"I understand you want my ass in your office," I said.

"Yeah, what the fuck's going on over there?"

"Why don't you drive over and find out?"

"You sound funny."

"I have stitches in my mouth."

"They bounced you around pretty good, huh?"

"What's this about you wanting my ass in your office?"

"I'm curious. Why are a bunch of farts who deal dope and whores so interested in you? I think maybe you're on to something we don't know about."

"I'm not."

"I think also you may have the delusion you're still a police officer."

"You've got things turned around a little bit. When a guy gets his cojones and his face kicked in, he becomes the victim. The guys who kick in his cojones and face are the criminals. These are the guys you get mad at. The object is to put them in jail."

"The sheriff said you can't identify Keats."

"I didn't see his face."

"And you never saw the Zulu before?"

"Keats, or whoever the white guy was, said he was one of Baby Doc's tontons macoute."

"What do you want us to do, then?"

"If I remember our earlier conversation right, y'all were going to handle it."

"It's after the fact now. And I don't have authority in this kind of assault case. You know that."

I looked out the window at the leaves floating on the brown current.

"Do you all ever salt the mine shaft?" I said.

"You mean plant dope on a suspect? Are you serious?"

"Save the Boy Scout stuff. I've got a wife and another person in my home who are in jeopardy. You said you were going to handle things. You're not handling anything. Instead I get this ongoing lecture that somehow I'm the problem in this situation."

"I never said that."

"You don't have to. A collection of moral retards runs millions in drugs through the bayous, and you probably don't nail one of them in fifty. It's frustrating. It looks bad on the monthly report. You wonder if you're going to be transferred to Fargo soon. So you make noise about civilians meddling in your business."

"I don't like the way you're talking to me, Robicheaux."

"Too bad. I'm the guy with the stitches. If you want to do something for me, figure out a way to pick up Keats."

"I'm sorry you got beat up. I'm sorry we can't do more. I understand your anger. But you were a cop and you know our limits. So how about easing off the Purple Heart routine?"

"You told me Keats's bars have hookers in them. Get the local heat to park patrol cars in front of his bars a few nights. You'll bring his own people down on him."

"We don't operate that way."

"I had a feeling you'd say that. See you around, partner. Don't hang on the rim too long. Everybody will forget you're in the game."

"You think that's clever?"

I hung up on him, finished my Dr. Pepper, and drove down the dirt road in the warm wind that thrashed the tree limbs overhead. The bayou was covered with leaves now, and back in the shadows on the far bank I could see cottonmouths sleeping on the lower branches of the willow trees, just above the water's languid surface. I rumbled across the drawbridge into town, withdrew three hundred dollars from the bank, then took the back road through the sugarcane fields to St. Martinville and caught the interstate to New Orleans.

The wind was still blowing hard as I drove down the long concrete causeway over the Atchafalaya swamp. The sky was still a soft blue and filled with tumbling white clouds, but a good storm was building out on the Gulf and I knew that by evening the southern horizon would be black and streaked with rain and lightning. I watched the flooded willow trees bend in the wind, and the moss on the dead cypress in the bays straighten and fall, and the way the sunlight danced and shattered on the water when the surface suddenly wrinkled from one shore to the next. The Atchafalaya basin encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, willow islands, sand bogs, green leaves covered with buttercups, wide bays dotted with dead cypress and oil-well platforms, and flooded woods filled with cottonmouths, alligators, and black clouds of mosquitoes. My father and I had fished and hunted all over the Atchafalaya when I was a boy, and even on a breezy spring day like this we knew how to catch bull bream and goggle-eye perch when nobody else would catch them. In the late afternoon we'd anchor the pirogue on the lee side of a willow island, when the mosquitoes would start to swarm out of the trees, and cast our bobbers back into the quiet water, right against the line of lilly pads, and wait for the bream and goggle-eye to start feeding on the insects. In an hour we'd fill our ice chest with fish.

But my reverie about boyhood moments with my father could not get rid of the words Annie had said to me. She had wanted to raise a red welt across the heart, and she had done a good job of it. But maybe what bothered me worse was the fact that I knew she had hurt me only because she had an unrelieved hurt inside herself. Her reference to a statement made by my first wife was an admission that maybe there was a fundamental difference in me, a deeply ingrained character flaw, that neither Annie nor my ex-wife nor perhaps any sane woman would ever be able to accept. I was not simply a drunk; I was drawn to a violent and aberrant world the way a vampire bat seeks a black recess within the earth.

My first wife's name was Niccole, and she was a dark-haired, beautiful girl from Martinique who loved horse racing almost as much as I. But unfortunately she loved money and clubhouse society even more. I could have almost forgiven her infidelities in our marriage, until we both discovered that her love affairs were not motivated by lust for other men but rather contempt for me and loathing for the dark, alcoholic energies that governed my life.

We had been at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain, and I had been drinking all afternoon at Jefferson Downs and now I had reached the point where I didn't even bother to leave the small bar under the mimosa trees at the lawn party and make a pretense of interest at the conversation around me. The wind was balmy and it rattled the dry palm fronds on the lakeshore, and I watched the red sun set on the horizon and reflect on the green, capping surface of the water. In the distance, white sailboats lurched in fountains of spray toward the Southern Yacht Club. I could feel the whiskey in my face, the omiscient sense of control that alcohol always brought me, the bright flame of metaphysical insight burning behind my eyes.

But my seersucker sleeve was damp from the bar, and my words were thick and apart from me when I asked for another Black Jack and water.

Then Niccole was standing next to me with her current lover, a geologist from Houston. He was a summer mountain climber, and he had a rugged, handsome profile like a Roman's and a chest that looked as hard as a barrel. Like all the other men there, he wore the soft tropical colors of the season-a pastel shirt, a white linen suit, a purple knit tie casually loose at the throat, he ordered Manhattans for both of them, then while he waited for the Negro bartender to fix their drinks he stroked the down on top of Nicole's arm as though I were not there.

Later, I would not be able to describe accurately any series of feelings or events after that moment. I felt something rip like wet newspaper in the back of my head; I saw his startled face look suddenly into mine; I saw it twist and convulse as my fist came across his mouth; I felt his hands try to grab my coat as he went down; I saw the genuine fear in his eyes as I rained my fists down on him and then caught his throat between my hands.

When they pulled me off him, his tongue was stuck in his throat, his skin was the color of ash, and his cheeks were covered with strings of pink spittle. My wife was sobbing uncontrollably on the host's shoulder.