Sunset Limited Read Online Free PDF Page A

saliva and blood, the tape-wrapped shank discarded in the red soup on his chest.
    “Boxleiter is buddies with Cisco Flynn. They were in the same state home in Denver. Maybe you’ll get to meet him. He got out three days ago,” she said.
    “Ms. Glazier, I’d like to—”
    “It’s Special Agent Glazier.”
    “Right. I’d like to talk with you, but… Look, why not let us take care of our own problems?”
    “What a laugh.” She stood up and gazed down at me. “Here it is. Hong Kong is going to become the property of Mainland China soon. There’re some people we want to put out of business before we have to deal with Beijing to get at them. Got the big picture?”
    “Not really. You know how it is out here in the provinces, swatting mosquitoes, arresting people for stealing hog manure, that sort of thing.”
    She laughed to herself and dropped her card on my desk, then walked out of my office and left the door open as though she would not touch anything in our department unless it was absolutely necessary.
     
    AT NOON I DROVE down the dirt road by the bayou toward my dock and bait shop. Through the oak trees that lined the shoulder I could see the wide gallery and purple-streaked tin roof of my house up the slope. It had rained again during the morning, and the cypress planks in the walls were stained the color of dark tea, the hanging baskets of impatiens blowing strings of water in the wind. My adopted daughter Alafair, whom I had pulled from a submerged plane wreck out on the salt when she was a little girl, sat in her pirogue on the far side of the bayou, fly-casting a popping bug into the shallows.
    I walked down on the dock and leaned against the railing. I could smell the salty odor of humus and schooled-up fish and trapped water out in the swamp. Alafair’s skin was bladed with the shadows of a willow tree, her hair tied up on her head with a blue bandanna, her hair so black it seemed to fill with lights when she brushed it. She had been born in a primitive village in El Salvador, her family the target of death squads because they had sold a case of Pepsi-Cola to the rebels. Now she was almost sixteen, her Spanish and early childhood all but forgotten. But sometimes at night she cried out in her sleep and would have to be shaken from dreams filled with the marching boots of soldiers, peasants with their thumbs wired together behind them, the dry ratcheting sound of a bolt being pulled back on an automatic weapon.
    “Wrong time of day and too much rain,” I said.
    “Oh, yeah?” she said.
    She lifted the fly rod into the air, whipping the popping bug over her head, then laying it on the edge of the lily pads. She flicked her wrist so the bug popped audibly in the water, then a goggle-eye perch rose like a green-and-gold bubble out of the silt and broke the surface, its dorsal fin hard and spiked and shiny in the sunlight, the hook and feathered balsa-wood lure protruding from the side of its mouth.
    Alafair held the fly rod up as it quivered and arched toward the water, retrieving the line with her left hand, guiding the goggle-eye between the islands of floating hyacinths, until she could lift it wet and flopping into the bottom of the pirogue.
    “Not bad,” I said.
    “You had another week off. Why’d you go back to work?” she said.
    “Long story. See you inside.”
    “No, wait,” she said, and set her rod down in the pirogue and paddled across the bayou to the concrete boat ramp. She stepped out into the water with a stringer of catfish and perch wrapped around her wrist, and climbed the wood steps onto the dock. In the last two years all the baby fat had melted off her body, and her face and figure had taken on the appearance of a mature woman’s. When she worked with me in the bait shop, most of our male customers made a point of focusing their attention everywhere in the room except on Alafair.
    “A lady named Ms. Flynn was here. Bootsie told me what happened to her father. You found him,