The New Iberia Blues_A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501176876
Amazon: 1501176870
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

I GOT THE CALL from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at four-fifteen a.m. “We got two guys fried outside a hot-pillow joint,” he said. “I think it’s your boy, that crazy pissant who was killing people about eighteen months back.”

“Wimple?”

“A security camera in the parking lot of a nightclub caught him. About five-three, propane tanks on his back, looks like he fell in a bag of flour? How many people match that description?”

“He had a flamethrower?”

“Come down if you want. I got to get on it. We cain’t find the night clerk.”

I called Bailey Ribbons and picked her up fifteen minutes later.

• • •

MORE THAN A dozen squad cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were parked at the crime scene, flashers ripping or blinking in the sunrise. The ground and asphalt and motel and nightclub were damp with humidity and partially in shadow, the air the color of a bruise, an odor like old fruit wafting on the breeze. The two victims were in the front seat of a Buick pockmarked with paint blisters, heads on their chests as though they had tired of the show and gone to sleep.

“The drip line from the flamethrower doesn’t go back much more than twenty-five feet,” the sheriff said. He was a huge man, about six and a half feet, over fifty, his stomach still flat. He was originally from Amarillo and once was a Texas Ranger. “If the gas tank had blown, it might have taken that little asswipe with it.”

“I think Smiley Wimple would have liked that,” I said.

“Say again?”

“He would have made a great pilot in the Japanese air force,” I replied.

The sheriff looked into space. He was from another generation. “We found the clerk.”

We followed him to the office. There was a doorway behind the counter. I looked up at the surveillance camera.

“Somebody already dumped it,” the sheriff said. He went through the doorway, then looked back at me. “You coming?”

The living area had a small kitchen and a table and one chair and a small bed. A harsh lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Porn magazines were on the table and stacked on a wall shelf. Both doors of a cabinet under the sink were open. A bare-chested thin man wearing a vinyl vest was inside the cabinet, so packed under the pipes that he was almost a ball. As far as I could tell, there were three entry wounds in his face and one in the throat and one in the mouth. No visible exit wounds.

“The shooter picked up his brass, but I figure it was a twenty-two, maybe hollow points,” the sheriff said. “You reckon this kid was trying to hide?”

Bailey touched a can of Ajax on the floor with her shoe. “No, he was put in there. Wimple wanted to humiliate him. He was probably locked in a small space when he was a child, so he visits the same fear on anyone who mocks him.”

“I’ve got a hooker in the back of my cruiser,” the sheriff said.

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