Which made me confront, at least temporarily, the real reason I was there: it's lousy to be alone, particularly when you're not handling anything properly. Particularly when you're drunk and starting to fuck up your life again on an enormous scale. And because somebody was playing "Baby Love" on the jukebox.

"Why don't you put some records on that jukebox that aren't twenty years old?" I said to the bartender.

"What?"

"Put some new music on there. It's 1987."

"The jukebox is broken, pal. You better slip your transmission into neutral."

I walked back out onto the street, my face warm with bourbon in the wind blowing off the backside of the island. On the dock by the restaurant I watched the waves slide through pilings, small incandescent fish moving about like smoky green lights below the surface. The restaurant was crowded with customers, and the bar was a well-lighted and orderly place where people had two drinks before dinner. When I walked inside I felt like a diver stepping out of a bathysphere into a hostile and glaring brilliance.

The maitre d' looked at me carefully. I had fixed my tie and tried to smooth the wrinkles in my seersucker coat, but I should have put on sunglasses.

"Do you have a reservation, sir?" he said.

"Tell Robin Dave Robicheaux's here. I'll wait in the bar."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Tell her Dave from New Orleans. The last name's hard to pronounce sometimes."

"Sir, I think you'd better see her outside of working hours."

"Say, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm going away?"

I ordered a drink at the bar, and five minutes later I saw her come through the door. She wore a short black dress with a white lace apron over it, and her figure and the way she walked, as though she were still on a burlesque runway, made every man at the bar glance sideways at her. She was smiling at me, but there was a perplexed light in her eyes, too.

"Wow, you come a long way to check up on a girl," she said.

"How you doing, kiddo?"

"Not bad. It's turned out to be a pretty good gig. Hey, don't get up."

"How long till you're off?"

"Three hours. Come on and sit in the booth with me. You're listing pretty heavy to port."

"A drunk front came through New Iberia this morning."

"Well, walk over here with mommy and let's order something to eat."

"I ate on the plane."

"Yeah, I can tell," she said.

We sat in a tan leather booth against the back wall of the bar. She blew out little puffs of air with her lips.

"Dave, what are you doing?" she said.

"What?"

"Like, this." She flicked her fingernail against my highball glass.

"Sometimes I clean out my head."

"You bust up with your old lady or something?"

"I'm going to get another Beam. You want a cup of coffee or a Coke?"

"Do I want coffee? God, that's great, Dave. Look, after the dinner rush I can get off early. Take the key to my apartment and I'll meet you there in about an hour. It's right around the corner."

"You got any hooch?"

"Some beer is all. I've been doing good, Dave. No little white pills, no glug-glug before I go to work. I can't believe how good I feel in the mornings."

"Pick me up at Sloppy Joe's."

"What do you want to go there for? It's full of college dopes who think Ernest Hemingway wrote on the bathroom walls or something."

"See you in an hour, kiddo. You're a sweet girl."

"Yeah, the guys at Smiling Jack's used to tell me that all the time. While they were trying to cop a feel under the table. I think you got hit in the head by lightning this morning."

When she came for me later at Sloppy Joe's, I was by myself at a table in the back, the breeze from a floor fan rising up my trouser leg, fluttering the wet sleeve of my seersucker coat that hung over the side of the table. The big sliding doors on two sides of the building were rolled wide open, and the neon light shone purple on the sidewalk. On the corner, two cops were rousting a drunk. They weren't cutting him any slack, either. He was going to the bag.

"Let's go, Lieutenant," Robin said.

"Wait till the Man leaves. My horizon keeps tilting. Key West is a bad town to have trouble in."

"All I do is flex my boobs and they tip their hats. Such gentlemen. No more booze, honey pie."

"I need to tell you some things. About my wife. Then you have to tell me some more about those people in New Orleans."

"Tomorrow morning. Mommy's going to fix you a steak tonight."

"They killed her."

"What?"

"They blew her to pieces with shotguns. That's what they did, all right."

She stared at me with her mouth parted. I could see the edges of her nostrils discolor.

"You mean Bubba Rocque killed your wife?" she said.

"Maybe it was him. Maybe not. Ole Bubba's a hard guy to second-guess."

"Dave, I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. Did it have something to do with me? God, I don't believe it."

"No."

"It does, though, because you're here."

"I just want to see if you can remember some things, Maybe I just wanted to see you, too."

"I guess that's why you had the hots for me when you were single. Tell me about it when your head's not ninety-proof." She looked around the bar. The floor fan ruffled her short black hair. "This place's a drag. The whole town's a drag. It's full of low-rent dykes and man-eaters that drift down from New York. Why'd you send me over here?"

"You told me you were doing well here."

"Who's doing well when people are out there killing a guy's wife? You messed with them, didn't you, Dave? You wouldn't listen to me."

I didn't answer, but instead picked up my highball glass.

"Forget it. Your milk cow has gone dry for tonight," she said, then took the glass out of my hand and poured it in a pool of whiskey and ice on the table.

She lived on the first floor of an old two-story stucco building with a red tile roof just off Duval Street. A huge banyan tree had cracked one wall, and the tiny yard was overgrown with weeds and untrimmed banana trees. Her apartment had a small kitchen, a bedroom separated by a sliding curtain, and a couch, breakfast table, and chairs that looked like they had come from a Goodwill store.

Robin had a good heart, and she wanted to be kind, but her cooking was truly a challenge, particularly to someone on a bender. She turned the steak black on one side, fried the potatoes in a half-inch of grease, and filled the apartment with smoke and the smell of burned onions. I tried to eat but couldn't. I'd reached the bottom of my drunk. The cogs on my wheels were sheared smooth, all my wiring was blown, and the skin of my face was thick and dead to the touch. I suddenly felt that I had aged a century, that someone had slipped a knife along my breastbone and scooped out all my vital organs.

"Are you going to be sick?" she said.

"No, I just need to go to bed."

She looked at me a moment in the light of the unshaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. Her eyes were green, and unlike most of the strippers on Bourbon, she had never needed to wear false eyelashes. She brought two sheets from her dresser in the bedroom and spread them on the couch. I sat down heavily, took off my shoes, and rubbed my hand in my face. I was already starting to dehydrate, and I could smell the alcohol against my palm like an odor climbing out of a dark well. She carried a pillow back to the couch.

"Robin?" I said.

"What are you up to, Lieutenant?" She looked down at me with the light behind her head.

I put my hand on her wrist. She sat down beside me and looked straight ahead. Her hands were folded, and her knees were close together under her black waitress uniform.

"Are you sure this is what you want?" she said.

"Yes."

"Did you come all the way over here just to get laid? There must be somebody available closer to home."