"It's good to see you, Streak," he said.

"You too, Lou. How's everything at home?"

"My wife finally took off with her beautician. A woman, I'm talking about. I guess I finally figured out why she seemed a little remote in the sack. What are we doing tonight?"

"I'll go inside and look around. I'd like you to be out here to cover my back. It's not a big deal."

He looked at the clapboard back of the bar, at the broken windows and the overflow of the garbage cans, and hooked his thumb in his belt.

"When'd you start needing backup for bullshit like this?"

"Maybe I'm getting over the hill for it."

"Be serious, my friend."

"You know about Kelly Drummond being killed?"

"That actress? Yeah, sure."

"I think maybe the shooter was after me. I don't want to walk into a setup."

"This is a weird fucking place for a setup, Dave. Why would a guy want to bring a cop to a public place in Lafayette for a whack?"

"Why do these guys do anything?"

"You have any idea who the shooter might be?"

"Maybe a guy who was in on a lynching thirty-five years ago."

He nodded and his eyes became veiled.

"That doesn't sound plausible to you?" I asked.

"What's plausible? I try to get off the booze and my liver swells up like a football, my wife turns out to be a dyke, and for kicks I'm standing by a bunch of bushes that stink like somebody with a kidney disease pissed on them."

I pulled my tropical shirt out of my khakis, stuck my.45 inside the back of my belt, and walked through the rear entrance of the building.

The inside smelled like refrigerated bathroom disinfectant and tobacco smoke. The wood floors were warped and covered with cigarette burns that looked like black insects. Some college boys were playing the jukebox and drinking pitcher beer at the bar, and two or three couples were dancing in the adjacent room. A lone biker, with a lion's mane of blond hair and arms wrapped with jailhouse art, hit the cue ball so hard on the pool table that it caromed off the side of the jukebox. But it was a dead night at Red's, and the only female at the bar was an elderly woman who was telling a long tale of grief and discontent to a yawning bartender.

"What'll you have?" he said to me.

"Has Amber been in?"

He shook his head to indicate either that she had not or he had no idea whom I was talking about.

"She hasn't been here?"

"What do you want to drink?"

"A 7 Up."

He opened it and poured it into a glass full of ice. But he didn't serve it to me. He walked to the rear of the long bar, which was empty, set it down, and waited for me. When he leaned on the bar, the biceps of his brown arms ridged with muscles like rocks. I walked down the length of the bar and sat on the stool in front of him.

"Which Amber you looking for?" he asked.

"I only know one."

"She don't come in here reg'lar. But I could call somebody who probably knows where she's at. I mean if we're talking about the same broad."

"A Mexican?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"She talks like a Mexican?"

"Yeah. What's a Mexican supposed to talk like?"

"That's not the one I'm looking for, then."

"Enjoy your 7 Up," he said, and walked away from me.

I waited a half hour. The biker went out and I heard him kick-start his motorcycle and peel down the dirt street in a roar of diminishing thunder. Then the college boys left and the bar was almost deserted. The bartender brought me another 7 Up. I reached for my billfold.

"It's on the house," he said.

"It's my birthday?" I said.

"You're a cop."

"I'm a cop?"

"It don't matter to me. I like having cops in. It keeps the riffraff out."

"Why do you think I'm a cop, partner?"

"Because I just went out back for a breath of air and Lou Girard was taking a leak on our banana trees. Tell Lou thanks a lot for me."

So I gave it up and walked back outside into the humid night, the drift of dust off the dirt road, and the heat lightning that flickered silently over the Gulf.

"I'm afraid it's a dud," I said to Lou through his car window. "I'm sorry to get you out for nothing."

"Forget it. You want to get something to eat?"

"No, I'd better head home."

"This hooker, Amber, her full name is Amber Martinez. I heard she was getting out of the life. But I can pick her up for you."

"No, I think somebody was just jerking me around."

"Let me know if I can do anything, then."

"All right. Thanks again. Goodnight, Lou."

"Goodnight, Dave."

I watched him drive around the side of the building and out onto the dirt street. Raindrops began to ping on the top of my truck.

But maybe I was leaving too early, I thought. If the bartender had made Lou Girard, maybe the woman had, too.

I went back inside. All the bar stools were empty. The bartender was rinsing beer mugs in a tin sink. He looked up at me.

"She still ain't here. I don't know what else to tell you, buddy," he said.

I put a quarter in the jukebox and played an old Clifton Chenier record, Hey 'Tite Fille, then I walked out onto the front steps. The rain was slanting across the neon glow of the Dixie beer sign and pattering in the ditches and on the shell parking lot. Across the street were two small frame houses, and next to them was a vacant lot with a vegetable garden and three dark oaks in it and an old white Buick parked in front. Then somebody turned on a light inside the house next to the lot, and I saw the silhouette of somebody in the passenger seat of the Buick. I saw the silhouette as clearly as if it had been snipped out of tin, and then I saw the light glint on a chrome or nickel-plated surface as brightly as a heliograph.

The shots were muffled in the rain-pop, pop, like Chinese firecrackers under a tin can-but I saw the sparks fly out from the pistol barrel through the interior darkness of the Buick. The shooter had fired at an odd angle, across the seat and through the back window, but I didn't wait to wonder why he had chosen an awkward position to take a shot at me.

I pulled the.45 from under my shirt, dropped to my knees behind the bumper of a pickup truck, and began firing with both hands extended in front of me. I let off all eight rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. The roar was deafening, like someone had slapped both his palms violently against my eardrums. The hollow-points exploded the glass out of the Buick's windows, cored holes like a cold chisel through the doors, whanged off the steering wheel and dashboard, and blew the horn button like a tiddly-wink onto the hood.

The slide locked open on the empty magazine, and the last spent casing tinkled on the flattened beer cans at my feet. I stood erect, still in the lee of the pickup truck, slipped the empty magazine out of the.45's butt, inserted a fresh one, and eased a round into the chamber. The street was quiet except for the pattering of the rain in the ditches. Then I heard a siren in the distance and the bar door opening behind me.

"What the fuck's going on?" the bartender said, his whole body framed in the light. "You fucking crazy or something?"

"Get back inside," I said.

"We never had trouble here. Where the fuck are you from? People lose licenses because of bullshit like this."

"Do you want to get shot?"

He slammed the door shut, locked it, and pulled the blinds.

I started across the street just as an electrical short in the Buick caused the horn to begin blowing non-stop. I kept the.45 pointed with both hands at the Buick's windows and moved in a circle around the front of the car. No one was visible above the level of the windows nor was there any movement inside. The hollow-points had cut exit holes the size of half-dollars in the passenger door.

A Lafayette city police car came hard around the corner, its emergency lights whirling in the rain. The police car stopped twenty yards from the Buick and both front doors sprang open. I could see the cop in the passenger's seat pulling his pump shotgun out of its vertical mount on the dashboard. I got my badge holder out of my back pocket and held it high over my head.