The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

But the events that followed were different, even for Clete.
    He felt a whoosh of heat on his skin as though someone had opened a furnace door next to his head. His heart was as hard and big as a muskmelon in his chest, hammering against his ribs, bursting with adrenaline, his strength almost superhuman. One hand was hooked through the back of Stanga’s belt, the other wrapped deep into the man’s neck. He drove Stanga’s head and face again and again into the tree trunk while people in the background screamed. Stanga’s body felt as light as a scarecrow’s in Clete’s hands, the arms flopping like rags with each blow.
    When Clete dropped him to the ground, Stanga was still conscious, his face trembling with shock, his nose streaming blood, the split on his forehead ridged up like an orange starfish.
    The images and sounds Clete saw and heard as he stumbled up the slope toward the street would remain with him for the rest of his life. The witnesses who had gathered on the slope had been transformed into a group of villagers in an Asian country that no one talked about anymore. Their throats were filled with lamentation and pleas for mercy, their eyes wide with terror, their fingers knitted desperately in front of them.
    Clete could smell a stench like stagnant water and duck shit and inflammable liquid bursting alight and straw and animal hair burning. He wiped Stanga’s spittle off his face with his sleeve and pushed through the crowd, stumbling off balance, a man out of place and time, with no moat or castle to which he could return.

CHAPTER
3
    I GOT THE PHONE call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department at 11:46 P.M . Clete had been barreling down the two-lane toward the Iberia Parish line when he hit the roadblock. Rather than think it through and let the situation decompress and play out of its own accord, he swung the Caddy onto a dirt road and tried to escape through a sugarcane field. The upshot was a blown tire, forty feet of barbed-wire fence tangled under his car frame, and a half-dozen Brahmas headed for Texas. The deputy who had called me was a fellow member of A.A. whom I saw occasionally at different meetings in the area. Her name was Emma Poche, and, like me, she had once been with the NOPD and had left the department under the same circumstances, ninety proof and trailing clouds of odium. Even today I had trepidation about Emma and believed she was perhaps one of those driven creatures who, regardless of 12-step membership, lived one drink and one click away from the Big Exit.
    She lowered her voice and told me she was subbing as a night screw and that her call was unauthorized.
    “I can’t understand you. Clete’s drunk?” I said.
    “Who knows?” she replied.
    “Say again?”
    “He doesn’t act drunk.”
    “What’s all that noise in the background?”
    “Four deputies trying to move him from the tank into an isolation cell.”
    The kitchen was dark, the moon high over the park on the far side of the bayou, the trees in the backyard full of light and shadows. I was tired and didn’t want to be pulled into another one of Clete’s escapades. “Tell those guys to leave him alone. He’ll settle down. He has cycles, kind of like an elephant in must.”
    “That pimp from New Iberia, what’s his name?”
    “Herman Stanga?”
    “Purcel tore him up at a bar in the black district. And I mean tore him up proper. The pimp’s lawyer is down here now. He wants your friend charged with felony assault.”
    “Stanga must have done something. Clete wouldn’t attack someone without provocation, particularly a lowlife like Stanga.”
    “He just poleaxed a deputy. You’d better get your ass up here, Dave.”
    I dressed and drove up the bayou ten miles to the lockup in the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Annex, next to the white-columned courthouse that had been built on the town square in the 1850s. Emma Poche met me at the door and walked me down to the holding cell where Clete had been