A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

radios with him?”
    â€œGarrett’s not strong on procedure. Y’all be good. I’ll be right back.”
    I ran through the rain and the flooded lawn, jumped in the pickup truck, and headed up the dirt road toward town. The oak limbs overhead thrashed in the wind, and a bright web of lightning lit the whole sky over the marsh. The rain on my cab was deafening, the windows swimming with water, the surface of the bayou dancing with a muddy light.
    When I pulled into Weldon’s drive, the night was so black and rain-whipped I could barely see his house. I hit my bright lights and drove slowly toward the house in second gear. Leaves were shredding out of the oak trees in front of the porch and cascading across the lawn, and I could hear a boat pitching and knocking loudly against its mooring inside the boathouse on the bayou. Then I saw Garrett’s patrol car parked at an angle by one corner of the house. I flipped on my spotlightand played it over his car, then across the side of the house, the windows and the hedges along the walls, and finally the telephone box that was fastened into the white brick by the back entrance. There was a line of dull silver-green footprints pressed into the lawn from the patrol car to the telephone box.
    Smart man, Garrett, I thought. You know a professional second-story creep always hits the phone box first. But you shouldn’t have gone in by yourself.
    I left my spotlight burning, took a six-battery flashlight from under the seat, pulled back the receiver on my .45, eased a round into the chamber, and stepped out into the rain.
    I stopped in a crouch until I was at the back of the house and past the side windows. The wiring at the bottom of the telephone box had been sliced neatly in half. I looked over my shoulder at the blacktop road, which was empty of cars and glazed with a pool of pink light from a neon bar sign. Where in the hell were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?
    I went up the steps to the back entrance to try the door, but two panes of glass, one by the handle and one by the night chain, had been covered with pipe tape and knocked out of the molding, and the door was open. I eased it back and stepped inside. My flashlight reflected off enamel, brass, and glass surfaces and made rings of yellow-green light all over the kitchen, which was immaculately clean and squared away, but already I could see the disarray that existed deeper in the house.
    â€œGarrett?” I said into the darkness. “It’s Dave Robicheaux.”
    But there was no answer. Outside, I could hear the rain pelting the bamboo that grew along the gravel drive. I moved into the dining room, with the .45 extended in my right hand, and swung the flashlight around the room. All the drawers were pulled out of the cabinets and emptied on the floor, the paintings on the wall were knocked down or askew, and the crystalware had been raked off a shelf and ground into the rug.
    The front rooms were even worse. The divans and antique upholstered chairs were slashed and gutted, a secretary bookcase overturned on its face and its back smashed in, the marble mantelpiece pried out of the wall, an enormous grandfather’s clock shattered into kindling and pieces of glinting brass. A sheet of lightning trembled on the front yard, and in my mind’s eye I saw myself silhouetted against the window just as I heard a foot depress a board in the hardwood floor somewhere behind or above me.
    I clicked off my flashlight and went back through the dining room to the stairway. There was a closed door at the top of it, but I could see a faint glow at the bottom of the jamb. The stairs were carpeted, and I moved as quietly as I could, a step at a time, toward the door and the rim of light at the bottom, my palm sweating on the grips of the .45, my pulse racing in my neck. I turned the doorknob, pushed it lightly with my fingers, and let the door drift back on its hinges.
    The hallway was strewn with sheets, mattress