But I was mortgaging today for tomorrow, and tomorrow I would probably postpone the debt again, and the next day and the next, until I would be very far in arrears with a debt that would eventually present itself like an unfed snake given its choice of a wounded rabbit's parts. But at that point I guess I didn't care. Annie was dead because I couldn't leave things alone. I had quit the New Orleans police department, the bourbon-scented knight-errant who said he couldn't abide any longer the political hypocrisy and the addictive, brutal ugliness of metropolitan law enforcement, but the truth was that I enjoyed it, that I got high on my knowledge of man's iniquity, that I disdained the boredom and predictability of the normal world as much as my strange alcoholic metabolism loved the adrenaline rush of danger and my feeling of power over an evil world that in many ways was mirrored in microcosm in my own soul.

I bought a bottle of vodka to take home and didn't touch it again until the next morning.

The four inches I drank for breakfast sat in my stomach like canned heat. I had to keep wiping my face with a towel for a half hour, until I stopped sweating, then I brushed my teeth, showered, put on my cream-colored slacks, charcoal sports shirt, and gray and red striped tie, and an hour later I was sitting in the sheriff's office while he listened indecisively to what I had to say and looked peculiarly at my face.

"Are you hot? You look flushed," he said.

"Go outside. It must be ninety-five already."

He nodded absently. He scratched the blue and red lines in his soft cheek with a fingernail and pushed a paper clip around on his desk blotter. Through the glass window of the closed office door I could see his deputies doing paperwork at their desks. The building was new and had the cool, neutral, refrigerated smell of a modern office, which was the image it was intended to convey, but the deputies still looked like the raw-boned rednecks and coonasses of an earlier time and they still kept cuspidors by their desks.

"How'd you know the department had an opening?" the sheriff said.

"It was in the paper."

"It's detective rank, Dave, but eighteen thousand isn't near what you made in New Orleans. It seems to me you'd be going back to the minor leagues."

"I don't need a lot of money. I've got the boat-and-bait business, and I own my house free and clear."

"There's a couple of deputies out there who want that job. They'd resent you."

"That's their problem."

He opened his desk drawer, dropped the paper clip in it, and looked at me. The soft edges of his face flexed with the thought that had been troubling him since I had told him I wanted the job.

"I'm not going to give a man a badge so he can be an executioner," he said.

"I wouldn't need a badge for that."

"The hell you wouldn't."

"I was a good cop. I never popped a cap unless they dealt the play."

"You don't have to convince me about your past record. We're talking about now. Are you going to tell me you can investigate your own wife's murder with any objectivity?"

I licked my tongue across my lips. I could feel the vodka humming in my blood. Ease up, ease up, ease up, you're almost home, I thought.

"I was never objective in any homicide investigation," I said. "You see the handiwork and you hunt the bastards down. Then, as my old partner used to say, 'You bust 'em or grease 'em.' But I didn't cool them out, Sheriff. I brought them in when I could have left them on the sidewalk and sailed right through Internal Affairs. Look, you've got some deputies out there who probably give you the cold sweats sometimes. It's because they're amateurs. One day they'll own bars or drive trucks or just go on beating up their wives. But they're not really cops."

His eyes blinked.

"They tell you a guy resisted arrest or fell down when they put him in the car," I said. "They're supposed to bring in a hooker, but they can't ever seem to find her. You send them into a Negro neighborhood and you wonder if the town is going to be burning by midnight."

"There's another problem, too. It comes in bottles."

"If I go out of control, fire me."

"Everybody around here likes and respects you, Dave. I don't like to see a man go back to his old ways because he's trying to fly with an overload."

"I'm doing all right, Sheriff." I looked him steadily in the eyes. I didn't like to run a con on a decent man, but most of the cards in my hands were blanks.

"You look like you've been out in the sun too long," he said.

"I'm dealing with it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. If I come in here blowing fumes in your face, pull my plug. That's all I can tell you. Where do you think those killers are now?"

"I don't know."

"They're doing a few lines, getting laid, maybe sipping juleps at the track. They feel power right now that you and I can't even guess at. I've heard them describe it as being like a heroin rush."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I know how they think. I don't believe you do. Those other guys out there don't, either. You know what they did after they murdered Annie? They drove to a bar. Not the first or the second one they saw, but one way down the road where they felt safe, where they could drink Jack Daniel's and smoke cigarettes without speaking to one another, until that moment when their blood slowed and they looked in each other's eyes and started laughing."

"Look at it another way. What evidence do you have in hand?"

"The lead we dug out of the walls, the shotgun shells off the floor, the pry bar they dropped on the porch," he said.

"But not a print."

"No."

"Which means you have almost nothing. Except me. They were out to kill me, not Annie. Every aspect of the investigation will eventually center around that fact. You'll end up interviewing me every other day."

He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbow on the desk blotter. He looked through the door glass at the deputies in the outer office. One of them leaned to the side of his desk and spit tobacco juice into a cuspidor.

"I'll have to run it by a couple of other people, but I don't think there'll be any trouble," he said. "But you don't work on just this one case, Dave. You carry a regular load just like the other detectives and you go by the same rules."

"All right."

He puffed on his cigarette and widened his eyes in the smoke, as though dismissing some private concerns from his mind, then he watched my expression closely and said, "Who do you think did it?"

"I don't know."

"You told me that the day after it happened, and I accepted that. But you've had a lot of time to think in the last ten days. I can't believe you haven't come to some conclusion. I wouldn't want to feel you're being less than honest here, and that maybe you're going to try to operate on your own after all."

"Sheriff, I gave motive to any number or combination of people. The bartender at Smiling Jack's is the kind of vicious punk who could blow out your light and drink a beer while he was doing it. I not only ran his head into a window fan and cocked a.45 between his eyes, I turned Bubba Rocque loose on him and made him get out of New Orleans. I messed up Eddie Keats with a pool cue in front of his whores, and I went into Bubba Rocque's house and told him I was going to put my finger in his eye if I found out he sent Keats and the Haitian after me."

"Maybe it was Toot and a guy I don't know. Maybe it was two contract men Bubba or Keats brought in from out of state. Maybe it's somebody out of the past. Once in a while they get out of Angola and keep their promises."

"New Orleans thinks the bartender went to the Islands."

"Maybe, but I doubt it. He's a rat, and a rat goes into a hole. He's more afraid of Bubba than he is of cops. I don't believe he'll be walking around on a beach anywhere. Besides, he's a mama's boy. He probably won't run far from home."