DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

dock and was chaining up the rental boats for the night. I walked
past the cooler and tapped with one knuckle on the bolted door.
          "We're closing
up, podna. You have to come out," I said.
          He jerked open the
door, his face streaming water. His dark blue
    shirt was unbuttoned, and on his chest I could see the same
scarlet network of lines that was tattooed on his arms. The pupils in his eyes
looked broken, like India ink dropped on green silk.
          "I'd appreciate
your cleaning up the water and paper towels you've left on the floor. Then I'd
like to have a talk with you," I said.
          He didn't answer. I
turned and walked back up front.
          I went behind the
counter and started to stock the candy shelves for tomorrow, then I stopped and
called the dispatcher at the department.
          "I think I've
got a meltdown in the shop. He might have a stolen boat, too," I said.
          "The governor in
town?"
          "Lose the
routine, Wally."
          "You hurt my
feelings . . . You want a cruiser, Dave?"
          I didn't have the
chance to answer. The man in the white straw hat came from behind me, his hand
inserted in the end of his bedroll. I looked at his face and dropped the phone
and fell clattering against the shelves and butane stove as he flung the
bedroll and the sheath loose from the machete and ripped it through the air, an
inch from my chest.
          The honed blade
sliced through the telephone cord and sunk into the counter's hardwood edge. He
leaned over and swung again, the blade whanging off the shelves, dissecting
cartons of worms and dirt, exploding a jar of pickled sausage.
          Batist's coffee pot
was scorched black and boiling on the butane fire. The handle felt like a
heated wire across my bare palm. I threw the coffee, the top, and the grinds in
the man's face, saw the shock in his eyes, his mouth drop open, the pain rise
out of his throat like a broken bubble.
          Then I grabbed the
tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on
his forearm.
          He flung the machete
from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot.
I thought I was home free. I wasn't.
          He hit me harder than
I'd ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your
nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.
          I got to my feet and
tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and
throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white
straw hat had leaped off the dock onto the concrete ramp and
mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the
current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.
          Batist came out of
the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at
me, then at the fleeing man.
          "Batist,
no!" I said.
          Batist and I both
stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of
the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the
darkness.
          I used the phone at
the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The
moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the
south.
          "How come you
ain't want me to stop him, Dave?" Batist said.
          "He's deranged.
I think it's PCP," I said. But he didn't understand. "It's called
angel dust. People get high on it and bust up brick walls with their bare
hands."
          "He knowed who
you was, Dave. He didn't have no interest in coming in till he seen you . . .
This started wit' that old man from the penitentiary."
          "What are you
talking about?"
          "That guard, the
one you call Cap'n, the one probably been killing niggers up at that prison
farm for fifty years. I tole you not to have his kind in our shop. You let