He popped open his tackle box, which had three layers of compartments in it, all of them filled with rubber worms, spinners, doll flies, surface plugs, and popping bugs.

"What's it look like?" he said.

"Guess what, Minos? I gave up being a straight man for government agents when I resigned from the New Orleans department."

He clipped a Devil Horse on his swivel and flipped it neatly across the channel into open water with a quick spring of his wrist. Then he retrieved it through the channel back into the bay and cast again. On the third cast I saw the quiet surface of the water balloon under the lily pads, then the dorsal fin of a bigmouth bass roll like a serpent right in front of the lure, the scales hammered with green and gold light, and then the water exploded when he locked down on the lure and Minos socked the treble hook hard into his jaw. The bass went deep and pulled for a hole among the reeds, clouding the water with mud, but Minos kept the tip of the rod up, the drag tight, and turned him back into the middle of the bay. Then the bass broke through the surface into the air, rattling the lure and swivel against his head, and splashed sideways like a wood plank whipped against the surface, before he went deep again and tried for the channel and open water.

"Get him up again," I said.

"He'll tear it out of his mouth."

I started to speak again, but I saw the line stop and quiver against the current, tiny beads of water glistening on the stretched monofilament. When Minos tried to turn the handle of the spinning reel, the rod dipped over the side. I put the hand net, which I had been holding, back under the seat of the boat. Suddenly the rod flipped up straight and lifeless in Minos's palm, the broken line floating in a curlicue on top of the water.

"Sonofabitch," he said.

"I forgot to tell you there are a bunch of cypress stumps under this bay. Don't feel bad, though. That same bass has a whole collection of my lures."

He didn't speak for almost five minutes. He drank a bottle of Dixie beer, put the empty back in the cooler, then opened another one and lit a cigar.

"You want some chicken?" he said.

"Sure. But it's getting late, Minos. I still want to go to the track tonight."

"I'm keeping you?"

I joined the sections of my Fenwick fly rod and tied a black popping bug with a yellow feather and red eyes to the tapered leader. I stuck the hook into the cork handle and handed him the rod.

"This is a surefire killer for goggle-eye," I said. "We'll go out into open water and throw back into the bank, then I've got to hit the road, partner."

I pulled the foot-long piece of train rail that I used as an anchor, left the outboard engine tilted up on the stern, and paddled us through the channel into the larger bay. The air was purple, swallows covered the sky, and a wind had come up and was blowing the insects back into the flooded trees so that the bream and sunfish and goggle-eye perch were feeding deep in the shadows. The western sky was a burnt orange, and cranes and blue herons stood in the shallows on the tips of the sandbars and islands of cattails. Minos dropped his cigar hissing into the water, false-cast in a figure eight over his head, and lay the popping bug right on the edge of the lily pads.

"How do you feel about wasting Romero?" he asked.

"I don't feel anything."

"I don't believe you."

"So what?"

"I don't believe you, that's all."

"Is that why we're out here?"

"I had a phone conversation with that homicide lieutenant, Magelli, this morning. You didn't tell him it was your wife Romero killed."

"He didn't ask."

"Oh yeah, he did."

"I don't feel like talking about this, Minos."

"Maybe you ought to learn who your friends are."

"Listen, if you're saying I was out to pop Romero, you're wrong. That's just the way it worked out. He thought he might have another season to run. He lost. It's that simple. And I think day-after analysis is for douchebags."

"I don't give a damn about Romero. He should have been a bar of soap a long time ago." He missed a strike among the lily pads and ripped the popping bug angrily back through a leaf.

"Then what's all this stuff about?"

"Magelli said you figured out something in Romero's apartment. Something you weren't telling him about."

I drew the paddle through the water and didn't answer.

"It had to do with lime juice or something," he said.

"The only thing that counts is the score at the end of the game. I made a big mistake in not using The New Orleans cops to bust Romero. I don't know how to correct it. Let it go at that, Minos."

He sat down in the boat and stuck the hook of the popping bug into the cork handle of the rod.

"Let me tell you a quick story," he said. "In Vietnam I worked for a major who was both a nasty and stupid man. In free-fire zones he liked to go dink-pinking in his helicopter-farmers in a field, women, water buffalo, whatever was around. Then his stupidity and incompetence compromised a couple of our agents and got them killed. I won't go into detail, but the VC could be imaginative when they created object lessons. One of those agents was a Eurasian schoolteacher I had something of a relationship with.

"I thought a lot about our major. I spent many nights thinking long and hard about him. Then one day an opportunity presented itself. Out in Indian country where you could paint the trees with a fat, incompetent fellow and then smoke a little dope and just let a bad day float away in the wind. But I didn't do it. I wasn't willing to trade the rest of my life-my conscience, if you will-for one asshole. So he's probably still out there, fucking people up, getting them killed, telling stories about all the dinks he left floating in the rice fields. But I'm not crazy today, Robicheaux. I don't have to live with a shitpile of guilt. I don't have to worry about the wrong people showing up at my house one day."

"Save your concern. I've got nothing of any value to go on. I blew it."

"I'd like to believe you're that humble and resigned."

"Maybe I am."

"No, I know guys like you. You're out of sync with the rest of the world, and you don't trust other people. That's why you're always thinking."

"Is that right?"

"You just haven't figured out how to pull it off yet," he said. His face was covered with the sun's last red light. "Eventually, you'll try to hang them up in a meat market."

11

HE WAS WRONG. I had already quit trying to figure out how to pull it off. Instead, I had spent the entire day brooding on an essential mistake I had made in the investigation, a failure to act upon a foregone conclusion about how Bubba and his wife operated-namely, that they used people. They used them in a cynical and ruthless fashion and then threw them away like soiled Kleenex. Johnny Dartez muled for Bubba and drowned in the plane at Southwest Pass; Eddie Keats kept Bubba's whores in line and Toot trimmed ears for him, and now one had been dumped in a swamp and the other had been cooked in his own bathtub; and finally in my pride and single-mindedness I had stumbled into the role of Victor Romero's executioner.

The board was swept clean. I had always thought of myself as a fairly smart cop, an outsider within the department, a one-eyed existentialist in the country of the blind, but I could not help comparing my situation with the way cops everywhere treat major crimes. We unconsciously target the most available and inept in that myriad army of metropolitan low-lifes: addicts, street dealers, petty thieves, hookers and a few of their Johns, storefront fences, and the obviously deranged and violent. With the exception of the hookers, most of these people are stupid and ugly and easy to convict. Check out the residents in any city or county jail. In the meantime the people who would market the Grand Canyon as a gravel pit or sell the Constitution at an Arab rug bazaar remain as socially sound as a silver dollar dropped into a church basket.