DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

trees along the train tracks. There were two telephone messages from Theodosha Flannigan in my mailbox. I dropped them both in the dispatcher's wastebasket.
    At 4:00 P.M." in the middle of a downpour, I saw her black Lexus pull to the curb in front of the courthouse. She popped open an umbrella and raced for the front of the building, water splashing on her calves and the bottom of her pink skirt.
    I went out into the corridor to meet her, feigning a confidence that masked my desire to avoid seeing her again.
    "Did you get my invitation?" she said, her face and hair bright with rain.
    "Yes, thanks for sending it," I replied.
    "I called earlier. A couple of times."
    Two deputies at the water cooler were looking at us, their eyes traveling the length of her figure.
    "Come on in the office, Theo. It's been a little busy today," I said.
    I closed the door behind us. "If you can't come Saturday, I understand. I need to talk to you about something else, though," she said.
    "Oh?"
    "I've got a problem. It comes in bottles. Not just booze. Six months ago I started using again. My psychiatrist gave me the keys to the candy store," she said.
    Her voice was wired, the whites of her eyes threaded with tiny veins. She let out a breath in a ragged sigh. Her breath smelled like whiskey and mint leaves, and not from the previous night. "Can I sit down?" she asked.
    "Yes, I'm sorry. Please," I said, and looked over my shoulder at Helen Soileau passing in the corridor.
    "Dave, I have little men with drills and saws working in my head all day. Sometimes in the middle of the night, too," Theodosha said.
    "There's a meeting tonight at Solomon House, across from old New Iberia High," I said.
    "I've been in treatment twice. I was in analysis for seven years. I get a year of sobriety, then things start happening in my head again. My most recent psychiatrist shot himself last week. In Lafayette, in Girard Park, while his kids were playing on the swings. I keep thinking I had something to do with it."
    "Where's Merchie in all this?"
    "He makes excuses for me. He doesn't complain. I couldn't ask for more. You know, he's not entirely normal himself." She took a handkerchief from her purse and blotted the moisture from her eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing here. Merchie's bothered because you think he's dumping oil waste around poor people's homes. He looks up to you. Can't you come out to Fox Run Saturday?"
    "I'm kind of jammed up these days."
    "How long were you drunk?"
    "Fifteen years, more or less."
    "You didn't want to drink when your wife died?"
    "No," I said, my eyes leaving hers.
    "I don't know how anybody stays sober. I feel dirty all over."
    "Why?"
    "Who cares? Some people are born messed up," she said. "I'm sorry for coming in here like this. I'm going to find a dark, hermetically sealed, air-conditioned lounge and dissolve myself inside a vodka collins."
    "Some people just ride out the hangover. Today can be the first inning in a new ballgame."
    "Good try," she said, rising from her chair.
    I thought she was about to leave. Instead, she fixed her gaze on me, waiting. Her hair had the black-purplish sheen of silk, the tips damp and curled around her throat.
    "Is there something else?" I asked.
    "What about Saturday?" Her face softened as she waited for an answer.
    Chapte
    4.
    That evening, at twilight, a Buick carrying three teenage girls roared around a curve on Loreauville Road, passed a truck, caromed off a roadside mailbox, then righted itself and slowed behind a school bus as someone in the backseat flung a box of fast-food trash and plastic cups and straws out the window. The truck driver, a religious man who kept a holy medal suspended from a tiny chain on his rearview mirror, would say later he thought the girls had settled down and would probably follow the church bus at a reasonable speed into Loreauville, five miles up Bayou Teche.
    Instead, the driver crossed the double-yellow stripe again, into oncoming traffic, then tried to cut