"My victims didn't suffer none," he said.

Then he began to talk about his mother and an incredible transformation took place in him. Tears streaked down his homely face, he trembled all over, his fingers left white marks on his arms. Evidently she had been not only a prostitute but perverse as well. When he was a little boy she had made him stand by the bed and watch her copulate with her johns. When he had tried to hide in the woods, she beat him with a quirt, brought him back to the house, and made him watch some more.

He spent fifteen years in the Wisconsin penitentiary for her murder.

Then he paused in his story, wiped his face with his hand, pulled his T-shirt from his chest with his finger, and smelled himself.

"I killed three more people the day I come out of prison. I told them I was gonna do it, and I done it," he said, and began cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick as though I were not there.

When I walked back out into the autumn sunshine that afternoon, back into the smell of east Texas piney woods and white-uniformed convicts burning piles of tree stumps on the edge of a cottonfield, I was convinced that Jack Hatfield's story about his mother was true but that almost everything else he had told me would remain as demonstrably elusive as a psychotic dream. Perhaps the answer to Jack Hatfield lay with others, I thought. Perhaps we should ask those who would eventually strap him to the gurney in the execution room, poke the IV needle into the vein, tape it lovingly to the skin, and watch him through the viewing glass as the injection dulled his eyes then hit his heart like a hammer. Would his life, his secret and dark knowledge, be passed on to them?

I'd had little sleep when I set out for the office the next morning. The sun had come up red and hot over the trees, and because I had left the windows down the night before, the inside of my truck was full of mosquitoes and dripping with humidity. I stopped at a traffic light on the east side of town and saw a purple Cadillac limousine, with tinted black windows, pull into a yellow zone by a restaurant and park squarely in front of the fire plug.

Cholo Manelli stepped out of the driver's door, stretched, rotated a crick out of his neck, looked up and down the street a couple of times, then walked around to the other side of the limo and opened the back door for Julie Balboni. Then the rest of Julie's entourage-three men and the woman named Margot-stepped out onto the sidewalk, their faces dour in the heat, their eyes sullen with the morning's early hour.

Cholo went up the sidewalk first, point man and good soldier that he was, his head turning slightly from side to side, his simian shoulders rolling under his flowered shirt. He opened the front door of the restaurant, and Julie walked inside, with the others in single file behind him.

I didn't plan any of the events that followed.

I drove through the light and went almost two blocks before I made a U-turn, drove back to the restaurant, and parked under a live-oak tree across the street from the limo. The early sun's heat was already rising from the cement, and I could smell dead water beetles in the curb gutters.

My eyes burned from lack of sleep, and though I had just shaved, I could feel stubble, like grit, along the edge of my jaw. I got out of the truck, put my seersucker coat over my arm, and walked across the street to the limo. The waxed purple surface had the soft glow of hard candy; the tinted black windows swam with the mirrored images of oak trees and azalea bushes moving in the breeze.

I unfolded the blade of my Puma knife, walked from fender to fender, and sawed the air stems off all four tires. The limo went down on the rims like it had been dropped from a chain. A black kid who had been putting circulars on doors stopped and watched me as he would a fascinating creature inside a zoo cage.

I walked to the filling station on the corner, called the dispatcher, and told him to have a wrecker tow the limo into the pound.

Then I went inside the restaurant, which gleamed with chrome and silverware and Formica surfaces, and walked past the long table where two waitresses were in the process of serving Julie and his group their breakfast. Cholo saw me first and started to speak, but I looked straight ahead and continued on into the men's room as though they were not there.

I washed my face with cold water, dried it with paper towels, and combed my hair in the mirror. There were flecks of white in my mustache now, and lines around my eyes that I hadn't noticed only a week before. I turned on the cold water and washed my face again, as though somehow I could rinse time and age out of my skin. Then I crumpled up the damp paper towel in my hand, flung it into the trash can, fixed my tie, put on my coat and sunglasses, and walked back into the restaurant.

Showtime, Julie, I thought.

Even sitting down, he towered above the others at the head of the table, in a pink short-sleeve shirt, suspenders, and gray striped slacks, his tangled black hair ruffling on his brow in the breeze from the fan, his mouth full of food while he told the waitress to bring more coffee and to reheat Margot's breakfast steak. Cholo kept trying to smile at me, his false teeth as stiff as whale bone in his mouth. Julie's other hoods looked up at me, then at Julie; when they read nothing in his face, they resumed eating.

"Hey, lieutenant, I thought that was you. You here for breakfast?" Cholo said.

"I was just passing by," I said.

"What's going on, Dave?" Julie said, his mouth chewing, his eyes fixed on the flower vase in front of him.

"I had a long night last night," I said.

"Yeah?" he said.

"We found a girl in a barrel down in south Vermilion Parish."

He continued to chew, then he took a drink of water. He touched his mouth with his napkin.

"You want to sit down, or are you on your way out?" he said.

Just then I heard the steel hook of the wrecker clang somewhere on the limo's frame and the hydraulic cables start to tighten on the winch. Cholo craned his head to look beyond the angle of the front window that gave onto the street.

"I always thought you were standup, Feet," I said.

"I appreciate the compliment, but that's a term they use in a place I've never been."

"That's all right, I changed my mind. I don't think you're standup anymore, Feet."

He blew up both his cheeks.

"What are you trying to say, Dave?"

"The man I work for got a bunch of phone calls yesterday. It looks like somebody dropped the dime on me with the Kiwanis Club."

"It ain't a bunch I got a lot of influence with. Talk with Mikey Goldman if you got that kind of problem."

"You use what works, Julie."

"Hey, get real, Dave. When I want to send a message to somebody, it don't come through Dagwood Bumstead."

Outside, the driver of the wrecker gunned his engine, pulled away from the curb, and dragged the limo past the front window. The limo's two front tires, which were totally deflated and still on the asphalt, were sliced into ribbons by the wheel rims.

Cholo's mouth was wide with unchewed scrambled eggs.

"Hey, a guy's got our car! A guy's driving off with the fucking limo, Julie!" he said.

Julie watched the wrecker and his limo disappear up the street. He pushed his plate away an inch with his thumb. One corner of his mouth drooped, and he pressed against it with his napkin.

"Sit down," he said.

Everyone had stopped eating now. A waitress came to the table with a pitcher of ice water and started to refill the glasses, then hesitated and walked back behind the counter. I pulled out a chair and sat at the corner of the table, a foot from Julie's elbow.

"You're pissed off about something and you have my fucking car towed in?" he said.