A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke Page A

a half bathroom just as the toy man started firing.
    I saw the sparks of gunpowder fly out into the darkness, heard two rounds whock into the tile wall and a third whang off the toilet bowl and blow the tank apart in a cascade of water and splintered ceramic; then he tried to change his angle of fire, and a fourth round ricocheted off a chrome towel rack and collapsed the shower door in a pile of frosted glass.
    I was flat on the floor, in a spreading pool ofwater, my back and hair covered with bits of glass and tile caulking. But it had turned around on him, and he knew it, because he was already backing fast into the hallway when I raised up and started firing.
    The roar of the .45 was deafening, the recoil as powerful and palm-numbing and disconnected as the kick of an air hammer; then the .45 felt suddenly weightless in my hand just before I pulled the trigger again. I fired four times at the bedroom entrance, then stood erect in a tinkle of glass at my feet, opening and closing my mouth to clear my eyes. The bedroom doorway was empty, the layered smoke motionless in the air. Out in the hall, an oil painting lay face down on the carpet, with three holes cored through the back of the canvas.
    I could hear them on the stairway, but one of them obviously wanted the game to go into extra innings. He had the high-pitched, metallic voice of a midget.
    â€œGive me your piece! I got that fuck bottled!”
    â€œThe boat’s leaving, Jewel. Either haul ass or you’re on your own,” another man said.
    I looked around the edge of the doorjamb and let off the .45—too quickly, high and wide, scouring a long trench in the wallpaper. But this time I saw three men—the man with the crowbar, the toy man, who wore black, silver-studded cowboy boots and had short-clipped blond hair that looked like duck down, and a third, older man in a brown windbreaker, black trousers like a priest’s, black, razor-trimmed hair, and a mouthful of metal fillingsthat reflected the light from Weldon’s office. Or at least that’s how the image of the three men froze itself in my mind just before I heard a sound that I thought was the unmistakable ring of opportunity, the cylinder of a revolver being clicked open and ejected brass cartridges rattling on a wood surface.
    I gripped the handle of the .45 with both hands and started to step out into the hall and begin firing, but the man in the windbreaker was a pro and had anticipated me. He had gone to one knee, three steps down from the landing, while the other two men had fled past him, and when he squeezed off his automatic I felt my raincoat leap out from my side as though a gust of air had blown through it. I spun back inside the cover of the doorway and heard him running into the darkness of the house below.
    They’ll drop you coming down the stairs, I thought. Think, think. They didn’t have a car in front or out on the blacktop. There’s no access road in the back. They came on the bayou. They have to go back to it on foot.
    I crossed the hallway and went into a bedroom on the opposite side, one with French doors and a verandah that overlooked the driveway, the garage, and the bamboo border of Weldon’s backyard. A moment later I heard them running hard on the wet gravel. They were visible for not more than two or three seconds, between the corner of the house and the back of the garage, but I aimed the .45 with both hands across the wood railingand fired until the clip was empty and the breech locked open and a solitary tongue of white smoke rose from the exposed chamber. Just before the three men crashed through the bamboo and disappeared into the rain, just as the man called Eddy was almost home free, the last round in the magazine ripped the corner off the garage and filled his face with a shower of wood splinters. He screamed, and his hand clutched his eye as though he had been scalded.
    Then I saw a patrol car turn off the blacktop and head fast