James Lee Burke
The Tin Roof Blowdown
Book 16 in the Robicheaux series
Acknowledgments
MY THANKS TO GLEN PITRE for his personal account about brown recluse spiders and for his account involving the desperation of the people trying to escape the storm on Highway 23.
For John and Kathy Clark
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills, I was brought forth;
While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields,
Or the primal dust of the world.
When He prepared the heavens, I was there,
When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,
When He established the clouds above,
When He strengthened the fountains of the deep,
When He assigned to the sea its limit,
So that the waters would not transgress His command,
When He marked out the foundations of the earth,
Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in his inhabited world,
And my delight was with the sons of men.
(Proverbs 8:24-31)
Chapter 1
MY WORST DREAMS have always contained images of brown water and fields of elephant grass and the downdraft of helicopter blades. The dreams are in color but they contain no sound, not of drowned voices in the river or the explosions under the hooches in the village we burned or the thropping of the Jolly Green and the gunships coming low and flat across the canopy, like insects pasted against a molten sun.