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

two brothers who got clipped after they raped the black girl? How bad you want the perps?” he said.
    “What do you think?”
    “I see it as another parish’s grief. As a couple of guys who got what they had coming.”
    “The shooters had one of our uniforms.”
    He set down the pork-chop sandwich he was eating and scratched the scar that ran through his left eyebrow.
    “I’m still running down skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. Nig went bail for a couple of chippies who work a regular Murphy game in the Quarter. They’re both junkies, runny noses, scabs on their thighs, mainlining six and seven balloons a day, sound familiar, scared shitless of detoxing in City Prison, except they’re even more scared of their pimp, who’s the guy they have to give up if they’re going to beat the Murphy beef.
    “So they ask Nig if they should go to the prosecutor’s office with this story they got off a couple of Johns who acted like over-the-hill cops. These guys were talking to each other about capping some brothers out in the Basin. One of the chippies asks if they’re talking about black guys. One duffer laughs and says, ‘No, just some boys who should have kept practicing on colored girls and left white bread alone.’”
    “Where are these guys out of?”
    “They said San Antone. But Johns usually lie.”
    “What else do the girls know?”
    “They’re airheads, Dave. The intellectual one reads the shopping guide on the toilet. Besides, they’re not interested in dealing anymore. Their pimp decided to plea out, so they’re off the hook.”
    “Write down their names, will you?”
    He took a piece of folded paper from his pants pocket, with the names of the two women and their addresses already written on it, and set it on the plank table. He started eating again, his green eyes smiling at nothing.
    “Old lesson from the First District, big mon. When somebody wastes a couple of shit bags…” He realized I wasn’t listening, that my gaze was focused over his shoulder on the swimming pool. He turned and stared through the tree trunks, his gaze roving across the swimmers in the pool, the parents who were walking their children by the hand to an instruction class a female lifeguard was putting together in the shallow end. Then his eyes focused on a man who stood between the wire enclosure and the bathhouse.
    The man had a peroxided flattop, a large cranium, like a person with water on the brain, cheekbones that tapered in an inverted triangle to his chin, a small mouth full of teeth. He wore white shoes and pale orange slacks and a beige shirt with the short sleeves rolled in neat cuffs and the collar turned up on the neck. He pumped a blue rubber ball in his right palm.
    “You know that dude?” Clete said.
    “His name’s Swede Boxleiter.”
    “A graduate?”
    “Canon City, Colorado. The FBI showed me some photos of a yard job he did on a guy.”
    “What’s he doing around here?”
    Boxleiter wore shades instead of the granny glasses I had seen in the photos. But there was no doubt about the object of his attention. The children taking swim lessons were lined up along the edge of the pool, their swimsuits clinging wetly to their bodies. Boxleiter snapped the rubber ball off the pavement, ricocheting it against the bathhouse wall, retrieving it back into his palm as though it were attached to a magic string.
    “Excuse me a minute,” I said to Clete.
    I walked through the oaks to the pool. The air smelled of leaves and chlorine and the rain that was sprinkling on the heated cement. I stood two feet behind Boxleiter, who hung on to the wire mesh of the fence with one hand while the other kneaded the rubber ball. The green veins in his forearm were pumped with blood. He chewed gum, and a lump of cartilage expanded and contracted against the bright slickness of his jaw.
    He felt my eyes on the back of his neck.
    “You want something?” he asked.
    “We thought we’d welcome you to town. Have