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

in front of the church bus when she realized safe harbor would never again be hers.
    Helen Soileau, four uniformed deputies, two ambulances, and a firetruck were already at the accident scene when I arrived. The girls were still inside the Buick. The telephone pole they had hit was cut in half at the base and the downed wires were hanging in an oak tree. The Buick had slid on its roof farther down the embankment, splintering a white fence before coming to rest by the side of a fish pond, where the gas tank had exploded and burned with heat so intense the water in the pond boiled.
    "You run the tag yet?" I said.
    "It's registered to a physician in Loreauville. The baby-sitter says he and his wife are playing golf. I left a message at the country club," Helen said.
    She wore her shield on a black cord around her neck. The wind shifted, blowing across the barns and pastures of the horse farm where the Buick had burned. But the odor the wind carried was not of horses and alfalfa. Helen held a wadded-up piece of Kleenex to her nose, snuffing, as though she had a cold. Two firemen used the jaws-of-life to pry apart the window on the driver's side of the Buick, then began pulling the remains of the driver out on the grass.
    "The bus driver says the Buick was swinging all over the road?" I asked.
    "Yep, they were having a grand time of it. Life on the bayou in 2002," Helen said.
    The water oaks along the Teche had already lost their leaves and their branches looked skeletal against the flattened, red glow of the sun on the western horizon. A spruce green Lincoln with two people in the front seat approached us from the direction of Loreauville, slowing in the dusk, pulling onto the shoulder. The driver got out, looking over the top of his automobile at the scene taking place by the fish pond, his face stenciled with a sadness that no cop, at least no decent one, ever wishes to deal with.
    I reached through the open window of Helen's cruiser and picked up a pair of polyethylene gloves and a vinyl garbage bag.
    "Where you going?" she said.
    "Litter patrol," I replied.
    I walked back along the road for two hundred yards or so, past a line of cedar trees that bordered another horse farm, then crossed the road to the opposite embankment where a spray of freshly thrown trash bloomed in the grass. I picked up chicken bones, half-eaten dinner rolls, soiled paper napkins, a splattered container of mashed potatoes and gravy, three blue plastic cups, three lids and straws, and broken pieces of a plastic wrap that had been used to seal the lids on the cups.
    There were still grains of ice in the cups, along with the unmistakable smell of sugar, lemon juice, and rum. I found a paper sack and placed the cups and lids in it, then deposited the sack in the garbage bag.
    When I got back to the accident scene, Helen was talking to the father and mother of the girl who had driven the Buick. The father's face was dilated with rage as he pointed his finger at the drivers of both the truck and the church bus, both of whom had said his daughter was speeding and crossing the double-yellow stripe.
    "Maybe you boxed her off, too. Why would she go off the left-hand embankment unless you wouldn't let her back in line? Answer me that, goddammit," he said.
    An ambulance containing the bodies of the. three girls was working its way around the other emergency vehicles, its flashers beating silently against the dusk.
    I dropped the evidence bag in Helen's cruiser and drove home, passing a rural black slum at the four corners, where several cars and pickup trucks were lined up at the service window of a drive-by daiquiri store.
    Early the next morning, when the streets were still empty and the light was gray and streaked with mist in the backyards along the bayou, Fat Sammy Figorelli parked his Cadillac in front of my house, puffed on a cigarette while studying the live oaks and antebellum homes that lined East Main, then walked up on my gallery and began knocking so