I hadn't seen the other man, who was sitting in a leather chair in the corner. He wore a brown departmental uniform, held his lacquered campaign hat on his knee, and leaned forward deferentially. He used to own a dry-cleaning business in town before someone talked him into running for sheriff. The rural cops had changed a lot in the last twenty years. When I was a boy the sheriff wore a blue suit with a vest and a big railroad watch and chain and carried a heavy revolver in his coat pocket. He was not bothered by the bordellos on Railroad Avenue and the slot machines all over Iberia Parish, nor was he greatly troubled when white kids went nigger-knocking on Saturday nights. He'd tip his John B. Stetson hat to a white lady on Main, and talk to an elderly Negro woman as though she were a post. This one was president of the Downtown Merchants Association.

"You know who they were, Dave?" he said. He had the soft, downturned lines in his face of most Acadian men in their late middle age. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins.

"A white guy named Eddie Keats. He owns some bars in Lafayette and New Orleans. The other guy is black. His name's Toot." I swallowed from the water glass on the table. "Maybe he's a Haitian. You know anybody like that around here?"

"No."

"You know Eddie Keats?"

"No. But we can cut a warrant for him."

"It won't do any good. I never saw his face. I couldn't make him in a lineup."

"I don't understand. How do you know it was this guy Keats?"

"He was messing around my house yesterday. Call the DEA agent in Lafayette. He's got a sheet on him. The guy works for Bubba Rocque sometimes."

"Oh boy."

"Look, you can pick up Keats on suspicion. He's supposed to be a low-level hit man. Roust him in his automobile, and maybe you'll turn something. Some weed, a concealed weapon, hot credit cards. These fuckers always have spaghetti hanging off the place somewhere." I drank from the water again and laid my head back on the pillow. My scrotum, with the ice bag under it, felt as big as a bowling ball.

"I don't know about that. That's Lafayette Parish. It's a little like going on a fishing trip in somebody else's pond." He looked at me quietly, as though I should understand.

"You want him back here again?" I said. "Because unless you send him a hard telegram, he will be."

He was silent a moment, then he wrote in a pad and put the pad and pencil back in his shirt pocket and buttoned it.

"Well, I'll give the DEA and the Lafayette sheriff's office a call," he said. "We'll see what happens."

Then he asked some more questions, most of which were the formless and irrelevant afterthoughts of a well-meaning amateur who did not want to seem unsympathetic. I didn't reply when he said good-bye.

But what did I expect? I couldn't be sure myself that the white man was Eddie Keats. New Orleans was full of people with the same Italian-Irish background that produced the accent you would normally associate with Brooklyn. I had admitted I couldn't make him in a lineup and I didn't know anything about the black man except that his name was Toot and he slept in a grave. What is an ex-dry cleaner who dresses like a Fritos delivery man supposed to do with that one? I asked myself.

But maybe there was a darker strain at work inside me that I didn't want to recognise. I knew how local cops would have dealt with Eddie Keats and his kind twenty years ago.

A couple of truly vicious coonass plainclothes (they usually wore J. C. Higgins suits that looked like clothes on a duck) would have gone to his bar, thrown his framed liquor license in the toilet, broken out all his car windows with a baton, then pointed a revolver between his eyes and snapped the hammer on an empty chamber.

No, I didn't like them then; I didn't like them now. But it was a temptation.

Batist came in smelling of wine and fish, with some flowers I suspected he had taken from a hall vase and put in a Coca-Cola bottle. When I told him that the black man named Toot was possibly a tonton macoute from Haiti who practiced black magic, Batist got him confused with the loup-garou, the bayou equivalent of the lamia or werewolf, and was convinced that we should see a traiteur in order to find this loup-garou and fill his mouth and nostrils with dirt from a witch's grave. He saw my eyes light on the pint wine bottle, with the paper bag twisted around its neck, that protruded from the back pocket of his overalls, and he shifted sideways in the chair to block my vision, but the bottle clanked loudly against the chair's arm. His face was transfused with guilt.

"Hey, podna, since when did you have to hide things from me?" I said.

"I shouldn't drink, me, when I got to look after Miss Annie and that little girl."

"I trust you, Batist."

His eyes averted mine and his big hands were awkward in his lap. Even though I had known him since I was a child, he was still uncomfortable when I, a white man, spoke to him in a personal way.

"Where's Alafair now?" I said.

"Wit' my wife and girl. She all right, you ain't got to worry, no. You know she talk French, her? We fixing po'-boys, I say pain, she know that mean 'bread,' yeah. I say sauce piquante, she know that mean 'hot sauce.' How come she know that, Dave?"

"The Spanish language has a lot of words like ours."

"Oh," he said, and was thoughtful a moment. Then, "How come that?"

Annie came through the door and saved me from an impossible discussion. Batist was absolutely obsessive about understanding any information that was foreign to his world, but as a rule he would have to hack and hew it into pieces until it would assimilate into that strange Afro-Creole-Acadian frame of reference that was as natural to him as wearing a dime on a string around his ankle to ward off the gris-gris, an evil spell cast by a traiteur, or conjuror.

Annie stayed with me through the evening while the light softened on the trees outside and the shadows deepened on the lawn, the western sky turned russet and orange like a chemical flame, and high school kids strolled down the sidewalks to the American Legion baseball game in the park. Through the open window I could smell barbecue fifes and water sprinklers, magnolia blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Then the sky darkened, and the rain clouds in the south pulsated with white streaks of lightning like networks of veins.

Annie lay next to me and rubbed my chest and touched my face with her fingers and kissed me on the eyes.

"Take away the ice bag and push the chair in front of the door," I said.

"No, Dave."

"Yes, it's all right. The doctor said there was no problem."

She kissed me on the ear, then whispered, "Not tonight, baby love."

I felt myself swallow.

"Annie, please," I said.

She raised up on one elbow and looked curiously into my face.

"What is it?" she said.

"I need you. You're my wife."

She frowned and her eyes went back and forth into mine.

"Tell me what it is," she said.

"You want to know?"

"Dave, you're my whole life. How could I not want to know?"

"Those sonsofbitches put me on my hands and knees and worked me over like they would a dog."

I could see the pain in her eyes. Her hand went to my cheek, then to my throat.

"Somebody will catch them. You know that," she said.

"No, they're hunting on the game reserve. They're mainline badasses, and they don't have anybody more serious to deal with than a dry cleaner in a sheriff's suit."

"You gave it up. We have a good life now. This is the place you've always wanted to come back to. Everybody in town likes you and respects you, and the people up and down the bayou are the best friends anyone could have. Now we have Alafair, too. How can you let a couple of criminals hurt all that?"