Sometime after midnight, I woke with a thick, numb feeling in my head, the kind you have after you've been out in a cold wind a long time by yourself. I sat quietly on the edge of the couch, my bare feet resting in a square of moonlight on the floor, and opened and closed my hands as though I were seeing them for the first time. Then I unlocked Annie's and my bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.

The bloody sheets and bedspread had been carried off in a vinyl evidence bag, but the mattress and the wooden bedstead were filled with holes that I could fit my fingers into as though I were probing the wounds in Our Lord's hands. The brown patterns all over the bedstead and the flowered wallpaper could have been slung there by a paintbrush. I rubbed my hand across the wall and felt the stiff, torn edges of the paper where the buckshot and deer slugs had torn through the wood. The moon shone through the pecan tree outside and made an oval of light in my lap. I felt as solitary as if I had been sitting in the bottom of a dry, cool well, with strips of silver cloud floating by against a dark sky.

I thought about my father and wished he were there with me. He couldn't read or write and never once traveled outside the state of Louisiana, but his heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey. He drank too much and he'd fistfight two or three men in a bar at the same time, with the enthusiasm of a boy hitting baseballs, but inside he had a gentle heart, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a tragic sense about the cruelty and violence that the world sometimes imposes upon the innocent.

He told me a story once about a killing that he'd seen as a young man. In my father's mind, the victim's death was emblematic of all the unjust and brutal behavior that people are capable of in groups, although in reality the victim was not an innocent man. It was the winter of 1935, and a criminal who had robbed banks with John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter had been flushed out of Margaret's whorehouse in Opelousas, a brothel that had been operating since the War Between the States. Cops chased him all the way to Iberia Parish, and when his car slid into a ditch, he struck out across a frozen field of sugarcane stubble. My father and a Negro were pulling stumps with a mule and trace chains and burning them in big heaps when the robber ran past them toward the old barn by our windmill. My father said he wore a white shirt with cufflinks and a bow tie, with no coat, and he gripped a straw boater in his hand as though it were his last possession on earth.

A cop fired a rifle from the road, and one of the robber's legs collapsed and he went down in the middle of the stubble.

The cops all wore suits and fedoras, and they walked in a line across the field as though they were flushing quail. They formed a half-circle around the wounded man, while he sat with his legs straight out before him and begged for his life. My father said that when they started shooting with their revolvers and automatic pistols, the man's shirt exploded with crimson flowers.

With crimson flowers that turned brown, that can be bruised into the grain of wood, that flake and shale away under the touch of my fingers. Because they impaled her upon this bedstead and this wall, drove her screams and her fear and her agony deep into this wood, translated these cypress boards, hewn by my father, into her crucifix.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I stared up at Robin, whose face and body looked strangely pale in the moonlight that fell through the pecan tree into the room. She slipped her hand under my arm and pulled me up gently from the edge of the bed.

"It's no good for you in here, Streak," she said quietly. "I'll fix us warm milk in the kitchen."

"Sure. Is the phone still ringing?"

"What?"

"The phone. I heard it ringing."

"No. It didn't ri-Dave, come on out of here."

"It didn't ring, huh? When I used to have the DTs, dead people would call me up on the phone. It was a crazy way to be back then."

That morning I drove back to New Orleans to look for Victor Romero. As I said before, his sheet wasn't much help, and I knew that undoubtedly he was a more intelligent and far more dangerous man that it indicated. However, it was also obvious from his record that he had the same vices and sordid preoccupations and worm's-eye view of the world as did most of his kind. I talked with street people in the Quarter, bartenders, some strippers who hooked on the side, late-hour cabdrivers who pimped for the strippers, a couple of black Murphy artists, door spielers on Bourbon, a fence in Algiers, a terminal junkie who was down to shooting into his wasted thighs with an eye-dropper insulated with the white edge of a one-dollar bill. If they admitted having known Romero, they said they thought he was dead, out of the country, or in federal custody. In each instance, I might as well have held a conversation with a vacant lot.

But sometimes what you don't hear is a statement in itself. I was convinced he was still in New Orleans-I had heard the streetcar bell in the background when he called-and if he was in town, somebody was probably hiding or supporting him, because he wasn't pimping or dealing. I went down to First District headquarters on the edge of the Quarter and talked to two detectives in vice. They said they had already tried to find Romero through his relatives, and there weren't any. His father had been a fruit picker who disappeared in Florida in the 1960s, and the mother had died in the state mental hospital at Mandeville. There were no brothers or sisters.

"How about girlfriends?" I said.

"Outside of whores, you're talking about his fist," one of the detectives said.

I drove back to New Iberia in a late-afternoon shower. The sun was shining while it rained, and the yellow surface of the Atchafalaya marsh danced with light.

I turned off at Breaux Bridge and parked my truck on the Henderson levee and stood among the buttercups and blue-bonnets and watched the light rain fall on the bays and the flooded cypress trees. The levee was thick with enormous black and yellow grasshoppers that sprang out of the grass, their lacquered backs shining in the wet light. When I was a boy, my brother and I would trap them with our straw hats, bait our trotline with them at sunset and string it between two abandoned oil platforms, and in the morning the line would be so taut and heavy with mudcat that it would take both of us to lift it clear of the water.

I was becoming tired of being a policeman again. Hold your soul against an emery wheel long enough, and one day you'll have only air between your hands. And with that thought in mind, I left Alafair with Batist that night and took Robin to the races at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. We ate shrimp and steak in the clubhouse, then went back out to the open-air seats and sat in a box by the finish line. It was a balmy night, and heat lightning flickered all over the southern horizon; the sod, still damp from the afternoon shower, had been freshly raked, and halos of moisture glowed in the arc lamps over head. Robin wore a white cotton sundress with purple and green tiger lilies printed on it, and her tanned neck and shoulders looked smooth and cool in the shadowy light. She had never been to a horse race before, and I let her pick the horses in the first three races. She chose one horse because of the white stockings on its feet, a second because of the jockey's purple silks, a third because she said the jockey's face was shaped like a toy heart. All three placed or showed, and she was hooked. Each time the horses thundered around the last turn and then spread out from the rail as they went into the home stretch, the jockeys whipping the quirts into their flanks, the torn sod flying in the air, she would be on her feet, her arms locked in mine, her breast pressed hard against me, her whole body jiggling and bouncing in excitement. We cashed $178 worth of tickets at the pay window that night, and on the way home we stopped at a late-hour market and bought Batist and his wife a fruit-and-cheese basket with a bottle of Cold Duck in it. When I turned the truck off on the dirt road that led along the bayou south of New Iberia, she was asleep with her head on my shoulder, her hand limp inside my shirt, her lips parted in the moonlight as though she were going to whisper a little girl's secret to me.