Sunset Limited Read Online Free Page B

“Did I say that? I’m going to go back to the laundry business. A bad day used to be washing somebody’s golf socks,” he said.
     
    I LOOKED THROUGH MY office window at the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier. She sat with her legs crossed, her back to me, in a powder-blue suit and white blouse, writing on a legal pad. Her handwriting was filled with severe slants and slashes, with points in the letters that reminded me of incisor teeth.
    When I opened the door she looked at me with ice-blue eyes that could have been taken out of a Viking’s face.
    “I visited William Broussard last night. He seems to think you’re going to get him out of the parish prison,” she said.
    “Cool Breeze? He knows better than that.”
    “Does he?”
    I waited. Her hair was ash-blond, wispy and broken on the ends, her face big-boned and adversarial. She was one of those you instinctively know have a carefully nursed reservoir of anger they draw upon as needed, in the same way others make use of daily prayer. My stare broke.
    “Sorry. Is that a question?” I said.
    “You don’t have any business indicating to this man you can make deals for him,” she said.
    I sat down behind my desk and glanced out the window, wishing I could escape back into the coolness of the morning, the streets that were sprinkled with rain, the palm fronds lifting and clattering in the wind.
    I picked up a stray paper clip and dropped it in my desk drawer and closed the drawer. Her eyes never left my face or relented in their accusation.
    “What if the prosecutor’s office does cut him loose? What’s it to you?” I said.
    “You’re interfering in a federal investigation. Evidently you have a reputation for it.”
    “I think the truth is you want his cojones in a vise. You’ll arrange some slack for him after he rats out some guys you can’t make a case against.”
    She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. She cocked her elbow on my desk and let one finger droop forward at my face.
    “Megan Flynn is an opportunistic bitch. What she didn’t get on her back, she got through posing as the Joan of Arc of oppressed people. You let her and her brother jerk your pud, then you’re dumber than the people in my office say you are,” she said.
    “This has to be a put-on.”
    She pulled a manila folder out from under her legal pad and dropped it on my desk blotter.
    “Those photos are of a guy named Swede Boxleiter. They were taken in the yard at the Colorado state pen in Canon City. What they don’t show is the murder he committed in broad daylight with a camera following him around the yard. That’s how good he is,” she said.
    His head and face were like those of a misshaped Marxist intellectual, the yellow hair close-cropped on the scalp, the forehead and brainpan too large, the cheeks tapering away to a mouth that was so small it looked obscene. He wore granny glasses on a chiseled nose, and a rotted and torn weight lifter’s shirt on a torso that rippled with cartilage.
    The shots had been taken from an upper story or guard tower with a zoom lens. They showed him moving through the clusters of convicts in the yard, faces turning toward him the way bait fish reflect light when a barracuda swims toward their perimeter. A fat man was leaning against the far wall, one hand squeezed on his scrotum, while he told a story to a half circle of his fellow inmates. His lips were twisted with a word he was forming, purple from a lollypop he had been eating. The man named Swede Boxleiter passed an inmate who held a tape-wrapped ribbon of silver behind his back. After Swede Boxleiter had walked by, the man whose palm seemed to have caught the sun like a heliograph now had his hands stuffed in his pockets.
    The second-to-last photo showed a crowd at the wall like early men gathered on the rim of a pit to witness the death throes and communal roasting of an impaled mammoth.
    Then the yard was empty, except for the fat man, the gash across his windpipe bubbling with