Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Page A

house, sipping his drink as though I had never been there.
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    THE SUN WAS WHITE in the sky and the brick drive was dappled with light as bright as gold foil. Through the cruiser’s front window I saw Cisco Flynn walk toward me from a trailer, his palms raised for me to stop.
    He leaned down on the window.
    “Take a walk with me. I got to keep my eye on this next scene,” he said.
    “Got to go, Cisco.”
    “It’s about Swede Boxleiter.”
    I turned off the ignition and walked with him to a canvas awning that was suspended over a worktable and a half dozen chairs. Next to the awning was a trailer whose air-conditioning unit dripped with moisture like a block of ice.
    “Swede’s trying to straighten out. I think he’s going to make it this time. But if he’s ever a problem, give me a call,” Cisco said.
    “He’s a mainline recidivist, Cisco. Why are you hooked up with him?”
    “When we were in the state home? I would have been anybody’s chops if it hadn’t been for Swede.”
    “The Feds say he kills people.”
    “The Feds say my sister is a Communist.”
    The door to the trailer opened and a woman stepped out on the small porch. But before she could close the door behind her, a voice shouted out, “Goddamnit, I didn’t say you could leave. Now, you listen, hon. I don’t know if the problem is because your brains are between your legs or because you think you’ve got a cute twat, but the next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you’d better not open your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don’t you ever contradict me in front of other people again.”
    Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless, the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the door.
    I turned to go.
    “There’s a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We’re three million over budget already. That’s other people’s money we’re talking about. They get mad about it,” Cisco said.
    “I remember that first film you made. The one about the migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie.”
    “Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it in a big way.”
    “The guy in that trailer is a shithead.”
    “Aren’t we all?”
    “Your old man wasn’t.”
    I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.
     
    THAT NIGHT, AS BOOTSIE and I prepared to go to bed, dry lightning flickered behind the clouds and the pecan tree outside the window was stiffening in the wind.
    “Why do you think Jack Flynn was killed?” Bootsie asked.
    “Working people around here made thirty-five cents an hour back then. He didn’t have a hard time finding an audience.”
    “Who do you think did it?”
    “Everyone said it came from the outside. Just like during the Civil Rights era. We always blamed our problems on the outside.”
    She turned out the light and we lay down on top of the sheets. Her skin felt cool and warm at the same time, the way sunlight does in the fall.
    “The Flynns are trouble, Dave.”
    “Maybe.”
    “No, no maybe about it. Jack Flynn might have been a good man. But I always heard he didn’t become a radical until his family got wiped out in the Depression.”
    “He fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was at the battle of Madrid.”
    “Good night,” she said.
    She turned toward the far wall. When I spread my hand on her back I could feel her breath rise and fall in her lungs. She looked at me over her shoulder, then rolled over and fit herself inside my arms.
    “Dave?” she said.
    “Yes?”
    “Trust me on this. Megan needs you for some reason she’s not telling you about. If she can’t get to you directly, she’ll go through Clete.”
    “That’s hard to believe.”
    “He called tonight and asked if I knew where she was. She’d left a message on his