“One guy—I ain’t using his name—says, ‘Don’t worry about it. We did what we had to do.’ Then the other guy says, ‘Yeah, but we should have taken more time. We should have put rocks on top of them or something. Animals are always digging up stuff in the woods, then a hunter comes along.’
“Then the first guy says, ‘Nobody’s going to find them. Nobody cares about them. They were both troublemakers. Right or wrong?’
“Then the second guy says, ‘I guess you’re right.’
“And the first guy says, ‘It’s like a war. You make up the rules when it’s over.’
“I stayed quiet in the bedroom till I heard them call room service for breakfast and a couple of bottles of Champale, then I walked into the living room in my skivvies, looking like I’d just popped out of my momma’s womb. I thought both of them was going to brown their britches right there.”
“You think they killed some people?”
He touched his fingers nervously to his forehead.
“Good God, man, I don’t know,” he said. “What’s it sound like to you?”
“It sounds bad.”
“What d’you think I ought to do?”
I rubbed my palm on the knee of my khaki work trousers, then clicked my nails on the metal housing of the outboard engine. The dappled sunlight fell through the willows on Dixie’s flushed face.
“I can introduce you to the Iberia sheriff or a pretty good DEA agent over in Lafayette,” I said.
“Are you kidding, man? I need a drug agent in my life like a henhouse needs an egg-sucking dog.”
“Well, there’s still the sheriff.”
He drank the foam out of the Jax bottle and looked at me with one eye squinted shut against the light.
“I’m getting the impression you think I’d just be playing with my swizzle stick,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and didn’t answer.
“Come on, Dave. I need some help. I can’t handle worry. It eats my lunch.”
“Where do you think this happened?”
“Up in Montana, I guess. That’s where we been the last three months.”
“We can talk to the FBI, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. You just don’t have enough information, Dixie.” I paused for a moment. “There’s another bump in the road, too.”
He looked at me as a child might if he was about to be brought to task.
“When I was on the grog, I had a hard time convincing people about some things I heard and saw,” I said. “It’s unfair, but it goes with the territory.”
He stared at the water and pinched his eyes with his fingers.
“My advice is to get away from these guys,” I said.
“I work with them.”
“There’re other companies.”
“Be serious. I was in Huntsville. The Texas parole office don’t give you the best letters of recommendation.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, then.”
“It’s a mess of grief, huh?”
I began pulling in the anchor rope.
“You’re gonna turn to stone on me?” he said.
“I wish I could help. I don’t think I can. That’s the way it is.”
“Before you crank that engine, let me ask you a question. Your father was killed on a rig out in the Gulf, wasn’t he?”
“That’s right.”
“It was a Star rig, wasn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. It killed a couple of dozen guys when it blew.”
“You’ve got a good memory, Dixie.” I twisted the throttle to open the gas feed and yanked the starter rope. It didn’t catch.
“It don’t matter to you that I’m talking about Star Drilling Company?” he said.
I kept yanking the rope while oil and gas bled away from the engine into the water. Then I put one knee on the plank seat, held the engine housing firm with my palm, and ripped the starter handle past my ear. The engine roared, the propeller churned a cloud of yellow mud and dead hyacinth vines out of the bottom, and I turned us back into the full sunlight, the slap of water under the bow, the wind that smelled of jasmine and wisteria. On the way back Dixie sat on the bow with his forearms lying loosely between his legs, his face listless and empty now, his rose-emblazoned shirt puffing with warm air.
Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen.
Then suddenly it was over, and the sky cleared and the western horizon was streaked with fire. Usually on a spring evening like this, when the breeze was cool and flecked with rain, Batist and I headed for Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. But the bottom had dropped out of the oil business in Louisiana, the state had the highest rate of unemployment in the country and the worst credit rating, and the racetrack had closed.
I boiled crawfish for supper, and Alafair and I shelled and ate them on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. That night I dreamed of a bubble of fire burning under the Gulf’s green surface. The water boiled and hissed, geysers of steam and dirty smoke rose into air, and an enormous blue-green oil slick floated all the way to the western horizon. Somewhere far down below among the twisted spars and drill pipe and cables and the flooded wreckage of the quarter boat were the bodies of my father and nineteen other men who went down with the rig when the drill bit punched into a pay sand and the wellhead blew.
The company’s public relations men said that they didn’t have a blowout preventer on because they had never hit an oil sand at that depth in that part of the Gulf before. I wondered what my father thought in those last moments of his life. I never saw fear in him. No matter how badly he was hurt by circumstances or my mother’s unfaithfulness, and eventually by drunken brawls in bars and the times he was locked up in the parish jail, he could always grin and wink at me and my brother and convincingly pretend to us that misfortune was not even worthy of mention.
But what did he feel in those last moments, high up on the monkeyboard in the dark, when the rig started to shake and groan and he saw the roughnecks on the platform floor dropping tongs and chain and running from the eruption of sand, salt water, gas, oil, and cascading drill pipe that in seconds would explode into an orange and yellow flame that melted steel spars like licorice? Did he think of me and my brother, Jimmie?
I bet he did. Even when he clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the black, even as the rig caved with him on top of the quarter boat, I bet his thoughts were of us.
They never found his body, but even now, almost twenty-two years later, he visited me in my sleep and sometimes I thought he spoke to me during my waking day. In my dream I saw him walking out of the surf, the green waves and foam sliding around the knees of his overalls, his powerful body strung with rust-colored seaweed. His wind-burned skin was as dark as a mulatto’s, his teeth white, his thick, curly hair black as an Indian’s. His tin hat was cocked at an angle on his head, and when he popped a wet kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth and then crinkled his eyes at me, a shaft of morning sunlight struck his hat and flashed as bright as a heliograph. I could feel the salt water surge over my legs as I walked toward him.
But it’s the stuff of dreams. My father was dead. My wife was, too. The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts.
Books by James Lee Burke
DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS
The Glass Rainbow
Swan Peak
The Tin Roof Blowdown
/> Pegasus Descending
Crusader’s Cross
Last Car to Elysian Fields
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
Purple Cane Road
Sunset Limited
Cadillac Jukebox
Burning Angel
Dixie City Jam
In the Electric Mix with Confederate Dead
A Stained White Radiance
A Morning for Flamingos
Black Cherry Blues
Heaven’s Prisoners
The Neon Rain
BILLY BOB HOLLAND NOVELS
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Bitterroot
Heartwood
Cimarron Rose
HACKBERRY HOLLAND NOVELS
Feast Day of Fools
Rain Gods
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
OTHER FICTION
Jesus Out to Sea
White Doves at Morning
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict and Other Stories
Two for Texas
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Half of Paradise
Acclaim for James Lee Burke’s
A Morning for Flamingos
“Better than nearly everything else out there…. James Lee Burke again shows shy he is among the best crime novelists around. His prose is lush and evocative, especially in depicting the seedy and ominous New Orleans and south Louisiana underworlds.” —Baltimore Sun
“Truly astonishing…. No one writes better detective novels…. Burke is a creator of muscular, violent, headlong stories that honor and at the same time expand conventions of the form.” —Washington Post Book World
“Explosive…. A tale both tough and tender…. Burke writes some of the best dialogue this side of Elmore Leonard.” —Orlando Sentinel
“Remarkable…. One of the very best American crime writers. His Black Cherry Blues won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award…. A Morning for Flamingos may be even better.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Burke triumphs…. The man can write…. He’s one of the most polished mystery novelists alive, his hero, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, is as ripe and real as they get…. Grand escape…. Graceful exposition. Regional dialect peppery as gumbo. Fiery action passages. You-are-there descriptive prose: of cityscape and bayou, of swampy psychological territory, too…. Burke stitches up the complex and vastly colorful story with seamless art and drives it forward with quiet, powerful authority.” —Boston Globe
“Not since Raymond Chandler has anyone so thoroughly reinvented the crime and mystery genre as James Lee Burke.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
“James Lee Burke has moved steadily up the list of current thriller writers and now must be ranked near the top. His taut plots, lyrical style, and an ability to create bizarre yet believable characters makes his a unique and compelling voice.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“Totally believable and engrossing…. Gumshoe gumbo at its tastiest.” —Chicago Tribune
“James Lee Burke is a mystery writer with a difference…. He brings with him a command of language rarely found in the genre…. A Morning for Flamingos is probably the best in the series…. It’s razor-sharp and hard-boiled with an edge-of-your-seat tension and manly, sweaty realism…. This is a mystery that honors a century of detective fiction but creates from it something that is new.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“As elegant and moody as a New Orleans night…. Action lovers will find plenty of guns and chases in this story of drugs, love, and betrayal. But Burke has a dollop of William Faulkner in his soul…. Add to the mix some offbeat characters, Burke’s marvelously musical dialogue, and an ambiguous but thoroughly appropriate ending, and you have another terrific beignet from an exciting crime writer.” —Toronto Globe and Mail
“Impressive…. Throat-constricting action… A Morning for Flamingos has the mark of a crime classic.” —San Francisco Examiner
“He’s the best at writing mysteries.” —John Sandford
“James Lee Burke is an outstanding writer [who] blends a haunting, decadent setting with a haunted, fallible hero. He successfully manages to combine action with passion, toughness and sensuality…. Burke has crafted an intense, complex, and exhausting adventure for Robicheaux that shows him off to his best advantage.” —Houston Chronicle
“First-rate…. Rich stylistic textures and a provocative moral complexity…. A tasty gumbo of multidimensional characters, spiced with Cajun dialects and winning suspense…. A Morning for Flamingos transcends the realm of ordinary mystery fiction.” —Kansas City Star
“An exceptionally gifted writer.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Chilling, bone-marrow believability…. Not just Robicheaux himself, but all the denizens of the French Quarter whom we meet in A Morning for Flamingos are just as real as we would wish them to be.” —Los Angeles Daily News
“The conflicts are genuine, the frailties human, the action is relentless, the writing is superb.” —Worcester Sunday Telegram
“A nifty grifty thriller that takes a double dip into crime New Orleans style.” —Boston Herald
“The prose sings…. One would expect no less from a writer of Burke’s pedigree…. Numerous shades of gray are painted in this book, aided and abetted by a craftsman at work, free of clichés and contrivances.” —Arizona Daily Star
“Superb…. Burke’s mob-ridden plots, set mostly in Louisiana’s steaming bayous, crackle with cinematic speed and staging, while his dialogue sounds like it’s been lifted from a body pack. Yet his tough-guy hero, Robicheaux, is no ordinary sleuth.” —Toronto Star
“James Lee Burke’s sense of character and place is stronger than ever. You can hear the Louisiana lilt in the dialogue, smell the bayou, taste the food.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Black Cherry Blues won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award as Novel of the Year. A Morning for Flamingos is as good.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
About the Author
A Preview of Black Cherry Blues
Books by James Lee Burke
Acclaim for James Lee Burke’s A Morning for Flamingos
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1990 by James Lee Burke
Excerpt from Black Cherry Blues copyright © 1989 by James Lee Burke
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photograph © Cosmo Condina North America / Alamy
Cover copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
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First e-book edition: December 2011
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content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-316-20413-2
James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos
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