Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

Just as soon as I can get six aspirins down and a double shot of Jack Daniel’s.”
    “You’re going to the Valley!” Verisa said. Her head turned sharply at me.
    “I got a letter from a Mexican fellow I was in Korea with. He got involved in some trouble with this farm labor union, and he’s in the county jail waiting to go up to prison on a five-year sentence.”
    “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she said.
    “Ride back home with Bailey or take a flight. You don’t like to drive with me, anyway.”
    “So I’m left with the pleasant experience of explaining the condition of the room to the management. Is that it?” she said. “I imagine that by this time the cleaning woman has run down the hall in hysterics.”
    “Ignore them. We didn’t do the damage. They know what to expect when they contract for a convention. Particularly when it’s composed of lunatics.”
    “It’s lovely of you to leave me with these things.”
    “All right. I’ll talk with the manager on the way out. I’ll drip a few drops of blood on his desk, talk with him cordially, and then I’ll tell him to go to hell.”
    “You do what you want, Hack,” she said. “Get drunk for a week in the Valley, go across the border and find a sweet two-dollar girl, indulge all your disgusting obsessions.”
    She turned the car into the hotel drive, and a doorman stepped out to the edge of the walk under the canopy. I rubbed the dampness of the towel over my face.
    “I have to go see this man,” I said. “He was a good friend to me when I went on the line. I was so goddamned scared I couldn’t paste a Band-Aid on a scratch.”
    “Just don’t talk about it,” she said. “Drive down the road and forget anything else. That’s the way you do things best.”
    “Listen a minute. I don’t enjoy driving three hundred miles in one-hundred-degree heat with a hangover and a bloody nose. But this man has five years hard time to do because of a scuffle on a picket line. He doesn’t have a goddamn cent and he can’t get a white lawyer to file an appeal for him. Next week he’ll be chopping cotton on the prison farm and there won’t be a thing I can do for him.”
    “We can call the A.C.L.U. You don’t have to go down there today,” Bailey said.
    “No, you go on, Hack,” she said. “It would be too terrible for you to live through one day of putting things together without beginning another adventure.”
    “Okay, piss on it,” I said. “I’ll catch air in a few minutes, and you can go back to the ranch and serve cocktails to the D.A.R. Then next week we can take a trip to Walter Reed and shake hands with the basket cases. A wartime V.A. ward should be included on all bus tours. You can meet the dummies in their wheelchairs and the guys without human faces. It’s quite an experience.”
    Bailey lit his pipe in the backseat and Verisa’s eyes were brilliant with anger as the doorman stepped around the front of the car. I lowered the window and dumped the cracked ice in the towel onto the concrete.
    People stared at me in the lobby as I walked toward the elevator with the towel under my nose. I still wore my tennis shorts and canvas shoes, with a sports coat over my blood-streaked polo shirt. Verisa and Bailey walked on each side of me as impervious as granite. Upstairs, I showered and changed into a pair of cream slacks and a soft, maroon shirt, ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, and ate a half- dozen aspirins in the bathroom. I could hear Verisa making reservations on an afternoon flight to San Antonio. I looked in the mirror at my swollen nose, a slightly puffed upper lip, and the white discoloration in my face, and I decided to leave the whiskey doubleheaders to Grover Alexander or some other better left-hander than I. A bellboy brought the bottle; I took one drink out of it and closed the suitcase. I started to speak to Verisa, but she put a cigarette in her mouth and looked out through the smashed French