whole country.

    See you in the next incarnation,

    C.

    P.S. If you run into Lois, tell her I’m sorry for ripping her off. I left my toothbrush in the bathroom. I want her to have it.

    I watched his taillights glimmer and fade in the rain. As far as I knew, there was still a warrant on him. What was Cletus doing back in the States? And in Lafayette?

    But he was somebody else’s charge now, not mine. So good luck, partner, I thought. Whatever you’re operating on, I hope it’s as pure and clean as white gas and bears you aloft over the places where the carrion bircis clatter.

    I drove across the street and parked in front of the Star Drilling Company’s regional office. Confronting them probably seems a foolish thing to do, particularly in the capacity of a citizen rather than that of a law officer. But my experience as a policeman investigating white-collar criminals always led me to the same conclusion about them: they might envision a time when they’ll have to deal with the law, but in their minds the problem will be handled by attorneys, in a court proceeding that becomes almost a gentlemen’s abstraction. They tremble with both outrage and fear when a plainclothes cop, perhaps with an IQ