"It doesn't work that way."

"Yes, it does, if you look at what's right with your life instead of what's wrong with it."

"Are you going to push the chair in front of the door?"

She paused. Her face was quiet and purposeful. She turned off the light on the bedstand and pushed the heavy leather chair until it caught under the doorknob. In the moonlight through the window her curly gold hair looked as if it were flecked with silver. She pulled back the sheet and took away the ice bag, then touched me with her hand. The pain made both my knees jump.

I heard her sigh as she sat back down on the side of the bed.

"Are we going to fight with each other when we have a problem?" she said.

"I'm not fighting with you, kiddo."

"Yes, you are. You can't turn loose of the past, Dave. You get hurt, or you see something that's wrong in the world, and all the old ways come back to you."

"I can't help that."

"Maybe not. But you don't live alone anymore." She took my hand and lay down beside me again. "There's me, and now there's Alafair, too."

"I'll tell you what it feels like, and I won't say any more. You remember when I told you about how those North Vietnamese regulars overran us and the captain surrendered to them? They tied our hands around trees with piano wire, then took turns urinating on us. That's what it feels like."

She was quiet a long time. I could hear breathing in the dark. Then she took a deep breath and let it out and put her arm across my chest.

"I have a very bad feeling inside me, Dave," she said.

There was nothing more to say. How could there be? Even the most sympathetic friends and relatives of a battery or assault victim could not understand what that individual experiences. Over the years I had questioned people who had been molested by degenerates, mugged by street punks, shanked and shot by psychopaths, gang-banged and sodomised by outlaw bikers. They all had the same numb expression, the same drowning eyes, the same knowledge that they somehow deserved their fate and that they were absolutely alone in the world. And often we made their grief and humiliation even greater by ascribing the responsibility for their suffering to their own incaution, so that we could remain psychologically invulnerable ourselves.

I wasn't being fair to Annie. She had paid her share of dues, but there are times when you are very alone in the world and your own thoughts flay your skin an inch at a time. This was one of them.

I didn't sleep that night. But then insomnia and I were old companions.

Two days later the swelling between my legs had gone down and I could walk without looking like I was straddling a fence. The sheriff came out to see me at the boat dock and told me he had talked to the Lafayette city police and Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA. Lafayette had sent a couple of detectives to question Eddie Keats at his bar, but he claimed that he had taken two of his dancers sailing on the day I was beaten up, and the two dancers corroborated his story.

"Are they going to accept that?" I said.

"What are they supposed to do?"

"Do some work and find out where those girls were two days ago."

"Do you know how many cases those guys probably have?"

"I'm not sympathetic, Sheriff. People like Keats come into our area because they think they have a free pass. What did Minos P. Dautrieve have to say?"

The sheriff's face colored and the skin at the corner of his mouth tugged slightly in a smile.

"I think he said you'd better get your ass into his office," the sheriff replied.

"Those were his words?"

"I believe so."

"Why's he mad at me?"

"I get the impression he thinks you're messing around in federal business."

"Does he know anything about a Haitian named Toot?"

"No. I went through Baton Rouge and the National Crime Information Center in Washington and couldn't find out anything, either."

"He's probably an illegal. There's no paper on him," I said.

"That's what Dautrieve said."

"He's a smart cop."

I saw a look of faint embarrassment in the sheriff's eyes, and I felt instantly sorry for my remark.

"Well, I promise you I'll give it my best, Dave," he said.

"I appreciate what you've done."

"I'm afraid I haven't done very much."

"Look, these guys are hard to put away," I said. "I worked two years on the case of a syndicate hit man who pushed his wife off a fourth-floor balcony into a dry swimming pool. He even told me he did it. He walked right out of it because we took her diary out of the condo without a warrant. How about that for first-rate detective work? Every time I'd see him in a bar, he'd send a drink over to my table. It really felt good."

He smiled and shook hands.

"One more thing before I go," he said. "A man named Monroe from Immigration was in my office yesterday. He was asking questions about you."

The sunlight was bright on the bayou. The oaks and cypress on the far side made deep shadows on the bank.

"He was out here the day after that plane went down at Southwest Pass," I said.

"He asked if you had a little girl staying with you."

"What'd you tell him?"

"I told him I didn't know. I also told him it wasn't my business. But I got the feeling he wasn't really interested in some little girl. You bother him for some reason."

"I gave him a bad time."

"I don't know those federal people that well, but I don't think they drive up from New Orleans just because a man with a fish dock gives them a bad time. What's that fellow after, Dave?"

"I don't know."

"Look, I don't want to tell you what to do, but if you and Annie are helping out a little girl that doesn't have any parents, why don't you let other folks help you, too? People around here aren't going to let anybody take her away."

"My father used to say that a catfish had whiskers so he'd never go into a hollow leg he couldn't turn around in. I don't trust those people at Immigration, Sheriff. Play on their terms and you'll lose."

"I think maybe you got a dark view sometimes, Dave."

"You better believe it," I said.

I watched him drive away on the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees. I clicked my fingers on the warm board rail that edged my dock, then walked up to the house and had lunch with Annie and Alafair.

An hour later I took the.45 automatic and the full clip of hollow-points from the dresser drawer and walked with them inside the folded towel to the pickup truck and put them in the glove box. Annie watched me from the front porch, her arm leaned against a paintless wood post. I could see her breasts rise and fall under her denim shirt.

"I'm going to New Orleans. I'll be back tonight," I said.

She didn't answer.

"It's not going to take care of itself," I said. "The sheriff is a nice guy who should be cleaning stains out of somebody's sports coat. The feds don't have jurisdiction in an assault case. The Lafayette cops don't have time to solve crimes in Iberia Parish. That means we fall through the cracks. Screw that."

"I'm sure that somehow that makes sense. You know, rah, rah for the penis and all that. But I wonder if Dave is giving Dave a shuck so we can march off to the wars again."

Her face was cheerless and empty.

I watched the wind flatten the leaves in the pecan trees, then I opened the door of the pickup.

"I need to take some money out of savings to help somebody," I said. "I'll put it back next month."

"What can I say? Like your first wife told you, 'Keep it high and hard, podjo," she said, and went back inside the house.

The sweep of wind in the pecan trees seemed deafening.

I gassed up the truck at the dock, then as an afterthought I went inside the bait shop, sat at the wooden counter with a Dr. Pepper, and called Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette. While the phone rang I gazed out the window at the green leaves floating on the bayou.