the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt nine)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

The phone went dead in my hand, and I looked at the smoky green surface of the water in the summer haze and poured another jigger of Jim Beam. What did they have on him? I wondered. Whores? Juice from narcotics? It seemed sometimes that the best of us became most like the people whom we loathed. And whenever a good cop took a big fall, he could never look back and find that exact moment when he made a hard left turn down a one-way street. I remembered sitting in a courtroom when an ex-major-league baseball pitcher from New Orleans was sentenced to ten years in Angola for extortion and trafficking in cocaine. Seventeen years earlier he had won twenty-five games, had thrown fast-balls that could destroy barn doors, and now he weighed three hundred pounds and walked as though a bowling ball were slung between his thighs. When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, he stared up at the judge, the rings of fat on his neck trembling, and replied, “Your Honor, I have no idea how I got from there to here.”

I believed him, too. But as I sat in the warm breeze with the drowsy heat of the whiskey working in my head, my concern was not for Clete or an ex-baseball pitcher. I knew that my own fuse was lit, and it was only a matter of time before my banked fires would roar out of control in my life. I had never felt more alone, and I uttered a prayer that seemed a contradiction of everything I had learned back at the Catholic school: Dear God, my higher power, even though I’ve abandoned You, don’t abandon me.

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt eight)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

“The government will mess you up,” the Pencil Man said. “Each time you have contact with a government agency, it creates a piece of paper on you. There’s people that’s got whole rooms of paper on their lives. I don’t have any, not even a birth certificate. My mother squatted down just long enough to squirt me out in the back of a boxcar. I been moving ever since. I never had a social security card, a driver’s license, a draft card. I never filed an income tax return. You let them get papers on you and they’ll jerk you around.”

“You guys are my kind of situational philosophers,” I said.

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt seven)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

Fifteen minutes later I checked myself out of the hospital and took a cab to my houseboat. It was a dark, hot night and the heat had built up all day in the cabin. My collection of historical jazz records—irreplaceable seventy-eights of Blind Lemon, Bunk Johnson, Kid Ory, Bix Beiderbecke—lay scattered and broken and tattooed with footprints on the floor. I opened the windows wide, turned on my floor fan, picked up the few records that were still hard and stiff in their jackets, cleaned them with a soft cloth, and set them in the wall rack. Then I swept the rest into a paper bag and lay down to sleep on the couch with my clothes on.

Small waves chucked against the hull, and the boat rocked rhythmically under me. But it was no good; I couldn’t sleep. I was sweating and trembling and when I took my shirt off I shivered as though I’d been struck with a blast of arctic air. Each time I closed my eyes I felt the earth’s surface drop away under me, felt myself spinning end over end inside my automobile toward the distant bottom of a rock-strewn canyon, saw words form like a bubble on the dead lips of Sam Fitzpatrick sitting next to me.

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt six)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

I had almost achieved some tranquility by the time I parked my car on the short, darkened street that dead-ended into a sand dune and three coconut palms and the dilapidated dock where I kept my houseboat moored. A smooth, hard path with salt grass growing on the edges cut through the dune, and the waving palm fronds made shadows on the sand and the roof of my houseboat. I could hear the water slapping against the hull, and the moonlight fell across the lake itself in a long silver band. I walked across the gangplank with the wind cool in my face, the bend of the wood easy and familiar and comforting under my foot, the froth of the incoming tide sliding up on the sand under me. The mahogany and yellowish brown teak and glass panes and brass fittings of my boat were as rectangularly beautiful as metal and wood could be. I opened the hatch, stepped down into the main cabin, and turned on the light switch.

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt five)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

After four years of sobriety I once again wanted to fill my mind with spiders and crawling slugs and snakes that grew corpulent off the pieces of my life that I would slay daily. I blamed it on the killing of Julio Segura. I decided my temptation for alcohol and self-destruction was maybe even an indication that my humanity was still intact. I said the rosary that night and did not fall asleep until the sky went gray with the false dawn.

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt four)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

We drove in Clete’s car along the lakefront road. There was a light chop on the slate-green surface, and pelicans were diving for fish out of the white sun. The palm trees on the esplanade clicked dryly in the wind; and on the right-hand side of the road beyond the pink stucco walls, the long iron pike fences, the impassable hedges and rows of myrtle trees, lay the terraced lawns and mansions of the rich. I knew liberals out at Tulane who would tell me these were the people whom we served. But I didn’t like them any better than anybody else did. Actually, they didn’t like the police, either, or at least trust us, because they hired their own security, kept attack dogs on the grounds, and maintained floodlight and burglar alarm systems that were an electronic miracle. They lived in fear of kidnappers of their children, sophisticated jewel creeps, minorities who would compromise their property values. The irony was that they were among the most secure people upon earth—secure from disease, poverty, political oppression, virtually everything except death.

“How much you think these places cost?” Cletus asked.

“I don’t know, maybe a million bucks.”

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt three)

from The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke:

So this was the state of the art down at the Federal Building, I thought. We didn’t see much of the federal boys, primarily because they operated on their own as a rule, and even though they said otherwise, they looked down upon us as inept and uneducated. On the other hand, we didn’t have much liking for them, either. Any number of television serials portray the feds as manicured, dapper altruists dressed in Botany 500 suits, who dispassionately hunt down the oily representatives of the Mafia and weld the cell door shut on them. The reality is otherwise. As Didi Gee would probably point out, syndicate gangsters have little fear of any police agency or court system. They own judges, cops, and prosecutors, and they can always get to a witness or a juror.

The Treasury Department is another matter. Law enforcement people everywhere, as well as criminals, consider Treasury agents incorruptible. Within the federal government they are to law enforcement what Smokey the Bear and the U.S. Forest Service are to environmental integrity. Even Joe Valachi, the Brooklyn mob’s celebrity snitch, had nothing but admiration for the T-men.