The ones who would talk to me all had the same odor, like sweaty leather, the warm female scent of unwashed hair, reefer smoke and nicotine, and engine grease rubbed into denim. But they had little knowledge or interest about anything outside of their tribal and atavistic world.

I found a mulatto pimp off Magazine who also ran a shooting gallery that specialized in black-tar heroin, which was selling at twenty-five dollars a hit and was back in fashion with adult addicts who didn't want to join the army of psychotic meltdowns produced by crack in the projects.

His name was Camel; he had one dead eye, like a colorless marble, and he wore a diamond clipped in one nostril and his hair shaved in ridges and dagger points. He peeled back the shell on a hard-boiled egg with his thumb at the sandwich counter of an old dilapidated grocery and package store with wood-bladed fans on the ceiling. His skin had the bright copper shine of a newly minted penny.

After he had listened to me for a while, he set his egg on a paper napkin and folded his long fingers reflectively.

"This is my neighborhood, place where all my friends live, and don't nobody here hurt my ladies," he said.

"I didn't say they did, Camel. I just want you to tell me if you've heard about anybody who might be recruiting out in the parishes. Maybe a guy who's seriously out of control."

"I don't get out of the neighborhood much no mo'. Age creeping up on me, I guess."

"It's been a hot day, partner. My tolerance for bullshit is way down. You're dealing Mexican skag for Julie Balboni, and you know everything that's going on in this town."

"What's that name again?"

I looked into his face for a long moment. He scraped at a bit of crust on the comer of his dead eye with his fingernail.

"You're a smart man, Camel. Tell me honestly, do you think you're going to jerk me around and I'm just going to disappear?"

He unscrewed the cap on a Tabasco bottle and began dotting drops of hot sauce on his egg.

"I heard stories about a white guy, they say a strange guy reg'lar peoples in the bidness don't like to fool with," he said.

"All right-"

"You're looking in the wrong place."

"What do you mean?"

"The guy don't live around here. He sets the girls up on the Airline Highway, in Jefferson Parish, puts one in charge, then comes back to town once in a while to check everything out."

"I see, a new kind of honor system. What are you trying to feed me, Camel?"

"You're not hearing me. The reg'lar peoples stay away from him for a reason. His chippies try to short him, they disappear. The word there is disappear, gone from the crib, blipped off the screen. Am I getting this acrost to you all right?"

"What's his name?"

"Don't know, don't want to know. Ax yourself something. Why y'all always come to a nigger to solve your problem? We ain't got nothing like that in a black neighborhood."

"We'll see you around, Camel. Thanks for your help. Say, what's the name of the black guy working the bus depot?"

"I travel by plane, my man. That's what everybody do today," he said, and licked the top of the peeled egg before he put it in his mouth.

For years the Airline had been the main highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. When I-10 was built, the Airline became a secondary road and was absorbed back into that quasi-rural slum culture that has always characterized the peckerwood South: ramshackle nightclubs with oyster-shell parking lots; roach-infested motels that feature water beds and pornographic movies and rent rooms by the day or week; truck stops with banks of rubber machines in the restrooms; all-night glaringly lit cafes where the smell of fried food permeates the counters and stools as tangibly as a film of grease.

I went to three clubs and got nowhere. Each time I walked through the door the bartender's eyes glanced up to meet me as they would somebody who had been expected all evening. As soon as I sat at the bar the girls went to the women's room or out the back door. The electronic noise of the country bands was deafening, the amplified squelch in the microphones like metal raking on a blackboard. When I tried to talk to someone, the person would nod politely in the din as though a man without vocal cords were speaking to him, then go back to his drink or stare in the opposite direction through the layers of cigarette smoke.

I gave up and walked back to my truck, which was parked between the clapboard side of a nightclub and a squat six-room motel with a small yellow lawn and a dead palm tree by the drive-in registration window. The air smelled of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks by the river, dust from the shell parking lot, liquor and beer from a trash barrel filled with empty bottles. The sky out over the Gulf trembled with dry lightning.

I didn't hear her behind me.

"Everybody on the strip knew you were coming two hours ago, cutie," she said.

I turned and squinted my eyes at her. She drank out of her beer bottle, then puffed off her cigarette. Her face was porcine, her lipstick on crooked, her dyed red hair lacquered like tangled wire on her head. She put one hand on her hip and waited for me to recognize her.

"Charlotte?"

"What a memory. Have I tubbed up on you?"

"No, not really. You're looking good."

She laughed to herself and blew her cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the dark.

Thirty years ago she had been a stripper and hooker on Bourbon Street, then the mistress of a loanshark who blew his brains out, the wife of an alcoholic ex-police sergeant who ended up in Angola for doping horses at the Fairgrounds, and the last I heard the operator of a massage parlor in Algiers.

"What are you doing out here on the Airline?" I said.

"I run the dump next door," she said, and nodded toward the motel. "Hey, I got to sit down. I really got crocked tonight." She shook a wooden chair loose from the trash pile by the side of the nightclub and sat down in it with her knees splayed and took another drink from her beer bottle. An exhaust fan from a restroom was pinging above her head. "I already heard what you're looking for, Streak. A guy bringing the chickens in from the country, right?"

"Do you know who he is?"

"They come and they go. I'm too old to keep track of it anymore."

"I'd sure like to talk to this guy, Charlotte."

"Yeah, somebody ought to run an iron hook through his balls, all right, but it's probably not going to happen."

"Why not?"

"You got the right juice, the play pen stays open."

"He's connected?"

"What do you think?"

"With the Balboni family?"

"Maybe. Maybe he's got juice with the cops or politicians. There's lots of ways to stay in business."

"But one way or another, most of them go down. Right?"

She raised her beer bottle to her mouth and drank.

"I don't think anybody is going to be talking about this guy a whole lot," she said. "You hear stories, you know what I mean? That this guy you're looking for is somebody you don't want mad at you, that he can be real hard on his chippies."

"Is it true?"

She set her empty bottle down on the shells and placed her hands loosely in her lap. For a moment the alcoholic shine left her eyes and her expression became strangely introverted, as though she were focusing on some forgotten image deep inside herself.

"When you're in the life, you hear a lot of bad stories, cutie. That's because there aren't many good ones," she said.

"The man I'm looking for may be a serial killer, Charlotte."

"That kind of guy is a john, not a pimp, Streak." She leaned on her forearms, puffing on her cigarette, staring at the hundreds of bottle caps pressed into the dirt at her feet. Her lacquered hair was wreathed in smoke. "Go on back home. You won't change anything here. Everybody out on this road signed up for it one way or another."