Sunset Limited Read Free

had parked her car under the trees in my drive.
    Up on the dock, Clete poured the crushed ice and canned drinks and speckled trout out of the cooler. The trout looked stiff and cold on the board planks.
    “You ever hear anything about prisoners being gagged and cuffed to chairs in the Iberia Parish Prison?” I asked.
    “That’s what that was about? Maybe she ought to check out what those guys did to get in there.”
    “She said you were beautiful.”
    “She did?” He looked down the road where her car was disappearing under the canopy of oaks that grew along the bayou. Then he cracked a Budweiser and flipped me a can of diet Dr Pepper. The scar over his left eyebrow flattened against his skull when he grinned.
     
    THE TURNKEY HAD BEEN a brig chaser in the Marine Corps and still wore his hair buzzed into the scalp and shaved in a razor-neat line on the back of his neck. His body was lean and braided with muscle, his walk as measured and erect as if he were on a parade ground. He unlocked the cell at the far end of the corridor, hooked up Willie Cool Breeze Broussard in waist and leg manacles, and escorted him with one hand to the door of the interview room, where I waited.
    “Think he’s going to run on you, Top?” I said.
    “He runs at the mouth, that’s what he does.”
    The turnkey closed the door behind us. Cool Breeze looked like two hundred pounds of soft black chocolate poured inside jailhouse denims. His head was bald, lacquered with wax, shiny as horn, his eyes drooping at the corners like a prizefighter’s. It was hard to believe he was a second-story man and four-time loser.
    “If they’re jamming you up, Cool Breeze, it’s not on your sheet,” I said.
    “What you call Isolation?”
    “The screw says you asked for lockdown.”
    His wrists were immobilized by the cuffs attached to the chain around his waist. He shifted in his chair and looked sideways at the door.
    “I was on Camp J up at Angola. It’s worse in here. A hack made a kid blow him at gunpoint,” he said.
    “I don’t want to offend you, Breeze, but this isn’t your style.”
    “What ain’t?”
    “You’re not one to rat out anybody, not even a bad screw.”
    His eyes shifted back and forth inside his face. He rubbed his nose on his shoulder.
    “I’m down on this VCR beef. A truckload of them. What makes it double bad is I boosted the load from a Giacano warehouse in Lake Charles. I need to get some distance between me and my problems, maybe like in the Islands, know what I saying?”
    “Sounds reasonable.”
    “No, you don’t get it. The Giacanos are tied into some guys in New York City making dubs of movies, maybe a hundred t’ousand of them a week. So they buy lots of VCRs, cut-rate prices, Cool Breeze Midnight Supply Service, you wit’ me?”
    “You’ve been selling the Giacanos their own equipment? You’re establishing new standards, Breeze.”
    He smiled slightly, but the peculiar downward slope of his eyes gave his expression a melancholy cast, like a bloodhound’s. He shook his head.
    “You still don’t see it, Robicheaux. None of these guys are that smart. They started making dubs of them kung fu movies from Hong Kong. The money behind them kung fus comes from some very bad guys. You heard of the Triads?”
    “We’re talking about China White?”
    “That’s how it gets washed, my man.”
    I took out my business card and wrote my home number and the number of the bait shop on the back. I leaned across the table and slipped it in his shirt pocket. “Watch your butt in here, Breeze, particularly that ex-jarhead.”
    “Meet the jailer. It’s easy to catch him after five. He like to work late, when they ain’t no visitors around.”
     
    MEGAN’S BROTHER CISCO OWNED a home up Bayou Teche, just south of Loreauville. It was built in the style of the West Indies, one story and rambling, shaded by oaks, with a wide, elevated gallery, green, ventilated window shutters, and fern baskets hanging from the