Outside, the air tasted like pennies and felt like it had been superheated in an electric oven. Even the wind blew off the pavement like heat rising from a wood stove. I started my truck, unbuttoned my shirt to my waist, and headed toward I-10 and home.
When I passed Lake Pontchartrain, the moon was up and small waves were breaking against the rim of gray sandy beach by the highway. I wanted to stop the truck, strip to my skivvies, wade out to the drop-off, then dive down through the descending layers of temperature until I struck a cold, dark current at the bottom that would wash the last five hours out of my pores.
But Lake Pontchartrain, like the city of New Orleans, was deceptive. Under its slate-green, capping waves, its moon-glazed surfaces, its twenty-four-mile causeway glowing with electric light, waste of every kind lay trapped in the dark sediment, and the level of toxicity was so high that it was now against the law to swim in the lake.
I kept the truck wide open, the plastic ball on the floor stick shaking under my palm, all the way to the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge. Then I rolled down the elevated causeway through the Atchafalaya marsh and the warm night air that smelled of sour mud and hyacinths blooming back in the trees. Out over the pewter-colored bays, the dead cypress trunks were silhouetted against burning gas flares and the vast black-green expanse of sawgrass and flooded willow islands. Huge thunderclouds tumbled one upon another like curds of black smoke from an old fire, and networks of lightning were bursting silently all over the southern sky. I thought I could smell raindrops on the wind, as cool and clean and bright as the taste of white alcohol on the tip of the tongue.
Outside our bedroom window the pecan trees were motionless and gray, soaked with humidity, in the false dawn. Then the early red sun broke above the treeline in the marsh like a Lucifer match being scratched against the sky.
Bootsie slept on her side in her nightgown, the sheet molded against her thigh, her face cool, her auburn hair ruffled on the pillow by the window fan. In the early morning her skin always had a glow to it, like the pale pink light inside a rose. I moved her body against mine and kissed her mouth lightly. Without opening her eyes she smiled sleepily, slipped her arms around my back, widened her thighs, and pressed her stomach against me.
Out on the bayou, I thought I heard a bass leap from the water in a wet arc and then reenter the surface, slapping his tail, as he slid deep into the roots of the floating hyacinths.
Bootsie put her legs in mine, her breath warm against my cheek, one hand in the small of my back, her soft rump rolling against the bed; then I felt that heart-twisting moment begin to grow inside me, past any point of control, like a log dam in a canyon resisting a flooded streambed, then cracking and bursting loose in a rush of white water and uprooted boulders.
I lay beside her and held one of her hands and kissed the thin film of perspiration on her shoulders.
She felt my face with her fingers and touched the white patch in my hair as though she were exploring a physical curiosity in me for the first time.
"Ole Streak," she said, and smiled.
"Cops get worse names."
She was quiet a moment, then she said my name with a question mark beside it the way she always did when she was about to broach a difficult subject.
"Yes?" I said.
"Elrod Sykes called while you were in New Orleans. He wanted to apologize for coming to our house drunk."
"Okay."
"He wants to go to an AA meeting with you."
"All right, I'll talk to him about it."
She looked at the revolving shadows the window fan made on the wall.
"He's rented a big boat," she said. "He wants to go fishing out on the salt."
"When?"
"Day after tomorrow."
"What'd you tell him?"
"That I'd have to check with you."
"You don't think we should go?"
"He troubles me, Dave."
"Maybe the guy is psychic. That doesn't mean he's bad news."
"I have a strange feeling about him. Like he's going to do something to us."
"He's a practicing alcoholic, Boots. He's a sick man. How's he going to harm us?"
"I don't know. It's just the way I feel. I can't explain it."
"Do you think he's trying to manipulate me?"
"How do you mean?"
I raised up on one elbow and looked into her face. I tried to smile.
"I have an obligation to help other alcoholics," I said.
"Maybe it looks like Elrod's trying to pull some strings on me, that maybe instead of helping him I'll end up back on the dirty-boogie again."
"Let him find his own help, Dave."
"I think he's harmless."
"I should have listened to you. I shouldn't have invited them into the house."
"It's not good to do this, Boots. You're worrying about a problem that doesn't exist."
"He's too interested in you. There's a reason for it. I know it."
"I'll invite him to go to a meeting. We'll forget about the fishing trip."
"Promise me that, Dave."
"I do."
"You mean it, no going back on it?"
"You've got my word."
She cupped my fingers in her hand and put her head under my chin. In the shadowy light I could see her heart tripping against her breast.
I PARKED IN THE LOT BEHIND THE OFFICE AND WALKED TOWARD the back door. Two uniformed deputies had just taken a black man in handcuffs into the building, and four others were drinking coffee out of foam cups and smoking cigarettes in the shade against the wall. I heard one of them use my name, then a couple of them laugh when I walked by.
I stopped and walked back to them.
"How y'all doing today?" I said.
"What's going on, Dave?" Rufus Arceneaux said. He had been a tech sergeant in the Marine Corps and he still wore his sun-bleached hair in a military crewcut. He took off his shades and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"I'd better get back on it," one deputy said, flipped away his cigarette, and walked toward his cruiser.
"What's the joke about, Rufus?" I said.
"It's nothing I said, Dave. I was just quoting the boss man," Rufus said. His green eyes were full of humor as he looked at the other deputies.
"What did the sheriff have to say?"
"Hey, Dave, fair is fair. Don't lay this off on me," he said.
"Do you want to take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and tell me what you're talking about?"
"Hey, come on, man," he said, chuckling.
"What the fuck, it's no big deal. Tell him," the deputy next to him said.
"The sheriff said if the governor of Lou'sana invited the whole department to dinner, Dave would be the one guy who'd manage to spit in the punch bowl."
Then the three of them were silent, suppressing their grins, their eyes roving around the parking lot.
"Drop by my office sometime today, Rufus," I said. "Anytime before five o'clock. You think you can work it in?"
"It's just a joke, Dave. I'm not the guy who said it, either."
"That's right. So it's nothing personal. I'd just like to go through your jacket with you."
"What for?"
"You've been here eight or nine years, haven't you?"
"That's right."
"Why is it that I always have the feeling you'd like to be an NCO again, that maybe you have some ambitions you're not quite telling us about?"
His lips became a tight, stitched line, and I saw a slit of yellow light in his eye.
"Think about it and I'll talk to you later, Rufus," I said, and went inside the building, into the air-conditioned odor of cigar butts and tobacco spittle, and closed the door behind me.
Ten minutes later the sheriff walked into my office and sat down in front of my desk with his arms propped stiffly on his thighs. In his red-faced concentration he reminded me of a football coach sitting on the edge of a bench.
"Where do you think we should begin?" he said.
"You got me."
"From what I hear about that scene in the restaurant, you tried to tear that fellow apart."
"Those guys think they're in the provinces and they can do what they want. Sometimes you have to turn them around."
"It looks like you got your message across. Balboni had to take the guy to the hospital. You broke his tooth off inside his gums."
"It was a bad morning. I let things get out of control. It won't happen again."
He didn't answer. I could hear him breathing through his nose.
"You want some coffee?" I said.
"No."
I got up and filled my cup from my coffee maker in the corner.
"I've had two phone calls already about your trip to New Orleans last night," he said.
"What about it?"
He took a folded-back notebook out of his shirt pocket and looked at the first page.
"Did you ever hear of a black guy named Robert Brown?" he asked.
"Yep, that's Downtown Bobby Brown."
"He's trying to file charges against you. He says you smashed his face into a men's-room door at the bus depot."
"I see."
"What the hell are you doing, Dave?"
"He's a pimp and a convicted child molester. When I found him, he was scamming two girls who couldn't have been over sixteen years old. I wonder if he passed on that information when he filed his complaint."
"I don't give a damn what this guy did. I'm worried about a member of my department who might have confused himself with Wyatt Earp."
"This guy's charges aren't going anywhere and you know it."
"I wish I had your confidence. It looks like you got some people's attention over in Jefferson Parish, too."
"I don't understand."
"The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department seems to think we may have a loose cannon crashing around on our deck."
"What's their problem?"
"You didn't check in with them, you didn't coordinate with anybody, you simply went up and down the Airline Highway on your own, questioning hookers and bartenders about a pimp with no name."
"So?"
He rubbed the cleft in his round chin, then dropped the flat of his hand on his thigh.
"They say you screwed up a surveillance, that you blew a sting operation of some kind," he said.
"How?"
"I don't know."
"It sounds like bullshit to me, sheriff. It sounds like cops on a pad who don't want outsiders walking around on their turf."
"Maybe that's true, Dave, but I'm worried about you. I think you're overextending yourself and you're not hearing me when I talk to you about it."
"Did Twinky Lemoyne call?"
"No. Why should he?"
"I went over to Lafayette and questioned him yesterday afternoon."
He removed his rimless glasses, wiped them with a Kleenex, and put them back on. His eyes came back to meet mine.
"This was after I talked to you about involving people in the investigation who seem to have no central bearing in it?" he asked.
"I'm convinced that somehow Baby Feet was mixed up with Cherry LeBlanc, sheriff. Twinky Lemoyne has business ties to Feet. The way I read it, that makes him fair game."
"I'm really sorry to hear this, Dave."
"An investigation clears as well as implicates people. His black employees seem to think well of him. He didn't call in a complaint about my talking to him, either. Maybe he's an all-right guy."
"You disregarded my instructions, Dave."
"I saw the bodies of both those girls, sheriff."
"And?"
"Frankly I'm not real concerned about whose toes I step on."
He rose from his chair and tucked his shirt tightly into his gunbelt with his thumbs while his eyes seemed to study an unspoken thought in midair.
"I guess at this point I have to tell you something of a personal nature," he said. "I don't care for your tone, sir. I don't care for it in the least."
I picked up my coffee cup and sipped off it and looked at nothing as he walked out of the room.
Rosie Gomez was down in Vermilion Parish almost all day. When she came back into the office late that afternoon her face was flushed from the heat and her dark hair stuck damply to her skin. She dropped her purse on top of her desk and propped her arms on the side of the air-conditioning unit so the windstream blew inside her sleeveless blouse.
"I thought Texas was the hottest place on earth. How did anyone ever live here before air conditioning?" she said.
"How'd you make out today?"
"Wait a minute and I'll tell you. Damn, it was hot out there. What happened to the rain?"
"I don't know. It's unusual."
"Unusual? I felt like I was being cooked alive inside wet cabbage leaves. I'm going to ask for my next assignment in the Aleutians."
"I'm afraid you'll never make the state Chamber of Commerce, Rosie."
She walked back to her desk, blowing her breath up into her face, and opened her purse.
"What'd you do today?" she asked.
"I tried to run down some of those old cases, but they're pretty cold now-people have quit or retired or don't remember, files misplaced, that sort of thing. But there's one interesting thing here-" I spread a dozen National Crime Information Center fax sheets over the top of my desk. "If one guy committed several of these unsolved murders, it doesn't look like he ever operated outside the state. In other words, there don't seem to be any unsolved female homicides that took place during the same time period in an adjoining area in Texas, Arkansas, or Mississippi.
"So this guy may not only be homegrown but for one reason or another he's confined his murders to the state of Louisiana."
"That'd be a new one," she said. "Serial killers usually travel, unless they prey off a particular local community, like gays or streetwalkers. Anyway, look at what jumped up out of the weeds today."
She held up a plastic Ziploc bag with a wood-handled, brass-tipped pocket knife inside. The single blade was opened and streaked with rust.
"Where'd you find it?"
"A half mile back down the levee from where the girl was found in the barrel. It was about three feet down from the crest."
"You covered all that ground by yourself?"
"More or less."
I looked at her a moment before I spoke again. "Rosie, you're kind of new to the area, but that levee is used by fishermen and hunters all the time. Sometimes they drop stuff."
"All my work for nothing, huh?" She smiled and lifted a strand of hair off her eyebrow.
"I didn't say that-"
"I didn't tell you something else. I ran into an elderly black man down there who sells catfish and frog legs off the back of his pickup truck. He said that about a month ago, late at night, he saw a white man in a new blue or black car looking for something on the levee with a flashlight. Just like that alligator poacher you questioned, he wondered why anybody would be down there at night with a new automobile. He said the man with the light wasn't towing a boat trailer and he didn't have a woman with him, either. Evidently he thinks those are the only two reasonable explanations for anyone ever going down there."
"Could he give you a description of the white man?"
"No, he said he was busy stringing a trotline between some duck blinds. What's a trotline, anyway?"
"You stretch a long piece of twine above the water and tie it to a couple of stumps or flooded trees. Then intermittently you hang twelve-inch pieces of weighted line with baited hooks into the water. Catfish feed by the moon, and when they hook themselves, they usually work the hook all the way through their heads and they're still on the trotline when the fisherman picks it up in the morning."
I sat on the corner of her desk and picked up the plastic bag and looked at the knife. It was the kind that was made in Pakistan or Taiwan and could be purchased for two dollars on the counter of almost any convenience store.
"If that was our man, what do you think happened?" I said.
"Maybe that's where he bound her with the electrician's tape. He used the knife to slice the tape, then dropped it. He either searched for it that night or came back another night when he discovered it was missing."
"I don't want to mess up your day, Rosie, but our man doesn't seem to leave fingerprints. At least there were none on the electrician's tape in the two murders that we think he committed. Why should he worry about losing the knife?"
"He needs to orchestrate, to be in control. He can't abide accidents."
"He left the ice pick in Cherry LeBlanc."
"Because he meant to. He gave us the murder weapon; it'll never be found on him. But he didn't plan to give us his pocket knife. That bothers him."
"That's not a bad theory. Our man is all about power, isn't he?"
She stood her purse up straight and started to snap it shut. It clunked on the desk when she moved it. She reached inside and lifted out her.357 magnum revolver, which looked huge in her small hand, and replaced it on top of her billfold. She snapped the catch on the purse.
"I said the obsession is about power, isn't it?"
"Always, always, always," she said.
The concentration seemed to go out of her eyes, as though the day's fatigue had just caught up with her.
"Rosie?"
"What is it?"
"You feel okay?"
"I probably got dehydrated out there."
"Drop the knife off with our fingerprint man and I'll buy you a Dr Pepper."
"Another time. I want to see what's on the knife."
"This time of day our fingerprint man is usually backed up. He probably won't get to it until tomorrow."
"Then he's about to put in for some overtime."
She straightened her shoulders, slung her purse on her shoulder, and walked out the door into the corridor. A deputy with a girth like a hogshead nodded to her deferentially and stepped aside to let her pass.
When I was helping Batist clean up the shop that evening I remembered that I hadn't called Elrod Sykes about his invitation to go fishing out on the salt. Or maybe I had deliberately pushed it out of my mind. I knew that Bootsie was probably right about Elrod. He was one of the walking wounded, the kind for whom you always felt sympathy, but you knew eventually he'd rake a whole dustpan of broken glass into your head.
I called up to the house and got the telephone number that he had left with Bootsie. While Elrod's phone was ringing, I gazed out the screen window at Alafair and a little black girl playing with Tripod by the edge of a corn garden down the road. Tripod was on his back, rolling in the baked dirt, digging his claws into a deflated football. Even though there was still moisture in the root systems, the corn looked sere and red against the late sun, and when the breeze lifted in the dust the leaves crackled dryly around the scarecrow that was tilted at an angle above the children's heads.
Kelly Drummond answered the phone, then put Elrod on.
"You cain't go?" he said.
"No, I'm afraid not."
"Tomorrow's Saturday. Why don't you take some time off?"
"Saturday's a big day for us at the dock."
"Mr. Robicheaux… Dave… is there some other problem here? I guess I was pretty fried when I was at your house."
"We were glad to have you all. How about I talk with you later? Maybe we'll go to a meeting, if you like."
"Sure," he said, his voice flat. "That sounds okay."
"I appreciate the invitation. I really do."
"Sure. Don't mention it. Another time."
"Yes, that might be fine."
"So long, Mr. Robicheaux."
The line went dead, and I was left with the peculiar sensation that I had managed both to be dishonest and to injure the feelings of someone I liked.
Batist and I cleaned the ashes out of the barbecue pit, on which we cooked sausage links and split chickens with a sauce piquante and sold them at noon to fishermen for three-ninety-five a plate; then we seined the dead shiners out of the bait tanks, wiped down the counters, swept the grained floors clean, refilled the beer and soda-pop coolers, poured fresh crushed ice over the bottles, loaded the candy and cigarette machines, put the fried pies, hard-boiled eggs, and pickled hogs' feet in the icebox in case Tripod got into the shop again, folded up the beach umbrellas on the spool tables, slid back the canvas awning that stretched on wires over the dock, emptied water out of all our rental boats, ran a security chain through a welded ring on the housing of all the outboard engines, and finally latched the board flaps over the windows and turned keys in all the locks.
I walked across the road and stopped by the corn garden where Alafair and the black girl were playing. A pickup truck banged over the ruts in the road and dust drifted across the cornstalks. Out in the marsh, a solitary frog croaked, then the entire vault of sky seemed to ache with the reverberation of thousands of other frogs.
"What's Tripod been into today?" I said.
"Tripod's been good. He hasn't been into anything, Dave," Alafair said. She picked Tripod up and thumped him down on his back in her lap. His paws pumped wildly at the air.
"What you got there, Poteet?" I said to the little black girl. Her pigtails were wrapped with rubber bands and her elbows and knees were gray with dust.
"Found it right here in the row," she said, and opened her hand. "What that is, Mr. Dave?"
"I told you. It's a minié ball," Alafair said.
"It don't look like no ball to me," Poteet said.
I picked it out of her hand. It was smooth and cool in my palm, oxidized an off-white, cone-shaped at one end, grooved with three rings, and hollowed at the base. The French contribution to the science of killing people at long distances. It looked almost phallic.
"These were the bullets that were used during the War Between the States, Poteet," I said, and handed it back to her.
"Confederate and federal soldiers fought all up and down this bayou."
"That's the war Alafair say you was in, Mr. Dave?"
"Do I look that old to you guys?"
"How much it worth?" Poteet said.
"You can buy them for a dollar at a store in New Orleans."
"You give me a dollar for it?" Poteet said.
"Why don't you keep it instead, Po'?" I said, and rubbed the top of her head.
"I don't want no nasty minié ball. It probably gone in somebody," she said, and flung it into the cornstalks.
"Don't do that. You can use it in a slingshot or something," Alafair said. She crawled on hands and knees up the row and put the minié ball in the pocket of her jeans. Then she came back and lifted Tripod up in her arms. "Dave, who was that old man?" she said.
"What old man?"
"He got a stump," Poteet said.
"A stump?"
"That's right, got a stump for a leg, got an arm look like a shriveled-up bird's claw," Poteet said.
"What are y'all talking about?" I said.
"He was on a crutch, Dave. Standing there in the leaves," Alafair said.
I knelt down beside them. "You guys aren't making a lot of sense," I said.
"He was right up there in the corn leaves. Talking in the wind," Poteet said. "His mouth just a big hole in the wind without no sound coming out."
"I bet y'all saw the scarecrow."
"If scarecrows got B.O.," Poteet said.
"Where'd this old man go?" I said.
"He didn't go anywhere," Alafair said. "The wind started blowing real hard in the stalks and he just disappeared."
"Disappeared?" I said.
"That's right," Poteet said. "Him and his B.O."
"Did he have a black coat on, like that scarecrow there?" I tried to smile, but my heart had started clicking in my chest.
"No, suh, he didn't have no black coat on," Poteet said.
"It was gray, Dave," Alafair said. "Just like your shirt."
"Gray?" I said woodenly.
"Except it had some gold on the shoulders," she said.
She smiled at me as though she had given me a detail that somehow would remove the expression she saw on my face.
My knees popped when I stood up.
"You'd better come home for supper now, Alf," I said.
"You mad, Dave? We done something wrong?" Alafair said.
"Don't say 'we done,' little guy. No, of course, I'm not mad. It's just been a long day. We'll see you later, Poteet."
Alafair swung on my hand as she held on to Tripod's leash, and we walked up the slope through the pecan trees toward the lighted gallery of our house. The thick layer of humus and leaves and moldy pecan husks cracked under our shoes. Behind the house the western horizon was still as blue as a robin's egg and streaked with low-lying pink clouds.
"You're real tired, huh?" she said.
"A little bit."
"Take a nap."
"Okay, little guy."
"Then we can go to Vezey's for ice cream," she said. She grinned up at me.
"Were they epaulets?" I said.
"What?"
"The gold you saw on his shoulders. Sometimes soldiers wear what they call epaulets on the shoulders of their coats."
"How could he be a soldier? He was on a crutch. You say funny things sometimes, Dave."
"I get it from a certain little fellow I know."
"That man doesn't hurt children, does he?"
"No, I'm sure he's harmless. Let's don't worry about it anymore."
"Okay, big guy."
"I'll feed Tripod. Why don't you go inside and wash your hands for supper?"
The screen door slammed after her, and I looked back down the slope under the overhang of the trees at the corn garden in the fading twilight. The wind dented and bent the stalks and straightened the leaves and swirled a column of dust around the blank cheesecloth visage of the scarecrow. The dirt road was empty, the bait shop dark, the gray clouds of insects hovering over the far side of the bayou almost like a metamorphic and tangible shape in the damp heat and failing light. I stared at the cornstalks and the hot sky filled with angry birds, then pinched the moisture and salt out of my eyes and went inside the house.
A TROPICAL STORM THAT HAD BEEN EXPECTED TO HIT THE Alabama coast changed direction and made landfall at Grand Isle, Louisiana. At false dawn the sky had been bone white, then a red glow spread across the eastern horizon as though a distant fire were burning out of control. The barometer dropped; the air became suddenly cooler; the bream began popping the bayou's darkening surface; and in less than an hour a line of roiling, lightning-forked clouds moved out of the south and covered the wetlands from horizon to horizon like an enormous black lid. The rain thundered like hammers on the wood dock and the bait shop's tin roof, filled our unrented boats with water, clattered on the islands of lily pads in the bayou, and dissolved the marsh into a gray and shapeless mist.
Then I saw a sleek white cabin cruiser approaching the dock, its windows beaten with rain, riding in on its own wake as the pilot cut back the throttle. Batist and I were under the awning, carrying the barbecue pit into the lee of the shop. Batist had two inches of a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth; he squinted through the rain at the boat as it bumped against the strips of rubber tire nailed to the dock pilings.
"Who that is?" he said.
"I hate to think."
"He wavin' at you, Dave. Hey, it's that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot'er night. That man must surely love water."
We set the barbecue pit under the eave of the building and got back inside. The rain was whipping off the roof like frothy ropes. Through the screen window I could see Elrod and Kelly Drummond moving around inside the boat's cabin.
"Oh, oh, he trying to get out on the dock, Dave. I ain't goin' out there to pull him out of the bayou this time, me. Somebody ought to give that man swimmin' lessons or a big rock, one, give people some relief."
Our awning extended on wires all the way to the lip of the dock, and Elrod was trying to climb over the cruiser's gunwale into the protected area under the canvas. He was bare-chested, his white golf slacks soaked and pasted against his skin, his rubber-soled boat shoes sopping with water. His hand slipped off the piling, and he fell backward onto the deck, raked a fishing rod down with him and snapped it in half so that it looked like a broken coat hanger.
I put on my rain hat and went outside.
Elrod shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up at me in the rain. A purple and green rose was tattooed on his upper left chest.
"I guess I haven't got my sea legs yet," he said.
"Get back inside," I said, and jumped down into the boat.
"We're going after speckled trout. They always hit in the rain. At least they do on the Texas coast."
The rain was cold and stung like BBs. From two feet away I could smell the heavy surge of beer on his breath.
"I'm going inside," I said, and pulled open the cabin door.
"Sure. That's what I was trying to do. Invite you down for a sandwich or a Dr Pepper or a tonic or something," he said, and closed the cabin door behind us.
Kelly Drummond wore leather sandals, a pair of jeans, and the Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name ironed on the back that Alafair had given to Elrod after he had fallen into the bayou. She picked up a towel and began rubbing Elrod's hair with it. Her green eyes were clear, her face fresh, as though she had recently awakened from a deep sleep.
"You want to go fishing with us?" she said.
"I wouldn't advise going out on the salt today. You'll probably get knocked around pretty hard out there."
She looked at Elrod.
"The wind'll die pretty soon," he said.
"I wouldn't count on that," I said.
"The guy who rented us the boat said it can take pretty heavy seas. This weather's not that big a deal, is it?" he said.
On the floor was an open cooler filled with cracked ice, long-necked bottles of Dixie, soda pop, and tonic water.
"I can outfit you with some fly rods and popping bugs," I said. "Why not wait until the rain quits and then try for some bass and goggle-eye perch?"
"When's the last time you caught fresh-water fish right after a rain?" He smiled crookedly at me.
"Suit yourself. But I think what you're doing is a bad idea," I said. I looked at Kelly.
"El, we don't have to go today," she said. "Why don't we just drive down to New Orleans and mess around in the French Quarter?"
"I planned this all week."
"Come on, El. Give it up. It looks like Noah's flood out there."
"Sorry, we've got to do it. You can understand that, cain't you, Mr. Robicheaux?"
"Not really. Anyway, watch the bend in the channel about three miles south. The water's been low and there're some snags on the left."
"Three miles south? Yeah, I'll watch it," he said, his eyes refocusing on nothing. His suntanned, taut chest was beaded with water. His feet were wide spread to keep his balance, even though the boat was not moving. "You sure you don't want a tonic?"
"Thanks, anyway. Good luck to you all," I said.
Before I went out the cabin door, Kelly made her eyes jump at me, but I closed the door behind me and stepped up on the gunwale and onto the dock.
I began pushing huge balloons of water out of the awning with a broom handle and didn't hear her come up behind me.
"He'll listen to you. Tell him not to go out there," she said. There was a pinched indentation high up on her right cheek.
"I think you should tell him that yourself."
"You don't understand. He had a big fight with Mikey yesterday about the script and walked off the set. Then this morning he put the boat on Mikey's credit card. Maybe if we take the boat back now, the man'll tear up the credit slip. You think he might do that?"
"I don't know."
"El's going to get fired, Mr. Robicheaux."
"Tell Elrod you're staying here. That's about all I can suggest."
"He'll go anyway."
"I wish I could help you."
"That's it? Au revoir, fuck you, boat people?"
"In the last two days Elrod told both me and my wife he'd like to go to an AA meeting with me. Now it's ten in the morning and he's already ripped. What do you think the real problem is-the boat, your director, the rain, me, or maybe something else?"
She turned around as though to leave, then turned back and faced me again. There was a bright, painful light in her green eyes, the kind that comes right before tears.
"What do I do?" she said.
"Go inside the shop. I'll try again," I said.
I climbed back down into the boat and went into the cabin. He had his elbows propped on the instrument panel, while he ate a po'-boy sandwich and stared at the rain dancing in a yellow spray on the bayou.
His face had become wan and indolent, either from fatigue or alcoholic stupor, passive to all insult or intimidation. The more I talked, the more he yawned.
"She's a good lady, El," I said. "A lot of men would cut off their fingers with tin snips to have one like her."
"You got that right."
"Then why don't you quit this bullshit, at least for one day, and let her have a little serenity?"
Then his eyes focused on the cooler, on an amber, sweating bottle of Dixie nestled in the ice.
"All right," he said casually. "Let me borrow your fly rods, Mr. Robicheaux. I'll take good care of them."
"You're not going out on the salt?"
"No, I get seasick anyway."
"You want to leave the beer box with me?"
"It came with the boat. That fellow might get mad if I left it somewhere. Thanks for your thoughtfulness, though."
"Yeah, you bet."
After they were gone, I resolved that Elrod Sykes was on his own with his problems.
"Hey, Dave, that man really a big movie actor?" Batist said.
"He's big stuff out in Hollywood, Batist. Or at least he used to be."
"He rich?"
"Yeah, I guess he is."
"That's his reg'lar woman, too, huh?"
"Yep."
"How come he's so unhappy?"
"I don't know, Batist. Probably because he's a drunk."
"Then why don't he stop gettin' drunk?"
"I don't know, partner."
"You mad 'cause I ax a question?"
"Not in the least, Batist," I said, and headed for the back of the shop and began stacking crates of canned soda pop in the storeroom.
"You got some funny moods, you," I heard him say behind me.
A half hour later the phone rang.
"Hello," I said.
"We got a problem down here," a voice said.
There was static on the line and rain was throbbing on the shop's tin roof.
"Elrod?"
"Yeah. We hit some logs or a sandbar or something."
"Where are you?"
"At a pay phone in a little store. I waded ashore."
"Where's the boat?"
"I told you, it's messed up."
"Wait until the water rises, then you'll probably float free."
"There's a bunch of junk in the propellor."
"What are you asking me, Elrod?"
"Can you come down here?"
Batist was eating some chicken and dirty rice at the counter. He looked at my face and laughed to himself.
"How far down the bayou is the boat?" I said.
"About three miles. That bend you were talking about."
"The bend I was talking about, huh?"
"Yeah, you were right. There're some dead trees or logs in the water there. We ran right into them."
"We?"
"Yeah."
"I'll come after you, but I'm also going to give you a bill for my time."
"Sure thing, absolutely, Dave. This is really good of you. If lean-"
I put the receiver back on the hook.
"Tell Bootsie I'll be back in about an hour," I said.
Batist had finished his lunch and was peeling the cellophane off a fresh cigar. The humor had gone out of his face.
"Dave, I ain't one to tell you what to do, no," he said. "But there's people that's always gonna be axin' for somet'ing. When you deal with them kind, it don't matter how much you give, it ain't never gonna be enough."
He lit his cigar and fixed his eyes on me as he puffed on the smoke.
I put on my raincoat and hat, hitched a boat and trailer to my truck, and headed down the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees toward the general store where Elrod had made his call. The trailer was bouncing hard in the flooded chuck-holes, and through the rearview mirror I could see the outboard engine on the boat's stern wobbling against the engine mounts. I shifted down to second gear, pulled to a wide spot on the road, and let a car behind me pass. The driver, a man wearing a shapeless fedora, looked in the opposite direction of me, out toward the bayou, as he passed.
Elrod was not at the general store, and I drove a quarter mile farther south to the bend where he had managed to put the cabin cruiser right through the limbs of a submerged tree and simultaneously scrape the bow up on a sandbar. The bayou was running high and yellow now, and gray nests of dead morning-glory vines had stuck to the bow and fanned back and forth in the current.
I backed my trailer into the shallows, then unwinched my boat into the water, started the engine, and opened it up in a shuddering whine against the steady clatter of the rain on the bayou's surface.
I came astern of the cabin cruiser and looped the painter on a cleat atop the gunwale so that my boat swung back in the lee of the cruiser. The current was swirling with mud and
I couldn't see the propeller, but obviously it was fouled. From under the keel floated a streamer of torn hyacinth vines and lily pads, baited trotline, a divot ripped out of a conical fish net, and even the Clorox marker bottle that went with it.
Elrod came out of the cabin with a newspaper over his head.
"How does it look?" he said.
"I'll cut some of this trash loose, then we'll try to back her into deeper water. How'd you hit a fish net? Didn't you see the Clorox bottle?"
"Is that how they mark those things?"
I opened my Puma knife, reached as deep below the surface as I could, and began pulling and sawing away the flotsam from the propeller.
"I 'spect the truth is I don't have any business out here," he said.
I flung a handful of twisted hyacinths and tangled fishline toward the bank and looked up into his face. The alcoholic shine had gone out of his eyes. Now they simply looked empty, on the edge of regret.
"You want me to get down in the water and do that?" he asked. Then he glanced away at something on the far bank.
"No, that's all right," I said. I stepped up on the bow of my boat and over the rail of the cabin cruiser. "Let's see what happens. If I can't shake her loose, I'll tie my outboard onto the bow and try to pull her sideways into the current."
We went inside the dryness of the cabin and closed the door. Kelly was sleeping on some cushions, her face nestled into one arm. When she woke, she looked around sleepily, her cheek wrinkled with the imprint of her arm; then she realized that little had changed in her and Elrod's dreary morning and she said, "Oh," almost like a child to whom awakenings are not good moments.
I started the engine, put it in reverse, and gave it the gas. The hull vibrated against the sandbar, and through the back windows I could see mud and dead vegetation boiling to the bayou's surface behind the stern. But we didn't move off the sandbar. I tried to go forward and rock it loose, then I finally cut the engine.
"It's set pretty hard, but it might come off if you push against the bow, Elrod," I said. "You want to do that?"
"Yeah, sure."
"It's not deep there. Just stay on the sandbar, close to the hull."
"Put on a life jacket, El," Kelly said.
"I swam across the Trinity River once at flood stage when houses were floating down it," he said.
She took a life jacket out of a top compartment, picked up his wrist, and slipped his arm through one of the loops. He grinned at me. Then his eyes looked out the glass at the far bank.
"What's that guy doing?" he said.
"Which guy?" I said.
"The guy knocking around in the brush out there."
"How about we get your boat loose and worry about other people later?" I said.
"You got it," he said, tied one lace on his jacket, and went out into the rain.
He held on to the rail on the cabin roof and worked his way forward toward the bow. Kelly watched him through the glass, biting down on the corner of his lip.
"He waded ashore before," I said, and smiled at her. "He's not in any danger there."
"El has accidents. Always."
"A psychologist might say there's a reason for that."
She turned away from the glass, and her green eyes moved over my face.
"You don't know him, Mr. Robicheaux. Not the gentle person who gives himself no credit for anything. You're too hard on him."
"I don't mean to be."
"You are. You judge him."
"I'd like to see him get help. But he won't as long as he's on the juice or using."
"I wish I had those kinds of easy answers."
"They're not easy. Not at all."
Elrod eased himself over the gunwale, sinking to his chest, then felt his way through the silt toward the slope on the sandbar.
"Can you stand in the stern? For the weight," I said to Kelly.
"Where?"
"In the back of the boat."
"Sure."
"Take my raincoat."
"I'm already sopped."
I restarted the engine.
"Just a minute," I said, and put my rain hat on her head. Her wet blond curls were flattened against her brow. "I don't mean to be personal, but I think you're a special lady, Ms. Drummond, a real soldier."
She used both her hands to pull the hat's floppy brim down tightly on her hair. She didn't answer, but for the first time since I had met her, she looked directly into my eyes with no defensiveness or anger or fear and in fact with a measure of respect that I felt in all probability was not easily won.
I waved at Elrod through the front glass, kicked the engine into reverse, and opened the throttle. The exhaust pipes throbbed and blew spray high into the air at the waterline, the windows shook, the boards under my feet hummed with the vibrations from the engine compartment. I looked over my shoulder through the back glass and saw Kelly bent across the gunwale, pushing at the bottom of the bayou with a tarpon gaff; then suddenly the hull scraped backward in the sand, sliding out of a trench in a yellow and brown gush of silt and dead reeds, and popped free in the current.
Elrod was standing up on the sandbar, his balled fists raised over his head in victory.
I cut the gas and started out the cabin door to get the anchor.
Just as the rain struck my bare head and stung my eyes, just as I looked across the bayou and saw the man in the shapeless fedora kneeling hard against an oak tree, his shadowed face aimed along the sights of a bolt-action rifle, the leather sling twisted military style around the forearm, I knew that I was caught in one of those moments that will always remain forever too late, knew this even before I could yell, wave my arms, tell him that the person in the rain hat and Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name on the back was not me. Then the rifle's muzzle flashed in the rain, the report echoing across the water and into the willow islands. The bullet cut a hole like a rose petal in the back of Kelly's shirt and left an exit wound in her throat that made me think of wolves with red mouths running through trees.