"Cuff him and put him behind the screen," I told Cecil.

Cecil pulled the man's hands behind his back, snapped the handcuffs tightly onto his wrists, and walked him back to our car as though he were a wounded bird. He locked him behind the wire mesh that separated the back and front seats, and waited for me to get into the passenger's seat. When I didn't, he walked back to where I stood by the Chevette.

"What's the deal? He's the one, ain't he?" he said.

"Yep."

"Let's take him in."

"We've got a problem, Cecil. There's no gun, no hat, no nylon stocking. Your cousin's not going to be able to identify him in a lineup, either."

"I seen you pick up them brandy glass. I seen you look at them Tootsie Roll paper."

"That's right. But the prosecutor's office will tell us to kick him loose. We don't have enough evidence, podna."

"My fucking ass. You get a beer, you. Come see in ten minutes. He give you that stocking, you better believe, yeah."

"How much money was in his wallet?"

"A hunnerd maybe."

"I think there's another way to do it, Cecil. Stay here a minute."

I walked back to our car. It was hot inside, and the handcuffed man was sweating heavily. He was trying to blow a mosquito away from his face with his breath.

"My partner wants to bust you," I said.

"So?"

"There's a catch. I don't like you. That means I don't like protecting you."

"What are you talking about, man?"

"I went off duty at five o'clock. I'm going to get me a shrimp sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and let him take you in. Are you starting to see the picture now?"

He shook back his damp hair from his eyes and tried to look indifferent, but he didn't hide fear well.

"I have a feeling that somewhere between here and the jail you're going to remember where you left that gun and stocking," I said. "But anyway it's between you and him now. And I don't take stock in rumors."

"What? What the fuck you talking about rumors, man?"

"That he took a suspect into the woods and put out his eye with a bicycle spoke. I don't believe it."

I saw him swallow. The sweat ran out of his hair.

"Hey, did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" I asked. "There's a great scene in there when this Mexican bandit says to Humphrey Bogart, 'I like your watch. I think you give me your watch.' Maybe you saw it on the late show at Raiford."

"I ain't playing this bullshit, man."

"Come on you, you can do it. You pretend you're Humphrey Bogart. You drive your car back to that convenience store and you give the owner your hundred dollars and that Gucci watch you're wearing. It's going to brighten up your day. I guarantee it."

The mosquito sat on the end of his nose.

"Here comes Cecil now. Let him know what you've decided," I said.

The light was soft through the trees as I drove along the bayou road toward my house that evening. Sometimes during the summer the sky in southern Louisiana actually turns lavender, with strips of pink cloud in the west like flamingo wings painted above the horizon, and this evening the air was sweet with the smell of watermelons and strawberries in somebody's truck patch and the hydrangeas and night-blooming jasmine that completely covered my neighbor's wooden fence. Out on the bayou the bream were dimpling the water like raindrops.

Before I turned into my lane I passed a fire-engine-red MG convertible with a flat tire by the side of the road, then I saw Bubba Rocque's wife sitting on my front step with a silver thermos next to her thigh and a plastic cup in her fingers. She wore straw Mexican sandals, beige shorts, and a low-cut white blouse with blue and brown tropical birds on it, and she had pinned a yellow hibiscus in her dark hair. She smiled at me as I walked toward her with my coat over my shoulder. Once again I noticed that strange red cast in her brown eyes.

"I had a flat tire. Can you give me a ride back to my aunt's on West Main?" she asked.

"Sure. Or I can change it for you."

"There's no air in the spare, either." She drank from the cup. Her mouth was red and wet, and she smiled at me again.

"What are you doing down this way, Mrs. Rocque?"

"It's Claudette, Dave. My cousin lives down at the end of the road. I come over to New Iberia about once a month to see all my relatives."

"I see."

"Am I putting you out?"

"No. I'll be just a minute."

I didn't ask her in. I went inside to check on Alafair and told the baby-sitter to go ahead and serve supper, that I would be back shortly.

"Help a lady up. I'm a little twisted this evening," Claudette Rocque said, and reached her hand out to mine. She felt heavy when I pulled her erect. I could smell gin and cigarettes on her breath.

"I'm sorry about your wife," she said.

"Thank you."

"It's a terrible thing."

I held the truck door open for her and didn't answer.

She sat with her back at an angle to the far door, her legs slightly apart, and moved her eyes over my face.

Oh boy, I thought. I drove out of the shadows of the pecan trees, back onto the bayou road.

"You look uncomfortable," she said.

"Long day."

"Are you afraid of Bubba?"

"I don't think about him," I lied.

"I don't think you're afraid of very much."

"I respect your husband's potential. I apologise for not asking you in. The house is a mess."

"You don't get backed into a corner easily, do you?"

"Like I said, it's been a long day, Mrs. Rocque."

She made an exaggerated pout with her mouth.

"And you're not going to call a married lady by her first name. What a proper law officer you are. Do you want a gin rickey?"

"No, thanks."

"You're going to hurt my feelings. Has someone told you bad things about me?"

I watched a sparrow hawk glide on extended wings down the length of the bayou.

"Did someone tell you I was in St. Gabriel?" she said. Then she smiled and reached out and ticked the skin above my collar with her nail. "Or maybe they told you I wasn't all girl."

I could feel her eyes moving on the side of my face.

"I've made the officer uncomfortable. I think I even made him blush," she said.

"How about a little slack, Mrs. Rocque?"

"Will you have a drink with me, then?"

"What do you think the odds are of your having a flat tire by my front lane?"

Her round doll's eyes were bright as she looked at me over her raised drinking cup.

"He's such a detective," she said. "He's thinking so hard now, wondering what the bad lady is up to." She rubbed her back against the door and flattened her thighs against the truck seat. "Maybe the lady is interested in you. Are you interested in me?"

"I wouldn't go jerking Bubba around, Mrs. Rocque."

"Oh my, how direct."

"You live with him. You know the kind of man he is. If I was in your situation, I'd give some thought to what I was doing."

"You're being rude, Mr. Robicheaux."

"Read it like you want. Your husband has black lightning in his brain. Mess around with his pride, embarrass him socially, and I think you'll get to see that same kid who wheeled his crippled cousin into the coulee."

"I have some news for you, sir," she said. Her voice wasn't coy anymore, and the red tint in her brown eyes seemed to take on a brighter cast. "I did three years in a place where the bull dykes tell you not to come into the shower at night unless you want to lose your cherry. Bubba never did time. I don't think he could. I think he'd last about three days until they had to lock him in a box and put handles on it and carry it out in the middle of an empty field."

I drove onto the drawbridge. The tires thumped on the metal grid. I saw the bridge tender, a look at Claudette Rocque and me with a quizzical expression on his face.