"Look, I know New Orleans cops who would have just killed the guy and never given him a chance. Then they'd plant a gun on him. They've got a name for it. What do they call it?"

"A 'drop' or a 'throwaway'."

"You're not that kind of cop. You're a good man. Why do you want to carry this guilt around?"

"You don't understand, Robin. I think maybe I'm going to do it again."

Later I called the office and told them I wouldn't be in that day, then I put on my running shorts and shoes, lifted weights under the mimosa tree in the backyard, and ran three miles along the bayou road. Wisps of fog still hung around the flooded roots of the cypress trees. I went inside the paintless wood-frame general store at the four-corners, drank a carton of orange juice and talked French with the elderly owner of the store, then jogged back along the road while the sun climbed higher into the sky and dragonflies dipped and hovered over the cattails.

When I came through the front screen, hot and running with sweat, I saw the door of Annie's and my bedroom wide open, the lock and hasp pried loose from the jamb, the torn wood like a ragged dental incision. Sunlight streamed through the windows into the room, and Robin was on her hands and knees, in a white sun halter and a pair of cutoff blue jean shorts, dipping a scrub brush into a bucket of soapy water and scouring the grain in the cypress floor. The buckshot-pocked walls and the headboard of the bed were wet and gleaming, and by a bottle of Clorox on the floor was another bucket filled with soaking rags, and the rags and the water were the color of rust.

"What are you doing?" I said.

She glanced at me, then continued to scrub the grain without replying. The stiff bristles of the brush sounded like sandpaper against the wood. The muscles of her tan back rippled with her motion.

"Damn you, Robin. Who gave you the fucking right to go into my bedroom?"

"I couldn't find your keys, so I pried the lock off with a screwdriver. I'm sorry about the damage."

"You get the fuck out of this room."

She paused and sat back on her heels. There were white indentations on her knees. She brushed the perspiration out of her hairline with the back of her wrist.

"Is this your church where you go every day to suffer?" she said.

"It's none of your business what it is. It's not a part of your life."

"Then tell me to get out of your life. Say it and I'll do it."

"I'm asking you to leave this room."

"I have a hard time buying your attitude, Streak. You wear guilt like a big net over your head. You ever know guys who are always getting the clap? They're not happy unless some broad has dosed them from their toenails to their eyes. Is that the kind of gig you want for yourself?"

The sweat was dripping off my hands onto the floor. I breathed slowly and pushed my wet hair back over my head.

"I'm sorry for being profane at you. I truly am. But come outside now," I said.

She dipped the brush in the bucket again and began to enlarge the scrubbed circle on the floor.

"Robin?" I said.

She concentrated her eyes on the strokes of the brush across the wood.

"This is my house, Robin."

I stepped toward her.

"I'm talking to you, kiddo. No more free pass," I said.

She sat back on her heels again and dropped the brush in the water.

"I'm finished," she said. "You want to stand here and mourn or help me carry these buckets outside?"

"You didn't have the right to do this. You mean well, but you didn't have the right."

"Why don't you show some respect for your wife and stop using her? If you want to get drunk, go do it. If you want to kill somebody, do that. But at least have the courage to do it on your own, without all this remorse bullshit. It's a drag, Dave."

She picked up one of the buckets with both hands to avoid spilling it, and walked out the door past me. Her bare feet left damp imprints on the cypress floor. I continued to stand alone in the room, the dust spinning in the shafts of light through the windows, then I saw her cross the backyard with the bucket and walk toward the duck pond.

"Wait!" I called through the window.

I gathered up the soiled rags from the floor, put them in the other bucket, and followed her outside. I stopped by the aluminum shed where I kept my lawn mower and tools, took out a shovel, and walked down to the small flower garden that Batist's wife had planted next to a shallow coulee that ran through my property. The soil in the garden was loamy and damp from the overflow of the coulee and partly shaded by banana trees so the geraniums and impatiens didn't burn up in the summer; but the outer edge was in full sun and it ran riot with daisies and periwinkles.

They weren't the cornflowers and bluebonnets that a Kansas girl should have, but I knew that she would understand. I pushed the shovel into the damp earth and scooped out a deep hole among the daisy roots, poured the two buckets of soap and water and chemicals into the dirt, put the brush and rags into the hole, then put the buckets on top and crushed them flat with my foot, and covered the hole back up with a wet mound of dirt and a tangle of severed daisy and periwinkle roots. I uncoiled the garden hose from the side of the house and watered the mound until it was as slick and smooth as the ground around it and the chemicals had washed far below the root system of the flower bed.

It was the kind of behavior that you don't care to think about or to explain to yourself later. I cleaned the shovel under the hose, replaced it in the shed, and walked back into the kitchen without speaking to Robin. Then I took a shower and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a denim shirt and read the newspaper at the redwood table under the mimosa tree. I could hear Robin making lunch in the kitchen and Alafair talking to her in a mixture of Spanish and English. Then Robin brought a ham-and-onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea to me on a tray. I didn't look up from the table when she set it on the table. She remained standing next to me, her bare thigh only an inch from my arm, then I felt her hand touch me lightly on the shoulder and finger my damp collar and tease the hair along my neck.

"I'll always be your biggest fan, Robicheaux," she said.

I put my arm around her soft bottom and squeezed her against me, my eyes shut.

Late that afternoon Minos Dautrieve was at my front door, dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and a paint-flecked gold shirt. A fishing rod stuck out the passenger's window of his parked Toyota jeep.

"I hear you know where all the big bass are," he said.

"Sometimes."

"I've got some fried chicken and Dixie beer and soda in the cooler. Let's get it on down the road."

"We were thinking of going to the track tonight."

"I'll have you back early. Get your butt moving, boy."

"You've really got the touch, Minos."

We hitched my trailer and one of my boats to his jeep and drove twenty-five miles to the levee that fronts the southwestern edge of the Atchafalaya swamp. The wind was down, the water quiet, the insects just beginning to rise from the reeds and lily pads in the shadows of the willow islands. I took us across a long bay dotted with dead cypresses and oil platforms, then up a bayou, deep into the swamp, before I cut the engine and let the boat drift quietly up to the entrance of a small bay with a narrow channel at the far end. I still didn't know what Minos was up to.

"On a hot day like this, they get deep in the holes on the shady side of the islands," I said. "Then just before dusk they move up to the edge of the channel and feed where the water curves around the bank."

"No kidding?" he said.

"You have a Rapula?"

"I might have one of those."