Read The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel for Free Online

perhaps painted on the walls and were never intended to be functional. When Clete entered the room, he felt a sense of enclosure that was like a vacuum sucking the air out of his lungs.
    He stood at the bar, his hat on, his powder-blue sport coat covering the handcuffs that were drawn through the back of his belt and the blue-black .38 he carried in a nylon shoulder holster. He was the only white person at the bar, but no one looked directly at him. Finally the bartender approached him, a damp rag knotted in one hand, his eyes averted, lights gleaming on his bald head. He did not speak.
    “Two fingers of Jack and a beer back,” Clete said.
    A woman on the next stool got up and went into the restroom. The bartender shifted a toothpick in his mouth with his tongue and poured the whiskey in a glass and drew a mug of draft beer. He set both of them on napkins in front of Clete. Clete removed a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and set it on the bar.
    “Anything else?” the bartender said.
    “I like the happy, neighborhood-type mood in here. I bet it’s Mardi Gras here every day.”
    The bartender propped his arms on the bar, his eye sockets cavernous, his impatience barely constrained. “Somebody did you something?” he said.
    “Is this place named for Gatemouth Brown, the musician?” Clete asked.
    “What are you doing in here, man?”
    “Waiting on my change.”
    “It’s on the house.”
    “I’m not a cop.”
    “Then you got no bidness in here.”
    “The twenty is for you. I need to talk to Herman Stanga.”
    The muscles on the backs of the bartender’s arms were knotted and tubular, one-color tats scrolled on his forearms.
    “I’m out of New Orleans and New Iberia,” Clete said. “I chase bail skips and other kinds of deadbeats. But that’s not why I’m here. How about losing the ofay routine?”
    The bartender removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked toward the back door. “Some nights we cook up some links and chops. They ain’t half bad,” he said. “But don’t give me no shit out there.”
    “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Clete said.
    Clete poured his Jack Daniel’s into his beer mug and drank it. He walked through a back hallway stacked with boxes, and out the back door into a rural scene that seemed totally disconnected from the barroom. The back lot was spacious and dotted with live oaks and pecan trees, the limbs and trunks wound with strings of white lights. A barbecue pit fashioned from a split oil drum leaked smoke into the canopy and drifted out over Bayou Teche. People were drinking out of red plastic cups at picnic tables, some of the tables lit by candles set inside blue or red vessels that looked like they had been taken from a church.
    Clete had never seen Herman Stanga but had heard him described and had no difficulty singling him out. Stanga was sitting with a woman in the shadows, at a table under a live oak that was not wrapped with lights. Both ends of the tabletop were covered with burning candles, guttering deep inside their votive containers. The woman was over thirty, heavy in the shoulders and arms, her blouse and dress those of a countrywoman rather than a regular at a juke.
    Stanga tapped a small amount of white powder from a vial on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, then held it up to the woman’s nose. She bent forward, closing one nostril, and sniffed it up as quickly as an anteater, her face lighting with the rush.
    Clete walked closer, the tree trunk between him and Stanga and Stanga’s female friend. A puff of wind off the bayou swelled the tree’s canopy, rustling the Spanish moss, spinning leaves down on the tabletop and the shoulders of the two figures sitting there. Clete could hear Stanga talking with the kind of hypnotic staccato one would associate with a 1940s scat singer:
    “See, baby, you ain’t no cleaning girl I brung up from the quarters in Loreauville. You’re a mature woman done been around and know how the world work.