Read Online Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

Broussard
     
    COOL BREEZE LAY ON a row of air cushions inside the cabin cruiser, his arm in a sling, his face sweating. When he had finished speaking, Megan looked at me sadly, her eyes prescient with the knowledge that a man’s best explanation for his life can be one that will never satisfy him or anybody else.
    “Y’all ain’t gonna say nothing?” he asked.
    “Let go of it, partner,” I said.
    “The Man always got the answer,” he replied.
    “Your daddy is an honest and decent person. If you’re still ashamed of him because he shined shoes, yeah, I think that’s a problem, Breeze,” I said.
    ” Dave …“Megan said.
    “Give it a break, Megan,” I said.
    “No… Behind us. The G sent us an escort,” she said.
    I turned and looked back through the hatch at our wake. Coming hard right up the trough was a large powerboat, its enamel-white bow painted with the blue-and-red insignia of the United States Coast Guard. A helicopter dipped out of the sky behind the Coast Guard boat, yawing, its downdraft hammering the water.
    I entered a channel that led to the boat ramp where my truck and boat trailer were parked. The helicopter swept past us and landed in the shell parking area below the levee. The right-hand door opened and the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier stepped out and walked toward us while the helicopter’s blades were still spinning.
    I waded through the shallows onto the concrete ramp.
    “You’re out of your jurisdiction, so I’m going to save you a lot of paperwork,” she said.
    “Oh?”
    “We’re taking Mr. William Broussard into our custody. Interstate transportation of stolen property. You want to argue about it, we can talk about interference with a federal law officer in the performance of her duty.”
    Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder on Megan, who stood on the bow of my boat, her hair blowing under her straw hat.
    “You take one picture out here and I’ll have you in handcuffs,” Adrien Glazier said.
    “Broussard’s been snakebit. He needs to be in a hospital,” I said.
    But she wasn’t listening. She and Megan stared at each other with the bright and intimate recognition of old adversaries who might have come aborning from another time.
----

FIVE
    THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCHTIME Clete Purcel picked me up at the office in the chartreuse Cadillac convertible that he had bought from a member of the Giacano crime family in New Orleans, a third-generation miscreant by the name of Stevie Gee who decided to spot-weld a leak in the gas tank but got drunk first and forgot to fill the tank with water before he fired up the welding machine. The scorch marks had faded now and looked like smoky gray tentacles on the back fenders.
    The back seat was loaded with fishing rods, a tackle box that was three feet long, an ice chest, air cushions, crushed beer cans, life preservers, crab traps, a hoop net that had been ground up in a boat propeller, and a tangled trot line whose hooks were ringed with dried smelt.
    Clete wore baggy white pants without a shirt and a powder-blue porkpie hat, and his skin looked bronzed and oily in the sun. He had been the best cop I ever knew until his career went south, literally, all the way to Central America, because of marriage trouble, pills, booze, hookers, indebtedness to shylocks, and finally a murder warrant that his fellow officers barely missed serving on him at the New Orleans airport.
    I went inside Victor’s on Main Street for a take-out order, then we crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove past the live oaks on the lawn of the gray and boarded-up buildings that used to be Mount Carmel Academy, then through the residential section into City Park. We sat at a picnic table under a tree, not far from the swimming pool, where children were cannonballing off the diving board. The sun had gone behind the clouds and rain rings appeared soundlessly on the bayou’s surface, like bream rising to feed.
    “That execution in St. Mary Parish… the