DR08 - Burning Angel Read Online Free Page B

in the cane fields, and today a ball peen hammer would bounce off its exterior and ring in your palm. Down the tree-dotted slope in front of the house were the bayou and dock and bait shop that I operated with an elderly black man named Batist, and on the far side of the bayou was the swamp, filled with gum and willow trees and dead cypress that turned bloodred in the setting sun. Alafair was almost fourteen now, far removed from the little Salva-doran girl whose bones had seemed as brittle and hollow as a bird's when I pulled her from a submerged plane out on the salt; nor was she any longer the round, hard-bodied Americanized child who read Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books and wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a Baby Orca T-shirt and red and white tennis shoes embossed with LEFT and RIGHT on each rubber toe. It seemed that one day she had simply stepped across a line, and the baby fat was gone, and her hips and young breasts had taken on the shape of a woman's. I still remember the morning, with a pang of the heart, when she asked that her father please not call her ”little guy“ and ”Baby Squanto“ anymore. She wore her hair in bangs, but it grew to her shoulders now and was black and thick with a light chestnut shine in it. She snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, and peeled the shell off the meat with her thumbnail. ”What's that book you were reading on the gallery, Dave?“ she asked. ”A diary of sorts.“
    ”Whose is it?“
    ”A guy named Sonny Boy.“
    ”That's a grown man's name?“ she asked. ”Marsallus?“ Bootsie said. She stopped eating. Her hair was the color of honey, and she had brushed it up in swirls and pinned it on her head. ”What are you doing with something of his?“
    ”I ran into him on Canal.“
    ”He's back in New Orleans? Does he have a death wish?“
    ”If he does, someone else may have paid the price for it.“ I saw the question in her eyes. ”The woman who was killed up on the St. Martin line,“ I said. ”I think she was Sonny's girlfriend.“ She bit down softly on the corner of her lip. ”He's trying to involve you in something, isn't he?“
    ”Maybe.“
    ”Not maybe. I knew him before you did, Dave. He's a manipulator.“
    ”I never figured him out, I guess. Let's go into town and get some ice cream,“
    I said. ”Don't let Sonny job you, Streak,“ she said. I didn't want to argue with Bootsie's knowledge of the New Orleans mob. After she married her previous husband, she had found out he kept the books for the Giacano family and owned half of a vending machine company with them. She also discovered, when he and his mistress were shot gunned to death in the parking lot of Hialeah race track, that he had mortgaged her home on Camp Street, which she had brought free and clear to the marriage. I didn't want to talk to Bootsie in front of Alafair about the contents of Sonny's notebook, either. Much of it made little sense to me-names that I didn't recognize, mention of a telephone tree, allusions to weapons drops and mules flying dope under U.S. coastal radar. In fact, the concern, the place names, seemed a decade out-of-date, the stuff of congressional inquiry during the mid-Reagan era. But many of the entries were physical descriptions of events that were not characterized by ideology or after-the-fact considerations about legality or illegality: The inside of the jail is cool and dark and smells of stone and stagnant water. The man in the corner says he's from Texas but speaks no English. He pried the heels off his boots with a fork and gave the guards seventy American dollars. Through the bars I can see the helicopters going in low across the canopy toward the village on the hillside, firing rockets all the way. I think the guards are going to shoot the man in the corner tomorrow morning. He keeps telling anyone who will listen he's only a marijuanista .. . We found six cane cutters with their thumbs wired