DR10 - Sunset Limited Read Online Free PDF

out. So that's why I say it must be your
birthday," the turnkey said. He bounced the baton on its lanyard and
winked. "When he's gone, I'm gonna be jailer. You might study on the
implications."
    At four that afternoon Alex Guidry stopped in front of Cool
Breeze's cell. He wore a seersucker suit and red tie and shined black
cowboy boots. His Stetson hung from his fingers against his pant leg.
    "You want to work scrub-down detail and do sweep-up in the
shop?" he asked.
    "I can do that."
    "You gonna make trouble?"
    "Ain't my style, suh."
    "You can tell any damn lie you want when you get out of here.
But if I'm being unfair to you, you tell me to my face right now," he
said.
    "People see what they need to."
    Alex Guidry turned his palm up and looked at it and picked at
a callus with his thumb. He started to speak, then shook his head in
disgust and walked down the corridor, the leather soles of his boots
clicking on the floor.
    Cool Breeze spent the next day scrubbing stone walls and
sidewalks with a wire brush and Ajax, and at five o'clock reported to
the maintenance shop to begin sweep-up. He used a long broom to push
steel filings, sawdust, and wood chips into tidy piles that he shoveled
onto a dustpan and dumped into a trash bin. Behind him a mulatto whose
golden skin was spotted with freckles the size of dimes was cutting a
design out of a piece of plywood on a jigsaw, the teeth ripping a sound
out of the wood like an electrified scream.
    Cool Breeze paid no attention to him, until he heard the
plywood disengage from the saw. He turned his head out of curiosity
just as the mulatto balled his fist and tried to jam a piece of
coat-hanger wire, sharpened to a point like an ice pick and driven
vertically through the wood handle off a lawn-mower starter rope,
through the center of Cool Breeze's ear and into his brain.
    The wire point laid open Cool Breeze's cheek from the jawbone
to the corner of his mouth.
    He locked his attacker's forearm in both bis hands, spun with
him in circles, then walked the two of them toward the saw that hummed
with an oily light.
    "Don't make me do it, nigger," he said.
    But his attacker would not give up his weapon, and Cool Breeze
drove first the coat hanger, then the balled fist and the wood plug
gripped inside the palm into the saw blade, so that bone and metal and
fingernails and wood splinters all showered into his face at once.
    He hid inside the barrel of a cement mixer, where by all odds
he should have died. He felt the truck slow at the gate, heard the
guards talking outside while they walked the length of the truck with
mirrors they held under the frame.
    "We got one out on the ground. You ain't got him in your
barrel, have you?" a guard said.
    "We sure as hell can find out," the truck driver said.
    Gears and cogs clanged into place, then the truck vibrated and
shook and giant steel blades began turning inside the barrel's
blackness, lifting curtains of wet cement into the air like cake dough.
    "Get out of here, will you? For some reason that thing puts me
in mind of my wife in the bathroom," the guard said.
    Two hours later, on a parish road project south of town, Cool
Breeze climbed from inside the cement mixer and lumbered into a cane
field like a man wearing a lead suit, his lacerated cheek bleeding like
a flag, the cane leaves edged with the sun's last red light.
     
    "I DON'T BELIEVE IT, Mout'," I said.
    "Man ain't tried to joog him?"
    "That the jailer set it up. He's already going on suspension.
He'd be the first person everyone suspected."
    "'Cause he done it."
    "Where's Breeze?"
    Mout' slipped his sack of birdseed over his shoulder and begin
flinging handfuls into the air again. The pigeons swirled about his
waxed bald head like snow-flakes.
     
    MY PARTNER WAS DETECTIVE Helen
Soileau. She wore slacks and
men's shirts to work, seldom smiled or put on makeup, and faced you
with one foot cocked at an angle behind the other, in the same way a
martial artist strikes a defensive posture.