Sunset Limited Read Online Free

charitable drive that is of no consequence.
    Or was there something else, a vague and ugly story years back? I couldn’t remember.
    Sunday afternoon I parked my pickup truck by his stable and walked past a chain-link dog pen to the riding ring. The dog pen exploded with the barking of two German shepherds who caromed off the fencing, their teeth bared, their paws skittering the feces that lay baked on the hot concrete pad.
    Alex Guidry cantered a black gelding in a circle, his booted calves fitted with English spurs. The gelding’s neck and sides were iridescent with sweat. Guidry sawed the bit back in the gelding’s mouth.
    “What is it?” he said.
    “I’m Dave Robicheaux. I called earlier.”
    He wore tan riding pants and a form-fitting white polo shirt. He dismounted and wiped the sweat off his face with a towel and threw it to a black man who had come out of the stable to take the horse.
    “You want to know if this guy Broussard was in the detention chair? The answer is no,” he said.
    “He says you’ve put other inmates in there. For days.”
    “Then he’s lying.”
    “You have a detention chair, though, don’t you?”
    “For inmates who are out of control, who don’t respond to Isolation.”
    “You gag them?”
    “No.”
    I rubbed the back of my neck and looked at the dog pen. The water bowl was turned over and flies boiled in the door of the small doghouse that gave the only relief from the sun.
    “You’ve got a lot of room here. You can’t let your dogs run?” I said. I tried to smile.
    “Anything else, Mr. Robicheaux?”
    “Yeah. Nothing better happen to Cool Breeze while he’s in your custody.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind, sir. Close the gate on your way out, please.”
    I got back in my truck and drove down the shell road toward the cattle guard. A half dozen Red Angus grazed in Guidry’s pasture, while snowy egrets perched on their backs.
    Then I remembered. It was ten or eleven years back, and Alex Guidry had been charged with shooting a neighbor’s dog. Guidry had claimed the dog had attacked one of his calves and eaten its entrails, but the neighbor told another story, that Guidry had baited a steel trap for the animal and had killed it out of sheer meanness.
    I looked into the rearview mirror and saw him watching me from the end of the shell drive, his legs slightly spread, a leather riding crop hanging from his wrist.
     
    MONDAY MORNING I RETURNED to work at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and took my mail out of my pigeonhole and tapped on the sheriff’s office.
    He tilted back in his swivel chair and smiled when he saw me. His jowls were flecked with tiny blue and red veins that looked like fresh ink on a map when his temper flared. He had shaved too close and there was a piece of bloody tissue paper stuck in the cleft in his chin. Unconsciously he kept stuffing his shirt down over his paunch into his gunbelt.
    “You mind if I come back to work a week early?” I asked.
    “This have anything to do with Cool Breeze Broussard’s complaint to the Justice Department?”
    “I went out to Alex Guidry’s place yesterday. How’d we end up with a guy like that as our jailer?”
    “It’s not a job people line up for,” the sheriff said. He scratched his forehead. “You’ve got an FBI agent in your office right now, some gal named Adrien Glazier. You know her?”
    “Nope. How’d she know I was going to be here?”
    “She called your house first. Your wife told her. Anyway, I’m glad you’re back. I want this bullshit at the jail cleared up. We just got a very weird case that was thrown in our face from St. Mary Parish.”
    He opened a manila folder and put on his glasses and peered down at the fax sheets in his fingers. This is the story he told me.
     
    THREE MONTHS AGO, UNDER a moon haloed with a rain ring and sky filled with dust blowing out of the sugarcane fields, a seventeen-year-old black girl named Sunshine Labiche claimed two white boys forced her car