DR10 - Sunset Limited Read Free Page B

But because of the fading light, or perhaps
the nature of their deed, their aim was bad.
    Both victims tried to rise from their knees, their bodies
convulsing simultaneously from the impact of the rounds.
    The witness said, "Their guns just kept popping. It looked
like somebody was blowing chunks out of a watermelon."
    After it was over, smoke drifted out over the water and the
shooter in the Panama hat took close-up flash pictures with a Polaroid
camera.
     
    "THE WITNESS USED A pair of
binoculars. He says the guy in the
green uniform had our department patch on his sleeve," the sheriff said.
    "White rogue cops avenging the rape of a black girl?"
    "Look, get that FBI agent out of here, will you?"
    He looked at the question in my face.
    "She's got a broom up her ass." He rubbed his fingers across
his mouth. "Did I say that? I'm going to go back to the laundry
business. A bad day used to be washing somebody's golf socks," he said.
     
    I LOOKED THROUGH MY office window at
the FBI agent named
Adrien Glazier. She sat with her legs crossed, her back to me, in a
powder-blue suit and white blouse, writing on a legal pad. Her
handwriting was filled with severe slants and slashes, with points in
the letters that reminded me of incisor teeth.
    When I opened the door she looked at me with ice-blue eyes
that could have been taken out of a Viking's face.
    "I visited William Broussard last night. He seems to think
you're going to get him out of the parish prison," she said.
    "Cool Breeze? He knows better than that."
    "Does he?"
    I waited. Her hair was ash-blond, wispy and broken on the
ends, her face big-boned and adversarial. She was one of those you
instinctively know have a carefully nursed reservoir of anger they draw
upon as needed, in the same way others make use of daily prayer. My
stare broke.
    "Sorry. Is that a question?" I said.
    "You don't have any business indicating to this man you can
make deals for him," she said.
    I sat down behind my desk and glanced out the window, wishing
I could escape back into the coolness of the morning, the streets that
were sprinkled with rain, the palm fronds lifting and clattering in the
wind.
    I picked up a stray paper clip and dropped it in my desk
drawer and closed the drawer. Her eyes never left my face or relented
in their accusation.
    "What if the prosecutor's office does cut him loose? What's it
to you?" I said.
    "You're interfering in a federal investigation. Evidently you
have a reputation for it."
    "I think the truth is you want his
cojones
in a vise. You'll arrange some slack for him after he rats out some
guys you can't make a case against."
    She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. She cocked her
elbow on my desk and let one finger droop forward at my face.
    "Megan Flynn is an opportunistic bitch. What she didn't get on
her back, she got through posing as the Joan of Arc of oppressed
people. You let her and her brother jerk your pud, then you're dumber
than the people in my office say you are," she said.
    "This has to be a put-on."
    She pulled a manila folder out from under her legal pad and
dropped it on my desk blotter.
    "Those photos are of a guy named Swede Boxleiter. They were
taken in the yard at the Colorado state pen in Canon City. What they
don't show is the murder he committed in broad daylight with a camera
following him around the yard. That's how good he is," she said.
    His head and face were like those of a misshaped Marxist
intellectual, the yellow hair close-cropped on the scalp, the forehead
and brainpan too large, the cheeks tapering away to a mouth that was so
small it looked obscene. He wore granny glasses on a chiseled nose, and
a rotted and torn weight lifter's shirt on a torso that rippled with
cartilage.
    The shots had been taken from an upper story or guard tower
with a zoom lens. They showed him moving through the clusters of
convicts in the yard, faces turning toward him the way bait fish
reflect light when a barracuda swims toward their perimeter. A fat