"I called before I left. You weren't in," I said.

"That's not enough."

Again I didn't answer him. The bagged rifle shells were on his desk.

"Tell the truth. What would you have done if you'd found the Haitian alive?" he asked.

"Busted him."

"I want to believe that."

I looked out of the window at a bright green magnolia tree in the morning haze.

"I'm sorry about what I did. It won't happen again," I said.

"If it does, you won't have to resign. I'll take your badge myself."

I looked at the magnolia tree a moment and watched a hummingbird hang over one of the white flowers.

"If we get a print off those shells, I want to send it to New Orleans," I said.

"Why?"

"The scene investigator dusted the radio that was in the bathtub with the Haitian. Maybe there's a connection with our shooter."

"How?"

"Who knows? I want New Orleans to give us a copy of Victor Romero's sheet and prints, too."

"You think he was the shooter?"

"Maybe."

"What's the motive?"

"Hell if I know."

"Dave, do you think maybe you're trying to tie too many things together here? I mean, you want your wife's killers. But you've only got one set of suspects that you can reach out and touch, so maybe you've decided to see some threads that aren't there. Like you said, you put a lot of people in Angola."

"The ex-con who snuffs you wants you to see his face and enjoy a couple of memories with him. The guy who shot at me last night did it for money. I don't know him."

"Well, maybe the guy's car will show up. I don't know how he got it out of the parish with all those holes in it."

"He boosted it, and it's in the bayou or a garage somewhere. We won't find it. At least not for a while."

"You're really an optimist, aren't you?"

I spent the day doing the routine investigative work of a sheriff's detective in a rural parish, I didn't enjoy it. For some reason, probably because he was afraid I'd run off again, the sheriff assigned me a uniformed deputy named Cecil Aguillard, an enormous, slow-witted redbone. He was a mixture of Cajun, Negro and Chitimacha Indian; his skin was the color of burnt brick, and he had tiny, turquoise-green eyes and a pie-plate face you could break a barrel slat across without his changing expression. He drove seventy miles an hour with one hand, spit Red Man out of the window, and pressed on the pedals with such weight and force that he had worn the rubber off the metal.

We investigated a stabbing in a Negro bar, the molestation of a retarded girl by her uncle, an arson case in which a man set fire to his own fish camp because his drunken guests wouldn't leave his party by the next morning, and finally, late that afternoon, the armed robbery of a grocery store out on the Abbeville road. The owner was a black man, a cousin of Cecil Aguillard, and the robber had taken ninety-five dollars from him, walked him back to the freezer, hit him across the eye with his pistol barrel, and locked him inside. When we questioned him he was still shaking from the cold, and his eye was swollen into a purple knot. He could only tell us that the robber was white, that he had driven up in a small brown car with an out-of-state license plate, had walked inside with a hat on, then suddenly rolled down a nylon stocking over his face, mashing his features into a blur of skin and hair.

"Somet'ing else. He took a bottle of apricot brandy and a bunch of them Tootsie Roll," the Negro said. "I tell him 'Big man with a gun, sucking on Tootsie Roll.' So he bust me in the face, him. I need that money for my daughter's col'ech in Lafeyette. It ain't cheap, no. You gonna get it back?"

I wrote on my clipboard and didn't reply.

"You gonna get it back, you?"

"It's hard to tell sometimes."

I knew better, of course. In fact, I figured our man was in Lake Charles or Baton Rouge by now. But time and chance happeneth to us all, even to the lowlifes.

On our radio we heard a deputy in a patrol car run a check on a 1981 tan Chevette with a Florida tag. He had stopped the Chevette out on the Jeanerette road because the driver had thrown a liquor bottle at a road sign. I called the dispatcher and asked her to tell the deputy to hold the driver until we got there.

Cecil drove the ten mile distance in less than eight minutes. The Chevette was pulled over on the oyster-shell parking lot of a ramshackle clapboard dance hall built back from the road. It was five p.m., the sun was orange over the rain clouds piled in the west, and Haliburton and cement and pickup trucks were parked around the entrance to the bar. A deeply tanned man in blue jeans, with no shirt on, leaned with one arm hooked over the open door of his Chevette, spitting disgustedly between his legs. His back was tattooed with a blue spider caught in a web. The web extended over both of his shoulder blades.

"What have you got him on?" I said to the deputy who had held him for us.

"Nothing. Littering. He says he works seven-and-seven offshore."

"Where's he break the bottle?"

"Back there. Against the railroad sign."

"We'll take it from here. Thanks for you help," I said.

The deputy nodded and drove off in his car.

"Shake this guy down, Cecil. I'll be back in a minute," I said.

I walked back to the railroad crossing, where an old Louisiana law-stop sign was postholed by the side of the gravel bedding. The wooden boards were stained with a dark, wet smear. I picked up pieces of glass out of the gravel and sootblackened weeds until I found two amber-colored pieces that were hinged together by an apricot brandy label.

I started back toward the parking lot with the two pieces of wet glass in my shirt pocket. Cecil had the tattooed man spread on the front of the fender of the Chevette and was ripping his pockets inside out. The tattooed man turned his head backwards, said something, and started to stand erect, when Cecil simultaneously picked him up in the air by his belt and slammed his head down on the hood. The man's face went white with concussion. Some oilfield roughnecks in tin hats, their denims spattered with drilling mud, stopped in the bar entrance and walked towards us.

"We're not supposed to bruise the freight, Cecil," I said.

"You want to know what he said to me?"

"Ease up. Our man here isn't going to give us any more trouble. He's already standing in the pig slop up to his kneecaps."

I turned to the oilfield workers, who obviously didn't like the idea of a redbone knocking around a white man.

"Private party, gentlemen," I said. "Read about it in the paper tomorrow. Just don't try to get your name in the story today. You got my drift?"

They made a pretense of staring me sullenly in the face, but a cold beer was much more interesting to them than a night in the parish jail.

The tattooed man was leaning on his arms against the front fender again. There were grains of dirt on the side of his face where it had hit the hood, and a pinched, angry light in his eyes. His blond hair was uncut and as thick and dry as old straw. Two Tootsie Roll wrappers lay on the floor of his car.

I looked under the seats. Nothing was there.

"You want to open the hatchback for us?" I said.

"Open it yourself," he said.

"I asked you if you wanted to do that. You don't have to. It beats going to jail, though. Of course, that doesn't mean you're necessarily going to jail. I just thought you might want to be a regular guy and help us out."

"Because you got no cause."

"That's right. It's called 'probable cause.' Were you in Raiford? I like the artwork on your back," I said.

"You want to look in my fucking car? I don't give a shit. Help yourself," he said, pulled the keys from the ignition, popped up the hatchback, and pulled open the tire well. There was nothing inside it except the spare and a jack.