In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Chapter 19

The rain was deafening on the gallery in the morning. When I opened the front door, islands of pecan leaves floated in muddy pools in the yard, and a fine, sweet-smelling, cool mist blew inside the room. I could barely make out the marsh beyond the curtain of rain dancing in a wet yellow light on the bayou's surface. I put on my raincoat and hat and ran splashing through the puddles for the bait shop. Batist and I stacked all the tables, chairs, and umbrellas on the dock in the lee of the building, roped them down, hauled our boats out of the water, and bolted the shutters on the windows. Then we drank a cup of coffee and ate a fried pie together at the counter inside while the wind tried to peel the tin roof off the joists.

In town, Bayou Teche had risen high up on the pilings of the drawbridges and overflowed its banks into the rows of camellia bushes in the city park, and passing cars sent curling brown waves of water and street debris sliding across curbs and lawns all the way to the front steps of the houses along East Main. The air smelled of fish and dead vegetation from storm drains and was almost cold in the lungs, and in front of the courthouse the rain spun in vortexes that whipped at the neck and eyes and seemed to soak your clothes no matter how tightly your raincoat was buttoned. Murphy Doucet arrived at the courthouse in a jail van on a wrist chain with seven other inmates, bare-headed, a cigarette in the center of his mouth, his eyes squinted against the rain, his gray hair pasted down on his head, his voice loud with complaint about the manacle that cut into his wrist.

A black man was locked to the next manacle on the chain. He was epileptic and retarded and was in court every three or four weeks for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. Inside the foyer, when the bailiff was about to walk the men on the chain to the front of the courtroom, the black man froze and jerked at the manacle, made a gurgling sound with his mouth while spittle drooled over his bottom lip.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" the bailiff said.

"Want to be on the end of the chain. Want to set on the end of the row," the black man said.

"He's saying he ain't used to being in the front of the bus," Doucet said.

"This man been bothering you, Ciro?" the bailiff said.

"No, suh. I just want to set on the end this time. Ain't no white peoples bothered me. I been treated just fine."

"Hurry up and get this bullshit over with," Doucet said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

"We aim to please. We certainly do," the bailiff said, unlocked the black man, walked him to the end of the chain, and snapped the last manacle on his wrist.

A young photographer from the Daily Iberian raised his camera and began focusing through his lens at Doucet.

"You like your camera, son?… I thought so. Then you just keep it poked somewhere else," Doucet said.

It took fifteen minutes. The prosecutor, a high-strung rail of a man, used every argument possible in asking for high bail on Doucet. Over the constant interruptions and objections of Doucet's lawyer, he called him a pedophile, a psychopath, a menace to the community, and a ghoul.

The judge had silver hair and a profile like a Roman Soldier. During World War II he had received the Congressional Medal of Honor and at one time had been a Democratic candidate for governor. He listened patiently with one hand on top of another, his eyes oblique, his head tilted at an angle like a priest feigning attentiveness to an obsessed penitent's ramblings.

Finally the prosecutor pointed at Doucet, his finger trembling, and said, "Your honor, you turn this man loose, he kills somebody else, goddamn it, the blood's going to be on our hands."

"Would counsel approach the bench, please? You, too, Detective Robicheaux," the judge said. Then he said, "Can you gentlemen tell me what the hell is going on here?"

"It's an ongoing investigation, your honor. We need more time," I said.

"That's not my point," the judge said.

"I object to the treatment of my client, your honor. He's been bullied, degraded in public, slandered by these two men here. He's been-" Doucet's lawyer said.

"I've heard enough from you today, sir. You be quiet a minute," the judge said. "Is the prosecutor's office in the process of filing new charges against the defendant?"

"Your honor, we think this man may have been committing rape and homicide for over three decades. Maybe he killed a policeman in Lafayette. We don't even know where to begin," the prosecutor said.

"Your sincerity is obvious, sir. So is your lack of personal control," the judge said. "And neither is solving our problem here. We have to deal with the charge at hand, and you and Detective Robicheaux both know it. Excuse my impatience, but I don't want y'all dragging 'what should be' in here rather than 'what is.' Now all of you step back."

Then he said, "Bail is set at ten thousand dollars. Next case," and brought his gavel down.

A few minutes later I stood on the portico of the courthouse and watched Murphy Doucet and his lawyer walk past me, without interrupting their conversation or registering my presence with more than a glance, get into the lawyer's new Chrysler, and drive away in the rain.

I WENT HOME FOR LUNCH BUT COULDN'T FINISH MY PLATE. THE back door was opened to the small screened-in porch, and the lawn, the mimosa tree, and the willows along the coulee were dark green in the relentless downpour, the air heavy and cold-smelling and swirling with mist.

Alafair was looking at me from across the table, a lump of unchewed sandwich in her jaw. Bootsie had just trimmed her bangs, and she wore a yellow T-shirt with a huge red and green Tabasco bottle on the front. Bootsie reached over and removed my fingers from my temple.

"You've done everything you could do," she said. "Let other people worry about it for a while."

"He's going to walk. With some time we can round up a few of his girls from the Airline Highway and get him on a procuring beef, along with the resisting arrest and assault charge. But he'll trade it all off for testimony against Julie Balboni. I bet the wheels are already turning."

"Then that's their decision and their grief to live with, Dave," Bootsie said.

"I don't read it that way."

"What's wrong?" Alafair said.

"Nothing, little guy," I said.

"Is the hurricane going to hit here?" she said.

"It might. But we don't worry about that kind of stuff. Didn't you know coonasses are part duck?"

"My teacher said 'coonass' isn't a good word."

"Sometimes people are ashamed of what they are, Alf," I said.

"Give it a break, Dave," Bootsie said.

The front door opened suddenly and a gust of cool air swelled through the house. Elrod came through the hallway folding an umbrella and wiping the water off his face with his hand.

"Wow!" he said. "I thought I saw Noah's ark out there on the bayou. It could be significant."

"Ark? What's an ark?" Alafair said.

"El, there's a plate for you in the icebox," Bootsie said.

"Thanks," he said, and opened the icebox door, his face fixed with a smile, his eyes studiously carefree.

"What's an ark?" Alafair said.

"It's part of a story in the Bible, Alf," I said, and watched Elrod as he sat down with a plate of tuna-fish sandwiches and potato salad in his hand. "What's happening out at the lake, El?"

"Everything's shut down till this storm blows over," he said. He bit into his sandwich and didn't look up from his plate.

"That'd made sense, wouldn't it?" I said.

He raised his eyes.

"I think it's going to stay shut down," he said. "There're only a couple of scenes left to shoot. I think Mikey wants to do them back in California."

"I see."

Now it was Alafair who was watching Elrod's face. His eyes focused on his sandwich.

"You leaving, Elrod?" she asked.

"In a couple of days maybe," he answered. "But I'm sure I'll be back this way. I'd really like to have y'all come visit, too."

She continued to stare at him, her face round and empty.

"You could bring Tripod," he said. "I've got a four-acre place up Topanga Canyon. It's right up from the ocean."

"You said you were going to be here all summer," she said.

"I guess it just hasn't worked out that way. I wish it had," he said. Then he looked at me. "Dave, maybe I'm saying the wrong thing here, but y'all come out to L.A., I'll get Alafair cast in five minutes. That's a fact."

"We'll talk it over," Bootsie said, and smiled across the table at him.

"I could be in the movies where you live?" Alafair said.

"You bet," Elrod said, then saw the expression on my face. "I mean, if that's what you and your family wanted."

"Dave?" She looked up at me.

"Let's see what happens," I said, and brushed at her bangs with my fingers. Elrod was about to say something else, but I interrupted him. "Where's Balboni?"

"He doesn't seem to get the message. He keeps hanging around his trailer with his greaseballs. I think he'll still be sitting there when the set's torn down," Elrod said.

"His trailer might get blown in the lake," I said.

"I think he has more than one reason for being out there," Elrod said.

I waited for him to finish, but he didn't. A few minutes later we went out on the gallery. The cypress planks of the steps and floor were dark with rain that had blown back under the eaves. Across the bayou the marsh looked smudged and indistinct in the gray air. Down at the dock Batist was deliberately sinking his pirogue in the shallows so it wouldn't be whipped into a piling by the wind.

"What were you trying to tell me about Balboni?" I said.

"He picks up young girls in town and tells them he's going to put them in a movie. I've heard he's had two or three in there in the last couple of days."

"That sounds like Julie."

"How's that?"

"When we were kids he never knew who he was unless he was taking his equipment out of his pants."

He stared at the rain.

"Maybe there's something I ought to tell you, Dave, not that maybe you don't already know it," he said. "When people like us, I'm talking about actors and such, come into a community, everybody gets excited and thinks somehow we're going to change their lives. I'm talking about romantic expectations, glamorous relationships with celebrities, that kind of stuff. Then one day we're gone and they're left with some problems they didn't have before. What I'm saying is they become ashamed when they realize how little they always thought of themselves. It's like turning on the lights inside the theater when the matinee is over."

"Our problems are our own, El. Don't give yourself too much credit."

"You cut me loose on a DWI and got me sober, Dave. Or at least I got a good running start at it. What'd you get for it? A mess of trouble you didn't deserve."

"Extend a hand to somebody else. That way you pass on the favor," I said.

I put my hand on the back of his neck. I could feel the stiff taper of his hair under my palm.

"I think about Kelly most when it rains. It's like she was just washed away, like everything that was her was dissolved right into the earth, like she wasn't ever here," he said. "How can a person be a part of your life twenty-four hours a day and then just be gone? I cain't get used to it."

"Maybe people live on inside of us, El, and then one day we get to see them again."

He leaned one hand against a wood post and stared at the rain. His face was wet with mist.

"It's coming to an end," he said. "Everything we've been doing, all the things that have happened, it's fixing to end," he said.

"You're not communicating too well, partner."

"I saw them back yonder in that sugarcane field last night. But this time it was different. They were furling their colors and loading their wagons. They're leaving us."

"Why now?" I heard my voice say inside myself.

He dropped his arm from the post and looked at me. In the shadows his brown skin was shiny with water.

"Something bad's fixing to happen, Dave," he said. "I can feel it like a hand squeezing my heart."

He tapped the flat of his fist against the wood post as though he were trying to reassure himself of its physical presence.

Late that afternoon the sheriff called me on my extension.

"Dave, could you come down to my office and help me with something?" he said.

When I walked through his door he was leaned back in his swivel chair, watching the treetops flatten in the wind outside the window, pushing against his protruding stomach with stiffened fingers as though he were discovering his weight problem for the first time.

"Oh, there you are," he said.

"What's up?"

"Sit down."

"Do we have a problem?"

He brushed at his round, cleft chin with the backs of his fingers.

"I want to get your reaction to what some people might call a developing situation," he said.

"Developing situation?"

"I went two years to USL, Dave. I'm not the most articulate person in the world. I just try to deal with realities as they are."

"I get the feeling we're about to sell the ranch."

"It's not a perfect world."

"Where's the heat coming from?" I said.

"There're a lot of people who want Balboni out of town."

"Which people?"

"Business people."

"They used to get along with him just fine."

"People loved Mussolini until it came time to hang him upside down in a filling station."

"Come on, cut to it, sheriff. Who are the other players?"

"The feds. They want Balboni bad. Doucet's lawyer says his client can put Julie so far down under the penal system they'll have to dig him up to bury him."

"What's Doucet get?"

"He cops to resisting arrest and procuring, one-year max on an honor farm. Then maybe the federal witness protection program, psychological counseling, ongoing supervision, all that jazz."

"Tell them to go fuck themselves."

"Why is it I thought you might say that?"

"Call the press in. Tell them what kind of bullshit's going on here. Give them the morgue photos of Cherry LeBlanc."

"Be serious. They're not going to run pictures like that. Look, we can't indict with what we have. This way we get the guy into custody and permanent supervision."

"He's going to kill again. It's a matter of time."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Don't give an inch. Make them sweat ball bearings."

"With what? I'm surprised his lawyer even wants to accept the procuring charge."

"They think I've got a photo of Doucet with Balboni and Cherry LeBlanc in Biloxi."

"Think?"

"Doucet's face is out of focus. The man in the picture looks like bread dough."

"Great."

"I still say we should exhume the body and match the utility knife to the slash wounds."

"All an expert witness can do is testify that the wounds are consistent with those that might have been made with a utility knife. At least that's what the prosecutor's office says. Doucet will walk and so will Balboni. I say we take the bird in hand."

"It's a mistake."

"You don't have to answer to people, Dave. I do. They want Julie out of this parish and they don't care how we do it."

"Maybe you should give some thought about having to answer to the family of Doucet's next victim, sheriff."

He picked up a chain of paper clips and trailed them around his blotter.

"I don't guess there's much point in continuing this conversation, is there?" he said.

"I'm right about this guy. Don't let him fly."

"Wake up, Dave. He flew this morning." He dropped the paper clips into a clean ashtray and walked past me with his coffee cup. "You'd better take off a little early this afternoon. This hurricane looks to be a real frog stringer."

It hit late that evening, pushing waves ahead of it that curled over houseboats and stilt cabins at West Cote Blanche Bay and flattened them like a huge fist. In the south the sky was the color of burnt pewter, then rain-streaked, flumed with thunderheads. You could see tornadoes dropping like suspended snakes from the clouds, filling with water and splintered trees from the marshes, and suddenly breaking apart like whips snapping themselves into nothingness.

I heard canvas popping loose on the dock, billowing against the ropes Batist and I had tried to secure it with, then bursting free and flapping end over end among the cattails. The windows swam with water, lightning exploded out of the gray-green haze of swamp, and in the distance, in the roar of wind and thunder that seemed to clamp down on us like an enormous black glass bell, I thought I could hear the terrified moaning of my neighbor's cattle as they fought to find cover in a woods where mature trees were whipped out of the soft ground like seedlings.

By midnight the power was gone, the water off, and half the top of an oak tree had crashed on the roof and slid down the side of the house, covering the windows with tangles of branches and leaves.

I heard Alafair cry out in her sleep. I lit a candle, placed it in a saucer on top of her bookcase, which was filled with her collection of Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and got in bed beside her. She wore her Houston Astros baseball cap and had pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her brown eyes moved back and forth as though she were searching out the sounds of the storm that seeped through the heavy cypress planks in the roof. The candlelight flickered on all the memorabilia she had brought back from our vacations or that we had saved as private signposts of the transitions she had made since I had pulled her from the submerged upside-down wreck of a plane off Southwest Pass: conch shells and dried starfish from Key West, her red tennis shoes embossed with the words Left and Right on the toes, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill from Disney-world, her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale on the front and the words Baby Orca that she had fitted over the torso of a huge stuffed frog.

"Dave, the field behind the house is full of lightning," she said. "I can hear animals in the thunder."

"It's Mr. Broussard's cattle. They'll be all right, though. They'll bunch up in the coulee."

"Are you scared?"

"Not really. But it's all right to be scared a little bit if you want to."

"If you're scared, you can't be standup."

"Sure you can. Standup people don't mind admitting they're scared sometimes."

Then I saw something move under the sheet by her feet.

"Alf?"

"What?" Her eyes flicked about the ceiling as though she were watching a bird fly from wall to wall.

I worked the sheet away from the foot of the bed until I was staring at Tripod's silver-tipped rump and black-ringed tail.

"I wonder how this fellow got in your bed, little guy," I said.

"He probably got out of his cage on the back porch."

"Yeah, that's probably it. He's pretty good at opening latched doors, isn't he?"

"I don't think he should go back out there, do you, Dave? He gets scared in the thunder."

"We'll give him a dispensation tonight."

"A dis-What?"

"Never mind. Let's go to sleep, little guy."

"Goodnight, big guy. Goodnight, Tripod. Goodnight, Frogger. Goodnight, Baby Squanto. Goodnight, Curious George. Goodnight, Baby Orca. Goodnight, sea shells. Goodnight-"

"Cork it, Alf, and go to sleep."

"All right. Goodnight, big guy."

"Goodnight, little guy."

In my sleep I heard the storm pass overhead like freight trains grinding down a grade, then suddenly we were in the storm's eye, the air as still as if it had been trapped inside a jar; leaves drifted to the ground from the trees, and I could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead.

The bedroom windows shine with an amber light that might have been aged inside oak. I slip on my khakis and loafers and walk out into the cool air that smells of salt and wet woods, and I see the general's troops forming into long columns that wind their way into other columns that seem to stretch over an infinitely receding landscape of hardwood forests fired with red leaves, peach orchards, tobacco acreage, rivers covered with steam, purple mountain ridges and valleys filled with dust from ambulance and ammunition wagons and wheeled artillery pieces, a cornfield churned into stubble by horses' hooves and men's boots, a meandering limestone wall and a sunken road where wild hogs graze on the bodies of the dead.

The general sits on a cypress stump by my coulee, surrounded by enlisted men and his aides. A blackened coffeepot boils amidst a heap of burning sticks by his foot. The officers as well as enlisted men are eating honeycombs peeled from inside a dead oak tree. The general's tunic is buttoned over his bad arm. A civilian in checkered trousers, high-top shoes, braces, and a straw hat is setting up a big box camera on a tripod in front of the group.

The general tips his hat up on his forehead and waves me toward him.

"A pip of a storm, wasn't it?" he says.

"Why are you leaving?"

"Oh, we're not gone just yet. Say, I want to have your photograph taken with us. That gentleman you see yonder is the correspondent for the Savannah Republican. He writes an outstanding story, certainly as good as this Melville fellow, if you ask me."

"I don't understand what's happening. Why did your wounds open, what were you trying to warn me of? "

"It's my foolishness, son. Like you, I grieve over what I can't change. Was it Bacon that talked about keeping each cut green? "

"Change what?"

"Our fate. Yours, mine. Care for your own. Don't try to emulate me. Look at what I invested my life in. Oh, we were always honorable-Robert Lee, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, A. P. Hill-but we served venal men and a vile enterprise. How many lives would have been spared had we not lent ourselves to the defense of a repellent cause like slavery?"

"People don't get to choose their time in history, general."

"Well said. You're absolutely right." He swings the flat of his right hand and hits me hard on the arm, then rises on his crutch and straightens his tunic. "Now, gentlemen, if y'all will take the honeycombs out of your faces, let's be about this photographing business. I'm amazed at what the sciences are producing these days."

We stand in a group of eight. The enlisted men have Texas accents, powder-blackened teeth, and beards that grow like snakes on their faces. I can smell horse sweat and wood smoke in their clothes. Just as the photographer removes his straw hat and ducks his head under a black cloth at the back of the camera, I look down the long serpentine corridor of amber light again and see thousands of troops advancing on distant fields, their blue and red and white flags bent into the fusillade, their artillery crews laboring furiously at the mouths of smoking cannon, and I know the place names without their ever being spoken-Culp's Hill, Corinth, the Devil's Den, Kennesaw Mountain, the Bloody Lane-and a collective sound that's like no other in the world rises in the wind and blows across the drenched land.

The photographer finishes and stoops under his camera box and lifts the tripod up on his shoulder. The general looks into the freshening breeze, his eyes avoiding me.

"You won't tell me what's at hand, sir?" I say.

"What does it matter as long as you stay true to your principles?"

"Even the saints might take issue with that statement, general."

"I'll see you directly, lieutenant. Be of good heart."

"Don't let them get behind you," I say.

"Ah, the admonition of a veteran." Then his aides help him onto his horse and he waves his hat forward and says, "Hideeho, lads," but there is no joy in his voice.

The general and his mounted escort move down the incline toward my neighbor's field, the tails of their horses switching, the light arcing over them as bright and heated and refractive as a glass of whiskey held up to the sun.

When I woke in the morning the rain was falling evenly on the trees in the yard and a group of mallards were swimming in the pond at the foot of my property. The young sugarcane in my neighbor's field was pounded flat into the washed-out rows as though it had been trampled by livestock. Above the treeline in the north I saw a small tornado drop like a spring from the sky, fill with mud and water from a field, then burst apart as though it had never been there.

I WORKED UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O'CLOCK THAT EVENING. Power was still off in parts of the parish; traffic signals were down; a rural liquor store had been burglarized during the night; two convenience stores had been held up; a drunk set fire to his own truck in the middle of a street; a parolee two days out of Angola beat his wife almost to death; and a child drowned in a storm drain.

Rosie had spent the day with her supervisor in New Orleans and had come back angry and despondent. I didn't even bother to ask her why. She had the paperwork on our case spread all over her desk, as though somehow rereading it and rearranging it from folder to folder would produce a different result, namely, that we could weld the cell door shut on Murphy Doucet and not have to admit that we were powerless over the bureaucratic needs of others.

Just as I closed the drawers in my desk and was about to leave, the phone rang.

"Dave, I think I screwed up. I think you'd better come home," Elrod said.

"What's wrong?"

"Bootsie went to town and asked me to watch Alafair. Then Alafair said she was going down to the bait shop to get us some fried pies."

"Get it out, Elrod. What is it?" I saw Rosie looking at me, her face motionless.

"I forgot Batist had already closed up. I should have gone with her."

I tried to hold back the anger that was rising in my throat.

"Listen, Elrod-"

"I went down there and she was gone. The door's wide open and the key's still in the lock-"

"How long's it been?"

"A half hour."

"A half hour?"

"You don't understand. I checked down at Poteet's first. Then I saw Tripod running loose on his chain in the road."

"What was she wearing?"

"A yellow raincoat and a baseball cap."

"Where's Bootsie?"

"Still in town."

"All right, stay by the phone and I'll be there in a few minutes."

"Dave, I'm sorry, I don't know what to say, I-"

"It's not your fault." I replaced the phone receiver in the cradle, my ears whirring with a sound like wind inside a sea shell, the skin of my face as tight as a pumpkin's.

Before Rosie and I left the office I told the dispatcher to put out an all-car alert on Alafair and to contact the state police.

All the way to the house I tried to convince myself that there was an explanation for her disappearance other than the one that I couldn't bear to hold in the center of my mind for more than a few seconds. Maybe Tripod had simply gotten away from her while she was in the bait shop and she was still looking for him, I thought. Or maybe she had walked down to the general store at the four-corners, had forgotten to lock the door, and Tripod had broken loose from the clothesline on his own.

But Alafair never forgot to lock up the bait shop and she wouldn't leave Tripod clipped to the clothesline in the rain.

Moments after I walked into the bait shop, all the images and fears that I had pushed to the edges of my consciousness suddenly became real and inescapable, in the same way that you wake from a nightmare into daylight and with a sinking of the heart realize that the nightmare is part of your waking day and has not been manufactured by your sleep. Behind the counter I saw her Astros baseball cap, where it had been flattened into the Buckboards by someone's muddy shoe or boot. Elrod and Rosie watched me silently while I picked it up and placed it on top of the counter. I felt as though I were deep under water, past the point of depth tolerance, and something had popped like a stick and pulled loose in my head. Through the screen I saw Bootsie's car turn into the drive and park by the house.

"I should have figured him for it," I said.

"Doucet?" Rosie said.

"He was a cop. He's afraid to do time."

"We're not certain it's Doucet, Dave," she said.

"He knows what happens to cops inside mainline jails. Particularly to a guy they make as a short-eyes. I'm going up to talk to Bootsie. Don't answer the phone, okay?"

Rosie's teeth made white marks on her bottom lip.

"Dave, I want to bring in the Bureau as soon as we have evidence that it's a kidnapping," she said.

"So far nothing official we do to this guy works. It's time both of us hear that, Rosie," I said, and went out the screen door and started up the dock.

I hadn't gone ten yards when I heard the telephone ring behind me. I ran back through the rain and jerked the receiver out of the cradle.

"You sound out of breath," the voice said.

Don't blow this one.

"Turn her loose, Doucet. You don't want to do this," I said. I looked into Rosie's face and pointed toward the house.

"I'll make it simple for both of us. You take the utility knife and the photo out of the evidence locker. You put them in a Ziploc bag. At eight o'clock tomorrow morning you leave the bag in the trash can on the corner of Royal and St. Ann in New Orleans. I don't guess you ought to plan on getting a lot of sleep tonight."

Rosie had eased the screen door shut behind her and was walking fast up the incline toward the house in the fading light.

"The photo's a bluff. It's out of focus," I said. "You can't be identified in it."

"Then you won't mind parting with it."

"You can walk, Doucet. We can't make the case on you."

"You lying sonofabitch. You tore up my house. Your tow truck scratched up my car. You won't rest till you fuck me up in every way you can."

"You're doing this because your property was damaged?"

"I'll tell you what else I'm going to do if you decide to get clever on me. No, that's not right. It won't be me, because I never hurt a child in my life. You got that?"

He stopped speaking and waited for me. Then he said it again: "You got that, Dave?"

"Yes," I said.

"But there's a guy who used to work in Balboni's movies, a guy who spent eleven years in Parchman for killing a little nigger girl. You want to know how it went down?"

Then he told me. I stared out the screen door at my neighbor's dark green lawn, at his enormous roses that had burst in the rain and were now scattered in the grass like pink tear drops. A dog began barking, and then I heard it cry out sharply as though it had been whipped across the ribs with a chain.

"Doucet-" I broke in. My voice was wet, as though my vocal cords were covered with membrane.

"You don't like my description? You think I'm just trying to scare you? Get a hold of one of his snuff films. You'll agree he's an artist."

"Listen to me carefully. If you hurt my daughter, I'll get to you one way or another, in or out of jail, in the witness protection program, it won't matter, I'll take you down in pieces, Doucet."

"You've said only one thing right today. I'm going to walk, and you're going to help me, unless you've let that affirmative-action bitch fuck most of your brains out. By the way, forget the trace. I'm at a phone booth and you've got shit on your nose."

The line went dead.

I was trembling as I walked up the slope to the house.

Rosie opened the screen door and came out on the gallery with Bootsie behind her. The skin of Bootsie's face was drawn back against the bone, her throat ruddy with color as though she had a windburn.

"He hung up too soon. We couldn't get it," Rosie said.

"Dave, my God. What-" Bootsie said. Her pulse was jumping in her neck.

"Let's go inside," I said, and put my arm around her shoulder. "Rosie, I'll be out in just a minute."

"No, talk to me right here," Bootsie said.

"Murphy Doucet has her. He wants the evidence that he thinks can put him in jail."

"What for?" she said. "You told me yesterday that he'll probably get out of it."

"He doesn't know that. He's not going to believe anybody who tells him that, either."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know, Boots. But we're going to get her back. If the sheriff calls, don't tell him anything. At least not right now."

I felt Rosie's eyes on the side of my face.

"What are you doing, Dave?" Bootsie said.

"I'll call you in a little while," I said. "Stay with Elrod, okay?"

"What if that man calls back?"

"He won't. He'll figure the line's open."

Before she could speak again, I went inside and opened the closet door in the bedroom. From under some folded blankets on the top shelf I took out a box of twelve-gauge shells and the Remington pump shotgun whose barrel I had sawed off in front of the pump handle and whose sportsman's plug I had removed years ago. I shook the shells, a mixture of deer slugs and double-ought buckshot, out on the bed and pressed them one by one into the magazine until I felt the spring come snug against the fifth shell. I dropped the rest of the shells into my raincoat pockets.

"Call the FBI, Dave," Bootsie said behind me.

"No," I said.

"Then I'll do it."

"Boots, if they screw it up, he'll kill her. We'll never even find the body."

Her face was white. I set the shotgun down and pulled her against me. She felt small, her back rounded, inside my arms.

"We've got a few hours," I said. "If we can't get her back in that time, I'm going to do what he wants and hope that he turns her loose. I'll bring the sheriff and the FBI in on it, too."

She stepped back from me and looked up into my face.

"Hope that he-" she said.

"Doucet's never left witnesses."

She wanted to come with us, but I left her on the gallery with Elrod, staring after us with her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

It was almost dark when we turned off the old two-lane highway onto the dirt road that led to Spanish Lake. The rain was falling in the trees and out on the lake and I could see the lights burning in one trailer under the hanging moss by the water's edge. All the way out to the lake Rosie had barely spoken, her small hands folded on top of her purse, the shadows washing across her face like rivulets of rain.

"I have to be honest with you, Dave. I don't know how far I can go along with this," she said.

"Call in your people now and I'll stonewall them."

"Do you think that little of us?"

"Not you I don't. But the people you work for are pencil pushers. They'll cover their butts, they'll do it by the numbers, and I'll end up losing Alafair."

"What are you going to do if you catch Doucet?"

"That's up to him."

"Is that straight, Dave?"

I didn't answer.

"I saw you put something in your raincoat pocket when you were coming out of the bedroom," she said. "I got the impression you were concealing it from Bootsie. Maybe it was just my imagination."

"Maybe you're thinking too much about the wrong things, Rosie."

"I want your word this isn't a vigilante mission."

"You're worried about procedure.… In dealing with a man like this? What's the matter with you?"

"Maybe you're forgetting who your real friends are, Dave."

I stopped the truck at the security building, rolled down my window, and held up my badge for the man inside, who was leaned back in his chair in front of a portable television set. He put on his hat, came outside, and dropped the chain for me. I could hear the sounds of a war movie through the open door.

"I'll just leave it down for you," he said.

"Thanks. Is that Julie Balboni's trailer with the lights on?" I said.

"Yeah, that's it."

"Who's with him?"

The security guard's eyes went past me to Rosie.

"His reg'lar people, I guess," he said. "I don't pay it much mind."

"Who else?"

"He brings out guests from town." His eyes looked directly into mine.

I rolled up the window, thumped across the chain, and drove into the oak grove by the lake. Twenty yards from Balboni's lighted trailer was the collapsed and blackened shell of a second trailer, its empty windows blowing with rain, its buckled floor leaking cinders into pools of water, the tree limbs above it scrolled with scorched leaves. To one side of Balboni's trailer a Volkswagon and the purple Cadillac with the tinted black windows were parked between two trees. I saw someone light a cigarette inside the Cadillac.

I stepped out of the truck with the shotgun hanging from my right arm and tapped with one knuckle on the driver's window. He rolled the glass down, and I saw the long pink scar inside his right forearm, the boxed hairline on the back of his neck, the black welt like an angry insect on his bottom lip where I had broken off his tooth in the restaurant on East Main. The man in the passenger's seat had the flattened eyebrows and gray scar tissue around his eyes of a prizefighter; he bent his neck down so he could look upward at my face and see who I was.

"What d'you want?" the driver said.

"Both of you guys are fired. Now get out of here and don't come back."

"Listen to this guy. You think this is Dodge City?" the driver said.

"Didn't you learn anything the first time around?" I said.

"Yeah, that you're a prick who blindsided me, that I can sue your ass, that Julie's got lawyers who can-"

I lifted the shotgun above the window ledge and screwed the barrel into his cheek.

"Do yourself a favor and visit your family in New Orleans," I said.

His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he tried to turn his head away from the pressure of the shotgun barrel. I pressed it harder into the hollow of his cheek.

"Fuck it, do what the man says. I told you the job was turning to shit when Julie run off Cholo," the other man said. "Hey, you hear me, man, back off. We're neutral about any personal beefs you got, you understand what I'm saying? You ought to do something about that hard-on you got, knock it down with a hammer or something, show a little fucking control."

I stepped back and pulled the shotgun free of the window. The driver stared at my hand wrapped in the trigger guard.

"You crazy sonofabitch, you had the safety off," he said.

"Happy motoring," I said.

I waited until the taillights of the Cadillac had disappeared through the trees, then I walked up onto the trailer's steps, turned the door knob, and flung the door back into the wall.

A girl not over nineteen, dressed only in panties and a pink bra, was wiggling into a pair of jeans by the side of two bunk beds that had been pushed together in the middle of the floor. Her long hair was unevenly peroxided and looked like twisted strands of honey on her freckled shoulders; for some reason the crooked lipstick on her mouth made me think of a small red butterfly. Julie Balboni stood at an aluminum sink, wearing only a black silk jockstrap, his salt-and-pepper curls in his eyes, his body covered with fine black hair, a square bottle of Scotch poised above a glass filled with cracked ice. His eyes dropped to the shotgun that hung from my right hand.

"You finally losing your mind, Dave?" he said.

I picked up the girl's blouse from the bed and handed it to her.

"Are you from New Iberia?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," she said, her eyes fastened on mine as she pushed her feet into a pair of pumps.

"Stay away from this man," I said. "Women who hang around him end up dead."

Her frightened face looked at Julie, then back at me.

Rosie put her hands on the girl's shoulders and turned her toward the door.

"You can go now," she said. "Listen to what Detective Robicheaux tells you. This man won't put you in the movies, not unless you want to work in pornographic films. Are you okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Here's your purse. Don't worry about what's happening here. It doesn't have anything to do with you. Just stay away from this man. He's in a lot of trouble," Rosie said.

The girl looked again at Julie, then went quickly out the door and into the dark. Julie was putting on his trousers now, with his back to us. The walls were covered with felt paintings of red-mouthed tigers and boa constrictors wrapped around the bodies of struggling unicorns. By the door was the canvas bag filled with baseballs, gloves, and metal bats. Julie's skin looked brown and rubbed with oil in the glow from a bedside lava lamp.

"It looks like you did a real number on Mikey Goldman's trailer," I said.

He zipped his fly. "Like most of the time, you're wrong," he said. "I don't go around setting fires on my own movie set. That's Cholo Manelli's work."

"Why does he want to hurt Mikey Goldman?"

"He don't. He thought it was my trailer. He's got his nose bent out of joint about some imaginary wrong I done to him. The first thing Cholo does in the morning is stick his head up his hole. You guys ought to hang out together."

"Why do you think I'm here, Julie?"

"How the fuck should I know? Nothing you do makes sense to me anymore, Dave. You want to toss the place, see if that little chippy left a couple of 'ludes in the sheets?"

"You think this is some chickenshit roust, Julie?"

He combed his curls back over his head with his fingers. His navel looked like a black ball of hair above his trousers.

"You take yourself too serious," he said.

"Murphy Doucet has my daughter." I watched his face. He put his thumbnail into a molar and picked out a piece of food with it. "Did you hear what I said?"

He poured three fingers of Scotch into his glass, then dropped a lemon rind into the ice, his face composed, his eyes glancing out the window at a distant flicker of lightning.

"Too bad," he said.

"Too bad, huh?"

"Yeah. I don't like to hear stuff like that. It upsets me."

"Upsets you, does it?"

"Yeah. That's why I don't watch that show Unsolved Mysteries. It upsets me. Hey, maybe you can get her face on one of those milk cartons."

As he drank from his highball, I could see the slight tug at the corner of his mouth, the smile in his eyes. He picked up his flowered shirt from the back of a chair and began putting it on in front of a bathroom door mirror as though we were not there.

I handed Rosie the shotgun, put my hands on my hips, and studied the tips of my shoes. Then I slipped an aluminum bat out of the canvas bag, choked up on the taped handle, and ripped it down across his neck and shoulders. His forehead bounced off the mirror, pocking and spider-webbing the glass like it had been struck with a ball bearing. He turned back toward me, his eyes and mouth wide with disbelief, and I hit him again, hard, this time across the middle of the face. He crashed headlong into the toilet tank, his nose roaring blood, one side of his mouth drooping as though all the muscle endings in it had been severed.

I leaned over and cuffed both of his wrists around the bottom of the stool. His eyes were receded and out of focus, close-set like a pig's. The water in the bowl under his chin was filling with drops of dark color like pieces of disintegrating scarlet cotton.

I nudged his arm with the bat. His eyes clicked up into my face.

"Where is she, Julie?" I said.

"I cut Doucet loose. I don't have nothing to do with what he does. You get off my fucking case or I'm gonna square this, Dave. It don't matter if you're a cop or not, I'll put out an open contract, I'll cowboy your whole fucking family. I'll-"

I turned around and took the shotgun out of Rosie's hands. I could see words forming in her face, but I didn't wait for her to speak. I bent down on the edge of Julie's vision.

"Your window of opportunity is shutting down, Feet."

He blew air out of his nose and tried to wipe his face on his shoulder.

"I'm telling you the truth. I don't know nothing about what that guy does," he said. "He's a geek… I don't hire geeks, I run them off… I got enough grief without crazy people working for me."

"You're lying again, Julie," I said, stepped back, leveled the shotgun barrel above his head, and fired at an angle into the toilet tank. The double-ought buckshot blew water and splintered ceramic all over the wall. I pumped the spent casing out on the floor. Julie jerked the handcuffs against the base of the stool, like an animal trying to twist itself out of a metal trap.

I touched the warm tip of the barrel against his eyebrow.

"Last chance, Feet."

His eyes closed; he broke wind uncontrollably in his pants; water and small chips of ceramic dripped out of his hair.

"He's got a camp south of Bayou Vista," he said. "It's almost to Atchafalaya Bay. The deed ain't in his name, nobody knows about it, it's like where he does all his weird stuff. It's right where the dirt road ends at the salt marsh. I seen it once when we were out on my boat."

"Is my daughter there?" I said quietly.

"I just told you, it's where he goes to be weird. You figure it out."

"We'll be back later, Feet. You can make a lot of noise, if you like, but your gumballs are gone and the security guard is watching war movies. If I get my daughter back, I'll have somebody from the department come out and pick you up. You can file charges against me then or do whatever you want. If you've lied to me, that's another matter."

Then I saw a secret concern working in his eyes, a worry, a fear that had nothing to do with me or the pain and humiliation that I had inflicted upon him. It was the fear that you inevitably see in the eyes of men like Julie and his kind when they realize that through an ironic accident they are now dealing with forces that are as cruel and unchecked by morality as the energies they'd awakened with every morning of their lives.

"Cholo-" he said.

"What about him?" I said.

"He's out there somewhere."

"I doubt it."

"You don't know him. He carries a barber's razor. He's got fixations. He don't forget things. He tied parts of a guy all over a ceiling fan once."

His chest moved up and down with his breathing against the rim of the toilet bowl. His brow was kneaded with lines, his nose a wet red smear against his face, his eyes twitching with a phlegmy light.

I shut off the valve that was spewing water upward into the shattered tank, then found a quilt and a pile of towels in a linen closet and placed the towels under Julie's forearms and the quilt between his knees and the bottom of the stool.

"That's about all I can do for you, Feet. Maybe it's the bottom of the ninth for both of us," I said.

The front wheels of the truck shimmied on the cement as I wound up the transmission on Highway 90 southeast of town. It had stopped raining, the oaks and palm trees by the road's edge were coated with mist, and the moon was rising in the east like a pale white and mottled-blue wafer trailing streamers of cloud torn loose from the Gulf's horizon.

"I think I'm beyond all my parameters now, Dave," Rosie said.

"What would you do differently? I'd like for you to tell me that, Rosie."

"I believe we should have Balboni picked up-suspicion for involvement in a kidnapping."

"And my daughter would be dead as soon as Doucet heard about it. Don't tell me that's not true, either."

"I'm not sure you're in control anymore, Dave. That remark about the bottom of the ninth-"

"What about it?"

"You're thinking about killing Doucet, aren't you?"

"I can put you down at the four-corners up there. Is that what you want?"

"Do you think you're the only person who cares about your daughter? Do you think I want to do anything that would put her in worse jeopardy than she's already in?"

"The army taught me what a free-fire zone is, Rosie. It's a place where the winners make up the rules after the battle's over. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there."

"You're wrong about all this, Dave. What we don't do is let the other side make us be like them."

Ahead I could see the lighted, tree-shadowed white stucco walls of a twenty-four-hour filling station that had been there since the 1930s. I eased my foot off the gas pedal and looked across the seat at Rosie.

"Go on," she said. "I won't say anything else."

We drove through Jeanerette and Franklin into the bottom of the Atchafalaya Basin, where Louisiana's wetlands bled into the Gulf of Mexico, not far from where this story actually began with a racial lynching, in the year 1957. Rosie had fallen asleep against the door. At Bayou Vista I found the dirt road that led south to the sawgrass and Atchafalaya Bay. The fields looked like lakes of pewter under the moon, the sugarcane pressed flat like straw into the water. Wood farmhouses and barns were cracked sideways on their foundations, as though a gigantic thumb had squeezed down on their roofs, and along one stretch of road the telephone poles had been snapped off even with the ground for a half mile and flung like sticks into distant trees.

Then the road entered a corridor of oaks, and through the trunks I saw four white horses galloping in circles in a mist-streaked pasture, spooking against the barbed-wire fences, mud flying from their hooves, their nostrils dilated, their eyes bright with fear against a backdrop of dry lightning, their muscles rippling under their skin like silvery water sliding over stone. Then I was sure I saw a figure by the side of the road, the palmetto shadows waving behind him, his steel-gray tunic buttoned at his throat, a floppy campaign hat pulled over his eyes.

I hit my bright lights, and for just a moment I saw his elongated milk-white face as though a flashbulb had exploded in front of it. "What are you doing here?" I said.

"Don't use those whom you love to justify a dishonorable cause."

"That's rhetoric."

"You gave the same counsel to the Sykes boy."

"It was you who told me to do it under a black flag. Remember? We blow up their shit big time, general."

"Then you will do it on your own, suh, and without me."

The truck's front springs bounced in a chuckhole and splashed a sheet of dirty water across the window; then I was beyond the pasture and the horses that wheeled and raced in the moonlight, traveling deep into the tip of the wetlands, with flooded woods on each side of me, blue herons lifting on extended wings out of the canals, the moist air whipped with the smell of salt and natural gas from the oil platforms out in the swamp.

The road bent out of the trees, and I saw the long expanses of sawgrass and mudflats that spread out into the bay, and the network of channels that had been cut by the oil companies and that were slowly poisoning the marshes with salt water. Rosie was awake now, rubbing her eyes with one knuckle, her face stiff with fatigue.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep," she said.

"It's been a long day."

"Where's the camp?"

"There's some shacks down by the flats, but they look deserted."

I pulled the truck to the side of the road and cut the lights. The tide was out, and the bay looked flat and gray and seabirds were pecking shellfish out of the wet sand in the moonlight. Then a wind gusted out of the south and bent a stand of willow trees that stood on a small knoll between the marsh and the bay.

"Dave, there's a light back in those trees," Rosie said.

Then I saw it, too, at the end of a two-lane sandy track that wound through the willows and over the knoll.

"All right, let's do it," I said, and pushed down on the door handle.

"Dave, before we go in there, I want you to hear something. If we find the wrong thing, if Alafair's not all right, it's not because of anything you did. It's important for you to accept that now. If I had been in your place, I'd have done everything the same way you have."

I squeezed her hand.

"A cop couldn't have a better partner than Rosie Gomez," I said.

We got out of the truck and left the doors open to avoid making any unnecessary sound, and walked up the sandy track toward the trees. I could hear gulls cawing and wheeling overhead and the solitary scream of a nutria deep in the marsh. Humps of garbage stood by the sides of the track, and then I realized that it was medical waste-bandages, hypodermic vials, congealed bags of gelatin, sheets that were stiff with dried fluids.

We moved away from the side of the road and into the trees. I walked with a shotgun at port arms, the.45 heavy in the right-hand pocket of my raincoat. Rosie had her chrome-plated.357 magnum gripped with both hands at an upward angle, just to the right of her cheek. Then the wind bent the trees again and blew a shower of wet leaves into a clearing, where we could see a tin-roofed cabin with a small gallery littered with cane poles, crab traps, and hand-thrown fishnets, and a Coleman lantern hissing whitely on a wood table in the front room. In the back were an outhouse and a pirogue set up on sawhorses, and behind the outhouse was Murphy Doucet's blue Mercury.

A shadow moved across the window, then a man with his back to us sat down at the table with a coffee pot and a thick white mug in his hands. Even through the rusted screen I could see his stiff, gray military haircut and the deeply tanned skin of his neck whose tone and texture reminded me of a cured tobacco leaf.

We should have been home free. But then I saw the moonlight glint on the wire that was stretched across the two-lane track, three inches above the sand. I propped the shotgun against a tree, knelt down in the wet leaves, and ran my fingers along the wire until I touched two empty Spam cans that were tied with string to the wire, then two more, then two more after that. Through the underbrush, against the glow of moonlight in the clearing, I could make out a whole network of nylon fishing line strung between tree trunks, branches, roots, and underbrush, and festooned with tin cans, pie plates, and even a cow bell.

I was sweating heavily inside my raincoat now. I wiped the salt out of my eyes with my hand.

One lung-bursting rush across the clearing, I thought. Clear the gallery in one step, bust the door out of the jamb, then park a big one in his brisket and it's over.

But I knew better. I would sound like a traveling junkyard before I ever made the gallery, and if Alafair was still alive, in all probability he would be holding a pistol at her head.

"We have to wait until it's light or until he comes out," I whispered to Rosie.

We knelt down in the trees, in the damp air, in the layered mat of black and yellow willow leaves, in the mosquitoes that rose in clouds from around our knees and perched on our faces and the backs of our hands and necks. I saw him get up once, walk to a shelf, then return to the table and read a magazine while he ate soda crackers out of a box. My thighs burned and a band of pain that I couldn't relieve began to spread slowly across my back. Rosie sat with her rump resting on her heels, wiping the mosquitoes off her forearms, her pink skirt hiked up on her thighs, her.357 propped in the fork of a tree. Her neck was shiny with sweat.

Then at shortly after four I could hear mullet jumping in the water, a 'gator flop his tail back in the marsh, a solitary mockingbird singing on the far side of the clearing. The air changed; a cool breeze lifted off the bay and blew the smell of fish and grass shrimp across the flats. Then a pale glow, like cobalt, like the watery green cast of summer light right before a rain, spread under the rim of banked clouds on the eastern horizon, and in minutes I could see the black shapes of jetties extending far out into the bay, small waves white-capping with the incoming tide, the rigging of a distant shrimp boat dropping below a swell.

Then Murphy Doucet wrote the rest of the script for us. He turned down the Coleman lantern, stretched his back, picked up something from the table, went out the front door, and walked behind our line of vision on the far side of the cabin toward the outhouse.

We moved out of the trees into the clearing, stepping over and under the network of can-rigged fishline, then divided in two directions at the corner of the gallery. I could smell a fecund salty odor like dead rats and stagnant water from under the cabin.

The rear windows were boarded with slats from packing boxes and I couldn't see inside or hear any movement. At the back of the cabin I paused, held the shotgun flat against my chest, and looked around the comer. Murphy Doucet was almost to the door of the outhouse, a pair of untied hunting boots flopping on his feet, a silvery object glinting in his right hand. Beyond the outhouse, by the marsh's edge, a blue-tick dog was tied to a post surrounded by a ring of feces.

I stepped out from the lee of the cabin, threw the stock of the shotgun to my shoulder, sighted between Doucet's neck and shoulder blades, and felt the words already rising in my throat, like bubbles out of a boiling pot, Surprise time, motherfucker! Throw it away! Do it now! when he heard Rosie trip across a fishline that was tied to a cow bell on the gallery.

He looked once over his shoulder in her direction, then leaped behind the outhouse and ran toward the marsh on a long green strip of dry ground covered with buttercups. But five yards before he would have splashed into the willows and dead cypress and perhaps out of our field of fire, his untied boots sank into a pile of rotting medical waste that was matted with the scales of morning-glory vines. A wooden crutch that looked hand-hewn, with a single shaft that fitted into the armrest, sprang from under his boot and hung between his legs like a stick in bicycle spokes.

He turned around helplessly toward Rosie, falling backward off balance now, his blue eyes jittering frantically, his right arm extended toward her, as though it were not too late for her to recognize that his hand held a can of dog food rather than a weapon, just as she let off the first round of her.357 and caught him right in the sternum.

But it didn't stop there. She continued to fire with both hands gripped on the pistol, each soft-nosed slug knocking him backward with the force of a jackhammer, his shirt exploding with scarlet flowers on his bony chest, until the last round in the cylinder hit him in the rib cage and virtually eviscerated him on the water's edge. Then he simply sat down on top of his crumpled legs as though all the bone in his body had been surgically removed.

When she lowered the weapon toward the ground, her cheeks looked like they contained tiny red coals, and her eyes were frozen wide, as though she were staring into a howling storm, one that was filled with invisible forces and grinding winds only she could hear.

But I didn't have time to worry about the line that Rosie had crossed and the grief and knowledge that dark moment would bring with it.

Behind me I heard wood slats breaking loose from the back of the cabin, then I saw metal chair legs crash through the window, and Alafair climbing over the windowsill, her rump hanging in midair, her pink tennis shoes swinging above the damp earth.

I ran to her, grabbed her around the waist, and held her tightly against me. She buried her head under my chin and clamped her legs on my side like a frog, and I could feel the hard resilience of her muscles, the heat in her hands, the spastic breathing in her throat as though she had just burst from deep water into warm currents of salt air and a sunlit day loud with the sound of seabirds.

"Did he hurt you, Squanto?" I said, my heart dropping with my own question.

"I told him he'd better not. I told him what you'd do. I told him you'd rip his nuts out. I told him-"

"Where'd you get this language, Alf?"

A shudder went through her body, as though she had just removed her hand from a hot object, then her eyes squeezed shut and she began to cry.

"It's all right, Baby Squanto. We're going back home now," I said.

I carried her on my hip back toward the truck, her arms around my neck, her face wet against my shirt.

I heard Rosie walking in the leaves behind me. She dumped the spent brass from the cylinder of her.357 into her palm, looked at them woodenly, then threw them tinkling into the trees.

"Get out of it, Rosie. That guy dealt the play a long time ago."

"I couldn't stop. Why didn't I stop shooting? It was over and I kept shooting."

"Because your mind shuts down in moments like that."

"No, he paid for something that happened to me a long time ago, didn't he?"

"Let the Freudians play with that stuff. They seldom spend time on the firing line. It'll pass. Believe me, it always does."

"Not hitting a man four times after he was going down. A man armed with a can of dog food."

I looked at the spreading glow out on the bay and the gulls streaking over the tide's edge.

"He had a piece on him, Rosie. You just don't remember it right now," I said, and handed Alafair to her.

I went back into the trees, found my raincoat, and carried it over my arm to the place where Murphy Doucet sat slumped among the buttercups, his torn side draining into the water. I took Lou Girard's.32 revolver from my raincoat pocket, wiped the worn bluing and the taped wooden grips on my handkerchief, fitted it into Doucet's hand, and closed his stiffened fingers around the trigger guard.

On his forearm was a set of teethmarks that looked like they had been put there by a child.

Next time out don't mess with Alafair Robicheaux or the Confederate army, Murph, I thought.

Then I picked up the crutch that had caught between his legs. The wood was old, weathered gray, the shaft shaved and beveled by a knife, the armrest tied with strips of rotted flannel.

The sun broke through the clouds overhead, and under the marsh's green canopy I could see hammered gold leaf hanging in the columns of spinning light, and gray shapes like those of long-dead sentinels, and like a man who has finally learned not to think reasonably in an unreasonable world, I offered the crutch at the air, at the shapes in the trees and at the sound of creatures moving through the water, saying, "Don't you want to take this with you, sir?" But if he answered, I did not hear it.