In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

walking toward my truck. The sunlight off the cement by the poolside was blinding. Baby Feet caught up with me. One of his other women dove off the board and splashed water and the smell of chlorine and suntan oil across my back.
          "Hey, I live in a fucking menagerie," Baby Feet said as we went out onto the street. "Don't go walking off from me with your nose bent out of joint. Did I ever treat you with a lack of respect?"
          I got in the truck.
          "Where we going, Feet?" I said.
          "Out by Spanish Lake. Look, I want you to take a message back to the man you work for. I'm not the source of any problems you got around here. The coke you got in this parish has been stepped on so many times it's baby powder. If it was coming from some people I've been associated with in New Orleans, and I'm talking about past associations, you understand, it'd go from your nose to your brain like liquid Drano."
          I headed out toward the old two-lane highway that led to the little settlement of Burke and the lake where Spanish colonists had tried to establish plantations in the eighteenth century and had given Iberia Parish its name.
          "I don't work narcotics, Julie, and I'm not good at passing on bullshit, either. My main concern right now is the girl we found south of town."
          "Oh, yeah? What girl's that?"
          "The murdered girl, Cherry LeBlanc."
          "I don't guess I heard about it."
          I turned and looked at him. He gazed idly out the window at the passing oak trees on the edge of town and a roadside watermelon and strawberry stand.
          "You don't read the local papers?" I said.
          "I been busy. You saying I talk bullshit, Dave?"
          "Put it this way, Feet. If you've got something to tell the sheriff, do it yourself."
          He pinched his nose, then blew air through it.
          "We used to be friends, Dave. I even maybe did you a little favor once. So I'm going to line it out for you and any of the locals who want to clean the wax out of their ears. The oil business is still in the toilet and your town's flat-ass broke. Frankly, in my opinion, it deserves anything that happens to it. But me and all those people you see back on that lake—" He pointed out the window. Through a pecan orchard, silhouetted against the light winking off the water, I could see cameras mounted on booms and actors in Confederate uniforms toiling through the shallows in retreat from imaginary federal troops. "We're going to leave around ten million dollars in Lafayette and Iberia Parish. They don't like the name Balboni around here, tell them we can move the whole fucking operation over to Mississippi. See how that floats with some of those coonass jackoffs in the Chamber of Commerce."
          "You're telling me you're in the movie business?"
          "Coproducer with Michael Goldman. What do you think of that?"
          I turned into the dirt road that led through the pecan trees to the lake.
          "I'm sure everyone wishes you success, Julie."
          "I'm going to make a baseball movie next. You want a part in it?" He smiled at me.
          "I don't think I'd be up to it."
          "Hey, Dave, don't get me wrong." He was grinning broadly now. "But my main actor sees dead people out in the mist, his punch is usually ripped by nine A.M. on weed or whites, and Mikey's got peptic ulcers and some kind of obsession with the Holocaust. Dave, I ain't shitting you, I mean this sincerely, with no offense, with your record, you could fit right in."
          I stopped the truck by a small wood-frame security office. A wiry man in a khaki uniform and a bill cap, with a white scar like a chicken's foot on his throat, approached my window.
          "We'll see you, Feet," I said.
          "You don't want to look around?"
          "Adios, partner," I said, waited for him to close the door, then turned around in the weeds