I started the engine, put it in reverse, and gave it the gas. The hull vibrated against the sandbar, and through the back windows I could see mud and dead vegetation boiling to the bayou's surface behind the stern. But we didn't move off the sandbar. I tried to go forward and rock it loose, then I finally cut the engine.

"It's set pretty hard, but it might come off if you push against the bow, Elrod," I said. "You want to do that?"

"Yeah, sure."

"It's not deep there. Just stay on the sandbar, close to the hull."

"Put on a life jacket, El," Kelly said.

"I swam across the Trinity River once at flood stage when houses were floating down it," he said.

She took a life jacket out of a top compartment, picked up his wrist, and slipped his arm through one of the loops. He grinned at me. Then his eyes looked out the glass at the far bank.

"What's that guy doing?" he said.

"Which guy?" I said.

"The guy knocking around in the brush out there."

"How about we get your boat loose and worry about other people later?" I said.

"You got it," he said, tied one lace on his jacket, and went out into the rain.

He held on to the rail on the cabin roof and worked his way forward toward the bow. Kelly watched him through the glass, biting down on the corner of his lip.

"He waded ashore before," I said, and smiled at her. "He's not in any danger there."

"El has accidents. Always."

"A psychologist might say there's a reason for that."

She turned away from the glass, and her green eyes moved over my face.

"You don't know him, Mr. Robicheaux. Not the gentle person who gives himself no credit for anything. You're too hard on him."

"I don't mean to be."

"You are. You judge him."

"I'd like to see him get help. But he won't as long as he's on the juice or using."

"I wish I had those kinds of easy answers."

"They're not easy. Not at all."

Elrod eased himself over the gunwale, sinking to his chest, then felt his way through the silt toward the slope on the sandbar.

"Can you stand in the stern? For the weight," I said to Kelly.

"Where?"

"In the back of the boat."

"Sure."

"Take my raincoat."

"I'm already sopped."

I restarted the engine.

"Just a minute," I said, and put my rain hat on her head. Her wet blond curls were flattened against her brow. "I don't mean to be personal, but I think you're a special lady, Ms. Drummond, a real soldier."

She used both her hands to pull the hat's floppy brim down tightly on her hair. She didn't answer, but for the first time since I had met her, she looked directly into my eyes with no defensiveness or anger or fear and in fact with a measure of respect that I felt in all probability was not easily won.

I waved at Elrod through the front glass, kicked the engine into reverse, and opened the throttle. The exhaust pipes throbbed and blew spray high into the air at the waterline, the windows shook, the boards under my feet hummed with the vibrations from the engine compartment. I looked over my shoulder through the back glass and saw Kelly bent across the gunwale, pushing at the bottom of the bayou with a tarpon gaff; then suddenly the hull scraped backward in the sand, sliding out of a trench in a yellow and brown gush of silt and dead reeds, and popped free in the current.

Elrod was standing up on the sandbar, his balled fists raised over his head in victory.

I cut the gas and started out the cabin door to get the anchor.

Just as the rain struck my bare head and stung my eyes, just as I looked across the bayou and saw the man in the shapeless fedora kneeling hard against an oak tree, his shadowed face aimed along the sights of a bolt-action rifle, the leather sling twisted military style around the forearm, I knew that I was caught in one of those moments that will always remain forever too late, knew this even before I could yell, wave my arms, tell him that the person in the rain hat and Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name on the back was not me. Then the rifle's muzzle flashed in the rain, the report echoing across the water and into the willow islands. The bullet cut a hole like a rose petal in the back of Kelly's shirt and left an exit wound in her throat that made me think of wolves with red mouths running through trees.

Chapter 10

It was a strange week, for me as well as the town. Kelly's death brought journalists from all over the country to New Iberia. They filled all the motels, rented every available automobile in Lafayette, and dwarfed in both numbers and technical sophistication our small area news services.

Many of them were simply trying to do their jobs. But another kind came among us, too, those who have a voyeuristic glint in their eyes, whose real motivations and potential for callousness are unknown even to themselves.

I got an unlisted phone number for the house.

I began to be bothered by an odor, both in my sleep and during the late afternoon when the sun baked down on the collapsed barn at the back of our property. I noticed it the second day after Kelly's death, the day that Elrod escorted her body back to Kentucky for the burial. It smelled like dead rats. I scattered a bag of lime among the weeds and rotted boards and the smell went away. Then the next afternoon it was back, stronger than before, as invasive as a stranger's soiled palm held to your face.

I put our bedroom fan in the side window so it would draw air from the front of the house, but I would dream of turkey buzzards circling over a corrugated rice field, of sandflecked winds blowing across the formless and decomposing shape of a large animal, of a woman's hair and fingernails wedging against the sides of a metal box.

On the seventh morning I woke early, walked past the duck pond in the soft blue light, soaked the pile of boards and strips of rusted tin with gasoline, and set it afire. The flames snapped upward in an enormous red-black handkerchief, and a cottonmouth moccasin, with a body as thick as my wrist, slithered out of the boards into the weeds, the hindquarters of an undigested rat protruding from its mouth.

The shooter left nothing behind, no ejected brass, no recoverable prints from the tree trunk where he had fired. The pocket knife Rosie had found on the levee turned out to be free of prints. Almost all of our work had proved worthless. We had no suspects; our theories about motivation were as potentially myriad as the time we were willing to invest in thinking about them. But one heart-sinking and unalterable conclusion remained in front of my eyes all day long, in my conversations with Rosie, the sheriff, and even the deputies who went out of their way to say good morning through my office door-Kelly Drummond was dead, and she was dead because she had been mistaken for me.

I didn't even see Mikey Goldman walk into my office. I looked up and he was standing there, flexing the balls of his feet, his protruding, pale eyes roving about the room, a piece of cartilage working in his jaw like an angry dime.

"Can I sit down?" he said.

"Go ahead."

"How you doing?"

"I'm fine, thanks. How are you?"

"I'm all right." His eyes went all over me, as though I were an object he was seeing for the first time.

"Can I help you with something?" I said.

"Who's the fucking guy who did this?"

"When we know that, he'll be in custody."

"In custody? How about blowing his head off instead?"

"What's up, Mr. Goldman?"

"How you handling it?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"How you handling it? I'm talking about you. I've been there, my friend. First Marine Division, Chosin Reservoir. Don't try to bullshit me."

I put down my fountain pen on the desk blotter, folded my hands, and stared at him.