Crime Beat

James Lee Burke is a master story teller who brings his moody signature to another gripping, violent tale says Eugene Abrahams in a review of Rain Gods (Orion) in the Cape Times. Abrahams, who admits to being an unashamedly biased Burke fan, claims that the legendary author remains at the height of his descriptive powers.

Sheriff Hackberry Holland is 70. His back hurts and his knees ache. A female deputy is coming on to him and has no qualms about using her spring-mounted, leather-weighted blackjack across the head of the Federal agent who is giving her boss a hard time, or saving Holland’s life using her .357 magnum – and every now and then the old-timer hears a bugle in the background of his consciousness, reminding him of those terrible years he was a POW during the Korean War, imprisoned in a drain.

And then there are times when his mind resonates “with images of snowy hills south of the Yalu River, and dead Chinese troops in quilted uniforms scattered randomly across the slopes…”

All Holland – think Clint Eastwood’s bitter and grizzled anti-hero in Gran Torino – wants to do is keep law and order in his nondescript Texas town on the seemingly lawless Mexican border, go home at night and relax on his porch with a coffee or a Coke, tend to his horses and flowers and forget about his debauched past life as an alcoholic lawyer and congressman.

He knows his time is almost up and, one day, “one way or another, his home and his ranch and the animals on it and he himself would become dust blowing in the wind. Tolstoy had said the only piece of earth a person owned was the six feet he claimed with his death.”

Holland’s wife died years ago, he visits his two sons infrequently – they never visit him – and his goal of a quiet small-town existence is shattered when he receives an anonymous tip-off about the shallow mass grave of nine Thai women and children behind the shell of an old church.

Were the victims prostitutes brought illegally across the border, or were they drug mules who had carried condom bullets in their stomachs? Why were they killed? And why are damaged Iraq war veteran Pete Flores and his pretty would-be country singer Vikki Gaddis on the run from the killers, with their destination – if they can get out of Texas alive – either Montana or Canada?

The mystery behind the massacre is revealed rather swiftly: a brothel keeper, Nick Dolan (who has a Mexican restaurant attached to his whorehouse and lives to give his wife and three kids everything they want) wanted to teach a former partner of his, Artie Rooney, a lesson. But, no, he did not want the Thai women killed and has washed his hands of the incident. They had been slaughtered because a New Orleans hitman, Hugo Cistranos, took his instructions too seriously and advised killer-for-hire Jack “The Preacher” Collins – a “pimple on creation” – to carry out his bidding which he did, in a blur of machine-gun fire.

Dolan is now running scared from Preacher, a man who believes he is the right hand of God – sprouting scripture as he goes – and has a chilling code of ethics, and Rooney. Cistranos wants to kill Preacher before the cold-blooded murderer realises he killed the women for the wrong reason.

Meanwhile, the Feds and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials want to wrap up the whole affair so they can arrest an immigrant Russian gang boss, Josef Sholokoff, who has a lucrative business in gun- and whore-running in Houston.

Holland, whom Lee Burke readers will remember from 1971’s Lay Down My Sword and Shield, needs to sort all this out, but with the Feds using him and Flores as bait, Preacher flitting in and out of his life like the ghost his “employers” say he is, and with other violent distractions – a meal at a diner goes horribly wrong – his road to retirement is a very bloody and bumpy one.

Burke’s characters – the major and minor ones – are all too real with raw human emotion and when he describes something you can feel, hear, smell and taste it – hell, you can almost touch it.

And the rain gods of the book’s title? “They ain’t here no more,” says the Apache who sleeps off his hangovers in Holland’s police cell. “When they saw what people did to this land, they upped and left.” Sure, the grey, dark clouds are there, but they are hanging over the horizon. And “when Holland strained his eyes, he thought he saw lightning on a distant hill, like gold wires sparking against the darkness”.

Which leaves us with the desert – all dry and brown and sandy and clay and really a character unto itself. The two-lane blacktop is the only route to salvation or, at the very least, an oasis, and some of the few attractions include “the tops of cottonwood trees along a streambed that had gone dry in late summer and whose banks were flanged with automobile scrap jutting out from the soil like pieces of rusted razor blades” to keep one company while gazing through the dusty windscreen of a battered pick-up.

James Lee Burke’s descriptive powers have never been better – equalled, yes, with his vivid-as-real-life Montana (the Billy Bob Holland series) and New Orleans (the Dave Robicheaux series), but never bettered.

An example: “As he lay in bed with a view of a chicken yard, a railed pen with six goats inside it, and a bladeless, rusted slip of a windmill strung with dead brush blown from a field of weeds, the man whose nickname was Preacher could not get the woman out of his mind, nor the scent of her fear and sweat and perfume while he wrestled with her on the ground, nor the expression of her face when she fired the .38 round through the top of his foot, exploding a jet of blood from the sole of his shoe.”

To say any more would reveal to you the many bright jewels packed into Burke’s treasure chest of word-magic. This much, however, is true: when reading any of his books, do not concentrate on the destination, but rather the journey. The story will end, sure enough, with a full stop, but along the way his priceless prose will carry you to places you’ve never been, introduce you to flawed characters intent on their own personal quest for redemption – and those whose lifeblood is pumped through a heart of darkness.

In all, a reading experience to thrill and awe.

# Abrahams is a sub-editor at Independent Newspapers Cape Town and an unashamedly biased Burke fan.