Read Online DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page B

lingered on
the scratch Karyn had put on my cheek.
          "I think it's a
lie, too," he said. He dropped the clipboard inside the drawer and closed
it. "But I have to conduct an internal investigation just the same."
          "I go on the
desk?"
          "No. I'm not
going to have my department manipulated for someone's political interests, and
that's what this is about. You're getting too close to something in this Aaron
Crown business. But you stay away from her."
          I still had my
morning mail in my hand. On the top was a pink memo slip with a message from
Bootsie, asking me to meet her for lunch.
          "How public is
this going to get?" I asked.
          "My feeling is
she doesn't intend it to be public. Aside from the fact I know you, that was
the main reason I didn't believe her. Her whole account is calculated to be
vague. Her charges don't require her to offer physical evidence—vaginal smears,
pubic hair, that kind of stuff. This is meant as a warning from the LaRose
family. If I have to, I'll carry this back to them on a dung fork, podna."
          He folded his hands
on the desk, his face suffused with the ruddy glow of his hypertension.
          Way to go, skipper, I
thought.
     
     
    M ost
people in prison deserve to be there. Old-time recidivists who are down on a bad
beef will usually admit they're guilty of other crimes, perhaps much worse ones
than the crimes they're down for.
          There're exceptions,
but not many. So their burden is of their own creation. But it is never an easy
one, no matter how modern the facility or how vituperative the rhetoric about
country club jails.
          You're a
nineteen-year-old fish, uneducated, frightened, with an IQ of around 100. At
the reception center you rebuff a trusty wolf who works in records and wants to
introduce you to jailhouse romance, so the trusty makes sure you go up the road
with a bad jacket (the word is out, you snitched off a solid con and caused him
to lose his good-time).
          You just hit main pop
and you're already jammed up, worried about the shank in the chow line, the
Molotov cocktail shattered inside your cell, the whispered threat in the
soybean field about the experience awaiting you in the shower that night.
          So you make a
conscious choice to survive and find a benefactor, "an old man," and
become a full-time punk, one step above the yard bitches. You mule blues,
prune-o, and Afghan skunk for the big stripes; inside a metal toolshed that
aches with heat, you participate in the savaging of another fish, who for just
a moment reminds you of someone you used to know.
          Then a day comes when
you think you can get free. You're mainline now, two years down with a jacket
full of goodtime. You hear morning birdsong that you didn't notice before; you
allow your mind to linger on the outside, the face of a girl in a small town, a
job in a piney woods timber mill that smells of rosin and hot oil on a ripsaw,
an ordinary day not governed by fear.
          That's when you tell
your benefactor thanks for all his help. He'll understand. Your next time up
before the board, you've got a real chance of entering the world again. Why
blow it now?
          That night you walk
into the shower by yourself. A man who had never even glanced at you before, a
big stripe, hare-lipped, flat-nosed, his naked torso rife with a raw smell like
a freshly uprooted cypress, clenches your skull in his fingers, draws you into
his breath, squeezes until the cracking sound stops and you hear the words that
he utters with a lover's trembling fondness an inch from your mouth: I'm
gonna take your eyes out with a spoon.
     
     
    I t was late afternoon when the gunbull drove me in his pickup down
to the Mississippi levee, where Aaron Crown, his face as heated as a baked
apple under a snap-brim cap, was harrowing an open field, the tractor's engine
running full bore, grinding the sun-hardened rows into loam,