A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke

stuffing, clothes, and shoes that had been thrown out of the doorways to the bedrooms. The only light came from behind a partially closed door at the end of the hall. Through the opening I could see a desk, a word processor, a black leather chair whose back had been split in a large X. I moved along the wall with the .45 at an upward angle, past two demolished bedrooms, a linen closet, a darkened bathroom, an overturned dirty-clothes hamper, a dumbwaiter, until I reached the last bedroom, which was only ten feet from the lighted room that Weldon probably used as a home office. I stepped quickly inside the bedroom door and swept my .45 back and forth in the darkness. The room was still intact, except for the fact that the box springs had been shoved halfway off the frame of the canopy bed, a warning that I didn’t heed.
    I caught my breath, squatted down at the base of the door, wiped the sweat and rainwater out of my eyes with my knuckle, then aimed the .45 along the wall at the lighted opening of the office.
    â€œThis is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. You’re under arrest. Throw your weapons out in the hall. Don’t think about it. Do it.”
    But there was no sound from inside.
    â€œRight now it’s breaking and entering,” I said. “You can be smart and come out on your own. If we have to come in after you, we’ll paint the walls with you. I guarantee it.”
    Beyond the opening in the door I saw a shadowbreak across Weldon’s desk. I could feel the veins tightening in my head, the sweat dripping out of my hair. It wasn’t going to go down right, I thought. When they think about it, they either freeze or become cunning. And my situation was all wrong. I had been forced to take up a position on the right-hand side of the hallway, so that I had to extend my right arm at an awkward angle around the doorjamb. I was getting a charley horse in my leg and a muscle twitch in my back. Where were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?
    â€œLast chance, partner. We’re about to shift up into the dirty boogie,” I said. But it was hard-guy flimflam. All I could do was contain whoever was in there and wait for backup.
    Then the shadow broke across the desk again, a shoe scraped against a piece of furniture, and I straightened my back, stiffened my right arm, and aimed the .45 in the middle of the door, my eyes burning with salt.
    But I’d forgotten that old admonition from Vietnam: Don’t let them get behind you, Robicheaux.
    He came out of the bedroom closet like a spring exploding from a broken clock, a short crowbar raised above his head. His head was huge, his face full of bone, his torso knotted with muscle under his wet T-shirt. I tried to pivot, swing the .45 clear of the doorjamb and aim it at his chest, or simply stand erect and get away from the arch of the crowbar, but my knees popped and burned and seemed to have all the resilience of cobweb. The crowbar thudded into my shoulder and rakeddown my arm and sent the .45 bouncing across the carpet.
    Then he was on me in earnest and I was rolling away from him, toward the canopy bed, my arms wrapped around my head. He hit me once in the back, a blow that felt just like a wild inside pitch that catches you flat and hard in the spine as you try to twist away from it in the batter’s box, and I kicked at him with one foot, tripped backward over the box springs, and saw the bone-plated, muddy-eyed resolution in his face as he came toward me again.
    â€œGet away, Eddy! I’m gonna blow up his shit!” a voice behind him said.
    A toy of a man stood in the doorway. He looked like a racehorse jockey, except his little body had the rigid lines of a weight lifter’s. In his diminutive hand was a blue revolver.
    But they had intervened in each other’s script and hesitated too long. I saw the .45 on the carpet, next to the hanging box springs, and I grabbed it and tumbled sideways into