"I have to be honest with you, Dave. I don't know how far I can go along with this," she said.

"Call in your people now and I'll stonewall them."

"Do you think that little of us?"

"Not you I don't. But the people you work for are pencil pushers. They'll cover their butts, they'll do it by the numbers, and I'll end up losing Alafair."

"What are you going to do if you catch Doucet?"

"That's up to him."

"Is that straight, Dave?"

I didn't answer.

"I saw you put something in your raincoat pocket when you were coming out of the bedroom," she said. "I got the impression you were concealing it from Bootsie. Maybe it was just my imagination."

"Maybe you're thinking too much about the wrong things, Rosie."

"I want your word this isn't a vigilante mission."

"You're worried about procedure.… In dealing with a man like this? What's the matter with you?"

"Maybe you're forgetting who your real friends are, Dave."

I stopped the truck at the security building, rolled down my window, and held up my badge for the man inside, who was leaned back in his chair in front of a portable television set. He put on his hat, came outside, and dropped the chain for me. I could hear the sounds of a war movie through the open door.

"I'll just leave it down for you," he said.

"Thanks. Is that Julie Balboni's trailer with the lights on?" I said.

"Yeah, that's it."

"Who's with him?"

The security guard's eyes went past me to Rosie.

"His reg'lar people, I guess," he said. "I don't pay it much mind."

"Who else?"

"He brings out guests from town." His eyes looked directly into mine.

I rolled up the window, thumped across the chain, and drove into the oak grove by the lake. Twenty yards from Balboni's lighted trailer was the collapsed and blackened shell of a second trailer, its empty windows blowing with rain, its buckled floor leaking cinders into pools of water, the tree limbs above it scrolled with scorched leaves. To one side of Balboni's trailer a Volkswagon and the purple Cadillac with the tinted black windows were parked between two trees. I saw someone light a cigarette inside the Cadillac.

I stepped out of the truck with the shotgun hanging from my right arm and tapped with one knuckle on the driver's window. He rolled the glass down, and I saw the long pink scar inside his right forearm, the boxed hairline on the back of his neck, the black welt like an angry insect on his bottom lip where I had broken off his tooth in the restaurant on East Main. The man in the passenger's seat had the flattened eyebrows and gray scar tissue around his eyes of a prizefighter; he bent his neck down so he could look upward at my face and see who I was.

"What d'you want?" the driver said.

"Both of you guys are fired. Now get out of here and don't come back."

"Listen to this guy. You think this is Dodge City?" the driver said.

"Didn't you learn anything the first time around?" I said.

"Yeah, that you're a prick who blindsided me, that I can sue your ass, that Julie's got lawyers who can-"

I lifted the shotgun above the window ledge and screwed the barrel into his cheek.

"Do yourself a favor and visit your family in New Orleans," I said.

His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he tried to turn his head away from the pressure of the shotgun barrel. I pressed it harder into the hollow of his cheek.

"Fuck it, do what the man says. I told you the job was turning to shit when Julie run off Cholo," the other man said. "Hey, you hear me, man, back off. We're neutral about any personal beefs you got, you understand what I'm saying? You ought to do something about that hard-on you got, knock it down with a hammer or something, show a little fucking control."

I stepped back and pulled the shotgun free of the window. The driver stared at my hand wrapped in the trigger guard.

"You crazy sonofabitch, you had the safety off," he said.

"Happy motoring," I said.

I waited until the taillights of the Cadillac had disappeared through the trees, then I walked up onto the trailer's steps, turned the door knob, and flung the door back into the wall.

A girl not over nineteen, dressed only in panties and a pink bra, was wiggling into a pair of jeans by the side of two bunk beds that had been pushed together in the middle of the floor. Her long hair was unevenly peroxided and looked like twisted strands of honey on her freckled shoulders; for some reason the crooked lipstick on her mouth made me think of a small red butterfly. Julie Balboni stood at an aluminum sink, wearing only a black silk jockstrap, his salt-and-pepper curls in his eyes, his body covered with fine black hair, a square bottle of Scotch poised above a glass filled with cracked ice. His eyes dropped to the shotgun that hung from my right hand.

"You finally losing your mind, Dave?" he said.

I picked up the girl's blouse from the bed and handed it to her.

"Are you from New Iberia?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," she said, her eyes fastened on mine as she pushed her feet into a pair of pumps.

"Stay away from this man," I said. "Women who hang around him end up dead."

Her frightened face looked at Julie, then back at me.

Rosie put her hands on the girl's shoulders and turned her toward the door.

"You can go now," she said. "Listen to what Detective Robicheaux tells you. This man won't put you in the movies, not unless you want to work in pornographic films. Are you okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Here's your purse. Don't worry about what's happening here. It doesn't have anything to do with you. Just stay away from this man. He's in a lot of trouble," Rosie said.

The girl looked again at Julie, then went quickly out the door and into the dark. Julie was putting on his trousers now, with his back to us. The walls were covered with felt paintings of red-mouthed tigers and boa constrictors wrapped around the bodies of struggling unicorns. By the door was the canvas bag filled with baseballs, gloves, and metal bats. Julie's skin looked brown and rubbed with oil in the glow from a bedside lava lamp.

"It looks like you did a real number on Mikey Goldman's trailer," I said.

He zipped his fly. "Like most of the time, you're wrong," he said. "I don't go around setting fires on my own movie set. That's Cholo Manelli's work."

"Why does he want to hurt Mikey Goldman?"

"He don't. He thought it was my trailer. He's got his nose bent out of joint about some imaginary wrong I done to him. The first thing Cholo does in the morning is stick his head up his hole. You guys ought to hang out together."

"Why do you think I'm here, Julie?"

"How the fuck should I know? Nothing you do makes sense to me anymore, Dave. You want to toss the place, see if that little chippy left a couple of 'ludes in the sheets?"

"You think this is some chickenshit roust, Julie?"

He combed his curls back over his head with his fingers. His navel looked like a black ball of hair above his trousers.

"You take yourself too serious," he said.

"Murphy Doucet has my daughter." I watched his face. He put his thumbnail into a molar and picked out a piece of food with it. "Did you hear what I said?"

He poured three fingers of Scotch into his glass, then dropped a lemon rind into the ice, his face composed, his eyes glancing out the window at a distant flicker of lightning.

"Too bad," he said.

"Too bad, huh?"

"Yeah. I don't like to hear stuff like that. It upsets me."

"Upsets you, does it?"

"Yeah. That's why I don't watch that show Unsolved Mysteries. It upsets me. Hey, maybe you can get her face on one of those milk cartons."

As he drank from his highball, I could see the slight tug at the corner of his mouth, the smile in his eyes. He picked up his flowered shirt from the back of a chair and began putting it on in front of a bathroom door mirror as though we were not there.