The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell Read Free Book Online

ice, near a door marked MEN that was propped open by a wastebasket that dribbled tan wads of paper, Shade found himself feeling strangely dumb. He was beginning to absorb the implications of the murder of Alvin Rankin. There would be gentle prods from the mount on this case. Spurs to the butt, heat and leverage, necessary doors overtly slammed.
    When he passed the duty desk Shade mumbled an unfocused glob of words to the man who occupied it. He was entering the battered green door of the squad room when his name was called.
    “What?” he asked the duty officer.
    “Blanchette with you?”
    “My man is parking the car,” Shade said, then started through the swinging green door.
    “Hey, Shade. Hold it. The two of you are supposed to go directlyto Mayor Crawford’s place. Captain said to send you right over—no coffee, no squats in the library. Straight over.”
    “Did he tell you to call me Shade, too?”
    “What? What’s with you?”
    Something in the man’s tone had sounded like a hidden insult, but now Shade felt petty.
    “Nothin’,” he said. He looked down the long, glazed hall and smiled sardonically. “It’s just that some aspects of my adult life disappoint the ‘eternal boy’ in me.”
    “Hunh,” said the duty officer. “And here I was just thinkin’ you were an asshole.”
    “Now that,” Shade said as he stepped down the hall, “is another of the ‘eternal boy’s’ major concerns, if you can believe it.”
    The officer sat down and swung his feet to the desktop.
    “I probably could,” he said, “but I think I’ll pass.”
    Blanchette leaned on Shade’s arm, a pantomime of crumbling health, and swatted at his thighs in a hit-and-run massage.
    “Just left it,” he wheezed. “Parked it by the pole, there, you know. The pole in the corner of the lot. I think it’s the quarter-mile mark or something. Couldn’t Bonehead have radioed?”
    Shade pulled from beneath Blanchette’s weight.
    “They could’ve.”
    “We need a union, you ask me. The man thinks he can dispense with technology out of callous disregard for our health. Unions make ’em pay extra, they want to do that.”
    This time Shade insisted on driving. The streets had evolved through the nighttime cycle, from passageways to minor entertainments and basic sins, rampant with sad revelers and charades of Dubble Bubble bliss, into the emptiness of post-party, the asphalt tickled only by taxis, patrol cars, thieves, and swing-shift nurses. But now the people who gave the bulge to the city’s withering bicep had begun to commute with their hands rubbing at the spot behind their eyeballs while splashing a Thermos of scalding joe toward the seat where the cup sat, heading forMcDonnell-Douglas, the Salter-Winn Shoe Factory, the dairy, and, again, the hospital. Daylight was only a vague promise in the east, and night had girded itself for a final stand before it welcomed defeat.
    Shade picked his way through the drowsy traffic toward Hawthorne Hills, a stretch of mounds that pimpled the southern edge of town, giving refuge to most of the monied and many of the elected of Saint Bruno.
    A large white house lounged on a hill like a favorite chair on an afterdeck, one leglike section curled over a ribbon of creek and the other leg crooked around a swath of oaks. Shade pulled into the drive.
    Captain Bauer had parked next to the tennis court. Shade parked next to him, and he and Blanchette started toward the door.
    He knew that Mayor Crawford had done many things before he entered politics, but having been smart enough to be born rich beyond fear seemed like the experience most relevant to his subsequent career.
    Their knock was answered by the mayor. He was in slacks and a polo shirt with a cherry half-robe loosely belted. Fit and silver-haired, he looked like the aging stud of a prime-time soap.
    “Come in, officers,” he said. He was wearing his job-description grief, his solemnity working overtime. “How is Alvin’s