DR08 - Burning Angel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

to see into the gum trees, then realized that the machine, a large oblong one with a cab and giant steel tracks, was parked beyond the trees in a field, its dozer blade glinting in the moonlight.
    Bertie's house and the nephew's were dark. When I walked toward the grove I could see where the dozer blade had graded whole roadways through the trees, ripping up root systems, snapping off limbs, slashing pulpy divots out of the trunks, scooping out trenches and spreading the fill out into the cane field, churning and flattening and re grinding the soil and everything in it, until the entire ground area in and around the grove looked like it had been poured into an enormous bag and shaken out at a great height.
    There was no one in sight.
    I walked out onto the edge of the field by the earth mover. The moon was bright above the treetops and the new cane ruffled in the breeze. I picked up handfuls of dirt and sifted them through my fingers, touched the pieces of fractured bone, as tiny and brown as awcient teeth; strips of wood porous with rot and as weightless as balsa; the remains of a high button shoe, mashed flat by the machine's track.
    The wind dropped and the air suddenly smelled of sour mud and humus and dead water beetles. The sky was a dirty black, the clouds like curds of smoke from an oil fire; sweat ran down my face and sides like angry insects. Who had done this, ripped a burial area apart, as though it had no more worth than a subterranean rat's nest?
    I walked back down the dirt lane toward my truck. I saw the white compact car returning down the access road, slowing gradually.
    Suddenly, from a distance of perhaps forty yards, the person in the passenger's seat shined a handheld spotlight at me. The glare was blinding; I could see nothing except a circle of white red-rimmed heat aimed into my eyes. ;
    No gun, no badge, I thought, a sweating late-middle-aged man \
    trapped on a rural road like a deer caught in an automobile's head- i lights.
    “I don't know who you are, but you take that light out of my eyes!” I shouted.
    The car was completely stopped now, the engine idling. I could hear two people, men, talking to each other. Then I realized their concern had shifted from me to someone else. The spotlight went out, leaving my eyes filled with whorls of color, and the car shot forward toward my parked truck, where a man on foot was leaning through the driver's window.
    He bolted down the far side of the railway, his body disappearing like a shadow into weeds and cattails. The white compact bounced over the train embankment, stopped momentarily, and the man in the passenger seat shined the spotlight out into the darkness. I used my T-shirt to wipe my eyes clear and tried to read the license plate, but someone had rubbed mud over the numbers.
    Then the driver scorched a plume of oily dust out of the road and floored the compact back onto the highway.
    I opened the driver's door to my truck. When the interior light flicked on, I saw curled on the seat, like a serpent whose back has been crushed with a car tire, a twisted length of rust-sheathed chain the color of dried blood. I picked it up, felt the delicate shell flake with its own weight against my palms. Attached to one end was a cylindrical iron cuff, hinged open like a mouth gaping in death. I had seen one like it only in a museum. It was a leg iron, the kind used in the transportation and sale of African slaves.
    Chapter 6
    NEXT MORNING was Saturday. The dawn was gray and there were strips of mist in the oak and pecan trees when I walked down the slope to help Batist open up the dock and bait shop. The sun was still below the treeline in the swamp, and the trunks on the far side of the bayou were wet and black in the gloom. You could smell the fecund odor of bluegill and sun perch spawning back in the bays.
    Batist was outside the bait shop, poking a broom handle into the pockets of rainwater that had collected in the canvas awning that extended on guy wires