DR07 - Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

you going to learn that, Dave?'
    Then she walked into the house and let the screen slam behind
her.
     
    I hosed down some boats at the dock,
cleaned off the
telephone-spool tables after the lunch crowd had left, then finally
gave in and used the phone in the bait shop to return Lucinda
Bergeron's call. I was told she had gone home sick for the day, and I
didn't bother to leave my name. Then I called three criminal attorneys
in Lafayette and two in New Orleans. Their fees ran from eighty to one
hundred and fifty dollars an hour, with no guarantees of anything.
    'You all right, Dave?' Alafair said. She sat on a tall stool
behind the cash register, her Houston Astros cap on sideways, her red
tennis shoes swinging above the floor. Her skin was dark brown, her
Indian black hair filled with lights like a raven's wing.
    'Everything's copacetic, little guy,' I said. Through the
screened windows the sun looked like a wobbling yellow flame on the
bayou. I wiped the perspiration off my face with a damp counter towel
and threw the towel in a corner.
    'You worried about money or something?'
    'It's just a temporary thing. Let's have a fried pie, Alf.'
    'Batist is in some kind of trouble, Dave?'
    'A little bit. But we'll get him out of it.' I winked at her,
but the cloud didn't go out of her face. It had been seven years since
I had pulled her from the submerged wreck of an airplane carrying
illegal refugees from El Salvador. She had forgotten her own language
(although she could understand most words in Cajun French without
having been taught them), and she no longer had nightmares about the
day the soldiers came to her village and created an object lesson with
machetes and a pregnant woman in front of the medical clinic; but when
she sensed difficulty or discord of any kind in our home, her brown
eyes would immediately become troubled and focus on some dark concern
inside herself, as though she were about to witness the re-creation of
a terrible image that had been waiting patiently to come aborning again.
    'You have to trust me when I tell you not to worry about
things, Squanto,' I said.
    Then she surprised me.
    'Dave, do you think you should be calling me all those baby
names? I'm twelve years old.'
    'I'm sorry, Alf.'
    'It's all right. Some people just might not understand. They
might think it's dumb or that you're treating me like a little kid or
something.'
    'Well, I won't do it anymore. How's that?'
    'Don't worry about it. I just thought I ought to tell you.'
    'Okay, Alf. Thanks for letting me know.'
    She punched around on the keys of the cash register while
blowing her breath up into her bangs. Then I saw her eyes go past me
and focus somewhere out on the dock.
    'Dave, there's a black woman out there with a gas can. Dave,
she's got a pistol in her back pocket.'
    I turned and looked out into the shade of the canvas awning
that covered the dock. It was Lucinda Bergeron, in a pair of faded
Levi's that barely clung to her thin hips, Adidas tennis shoes, and a
white, sweat-streaked T-shirt with the purple-and-gold head of Mike the
Tiger on it. She wore her badge clipped on her beltless waistband; a
chrome snub-nosed revolver in an abbreviated leather holster protruded
from her back pocket.
    Her face was filmed and gray, and she wiped at her eyes with
one sleeve before she came through the screen door.
    'Are you okay?' I said.
    'May I use your rest room?' she said.
    'Sure, it's right behind the coolers,' I said, and pointed
toward the rear of the shop.
    A moment later I heard the toilet flush and water running,
then she came back out, breathing through her mouth, a crumpled wet
paper towel in one hand.
    'Do you sell mouthwash or mints?' she said.
    I put a roll of Life Savers on top of the counter. Then I
opened up a can of Coca-Cola and set it in front of her.
    'It settles the stomach,' I said.
    'I've got to get something straight with you.'
    'How's that?'
    She drank out of the Coke can. Her face looked dusty and wan,
her eyes barely