"What was the man saying?"

"A lady got shot." Her palm was cupped tightly on the knob of the bedstead. She stared at the floor, and there were small white discolorations in her cheeks like slivers of ice. "He said you shot the lady. You shot the lady, Dave."

I sat up on the edge of the bed.

"I had some trouble last night, Alafair. Somebody fired a pistol at me and I shot back. I'm not sure who fired at me or what this lady was doing there. But the situation is a lot more complex than maybe some people think. The truth can be real hard to discover sometimes, little guy."

"Did you do what they say, Dave?" I could see the shine of fear in her brown eyes.

"I don't know. But I never shot at anybody who didn't try to hurt me first. You have to believe me on that, Alf. I'm not sure what happened last night, but sooner or later I probably will. In the meantime, guys like you and me and Bootsie have to be standup and believe in each other."

I brushed her bangs away from her eyes. She looked for a long time at the whirling blades of the window fan and the shadows they made on the bed.

"They don't have any right," she said.

"Who?"

"Those people. They don't have the right to talk about you like that."

"They have the right to read what's in the newspaper, don't they?"

"The lady at the counter was saying something just before we walked in. I heard her through the screen. She said, 'If he's gone back to drinking, it don't surprise me he done that, no.' That's when the man started reading out loud from the newspaper."

I picked her up by the waist and sat her on the bed. Her muscular body felt as compact as a small log.

"Look, little guy," I said, "drinking isn't part of my life anymore. I gave it to my Higher Power." I stroked her hair and saw a smile begin to grow at the edge of her mouth and eyes.

"Dave?"

"What?"

"What's it mean when you say somebody's got to be standup?"

"No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy."

She was grinning broadly now, her wide-set teeth white in the shadows of the room.

"Where's Bootsie?" I asked.

"Fixing supper."

"What are we having?"

"Sac-a-lait and dirty rice."

"Did you know they run freight trains on that in Louisiana?"

She started bouncing on the edge of the bed, then my words sank in. "What? Freight… what?" she said.

"Let me get dressed, little guy, then we'll check out the food situation."

My explanation to Alafair was the best I could offer, but the truth was I needed to get to an AA meeting. Since the night I had seen the general and his soldiers in the mist, I had talked once over the phone to my AA sponsor but had not attended a meeting, which was the place I needed to be most. What might be considered irrational, abnormal, aberrant, ludicrous, illogical, bizarre, schizoid, or schizophrenic to earth people (which is what AAs call non-alcoholics) is usually considered fairly normal by AA members.

The popular notion exists that Catholic priests become privy to the darkest corners of man's soul in the confessional. The truth is otherwise. Any candid Catholic minister will tell you that most people's confessions cause eye-crossing boredom in the confessor, and the average weekly penitent usually owns up to a level of moral failure on par with unpaid parking violations and overdue library books.

But at AA meetings, I've heard it all at one time or another: extortion, theft, forgery, armed robbery, child molestation, sodomy with animals, arson, prostitution, vehicular homicide, and the murder of prisoners and civilians in Vietnam.

I went to an afternoon meeting on the second floor of an Episcopalian church. I knew almost everyone there: a few housewives, a black man who ran a tree nursery, a Catholic nun, an ex-con bartender named Tee Neg who was also my sponsor, a woman who used to hook in the Column Hotel Bar in Lafayette, a psychologist, a bakery owner, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific, and a man who was once a famous aerialist with Ringling Brothers.

I told them the whole story about my psycho-historical encounters and left nothing out. I told them about the electricity that snapped and flickered like serpents' tongues in the mist, my conversations with the general, even the unwashed odor that rose from his clothes, the wounds in his men that maggots had eaten as slick as spoons.

As is usual with one's dramatic or surreal revelations at an AA meeting, the response was somewhat humbling. They listened attentively, their eyes sympathetic and good-natured, but a number of the people there at one time or another had ripped out their own wiring, thought they had gone to hell without dying, tried to kill themselves, or been one step away from frontal lobotomies.

When I had finished, the leader of the meeting, a pipeline welder, said, "Damn, Dave, that's the best endorsement of Dr Pepper I ever heard. You ought to call up them sonsof-bitches and get that one on TV."

Then everyone laughed and the world didn't seem so bad after all.

When I left the meeting I bought a spearmint snowball in the city park on Bayou Teche and used the outdoor pay phone by the recreation building. Through the moss-hung oak trees I could see kids diving into the public pool, their tan bodies glistening with water in the hot sunlight.

It took a couple of minutes to get the Lafayette coroner on the line. He was a hard-nosed choleric pathologist named Sol lie Rothberg, whom cops quickly learned to treat diplomatically.

"I wondered what you had on the Amber Martinez shooting," I said.

I could hear the long-distance wires humming in the receiver.

"Robicheaux?" he said.

"That's right."

"Why are you calling me?"

"I just told you."

"It's my understanding you're suspended."

"So what? Your medical findings are a matter of public record, aren't they?"

"When they become public they are. Right now they aren't public."

"Come on, Sollie. Somebody's trying to deep-fry my cojones in a skillet."

In my mind's eye I could see him idly throwing paper clips at his wastebasket.

"What's the big mystery I can clear up for you?" he said.

"What caliber weapon killed her?"

"From the size of the wound and the impact of the round, I'd say a.45."

"What do you mean 'size'?"

"Just what I said."

"What about the round?"

"It passed through her. There wasn't much to recover. It was a clean exit wound."

"It was a copper-jacketed round?"

"That's my opinion. In fact, I know it was. The exit hole wasn't much larger in diameter than the entry."

I closed and opened my eyes. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

"You there?" he said.

"Yes."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Sollie. I use hollow-points."

I could hear birds singing in the trees, and the surface of the swimming pool seemed to be dancing with turquoise light.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"Yeah, time of death."

"You're crowding me."

"Sollie, I keep seeing the back of her head. Her hair had stuck to the carpet. The blood had already dried, hadn't it?"

"I can't tell you about that because I wasn't there."

"Come on, you know what I'm asking you."

"Did she die earlier, you want to know?"

"Look, partner, you're my lifeline. Don't be jerking me around."

"How about I go you one better? Did she die in that car, you want to ask me?"

I had learned long ago not to interfere with or challenge Sollie's moods, intentions, or syntax.

"It's gravity," he said. "The earth's always pulling on us, trying to suck us into the ground."

"What?"

"It's what the shooter didn't think about," he said. "Blood's just like anything else. It goes straight down. You stop the heart, in this case the brain and then the heart, and the blood takes the shortest course to the ground. You with me?"