"Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain't gonna catch him," he said.

"You want to explain that?" Helen said.

"I just did," Beeler replied.

He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying good-bye.

That night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house.

A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road.

"You looking for somebody?" I asked.

"You," he said. "The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor."

He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear.

"Mistake to come around my house, Legion," I said.

"That's what you t'ink," he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull.

I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather-sheathed darning sock.

"I'm a police officer," I heard myself say.

"Don't matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain't gonna want to tell nobody about it," he replied.

He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist's drill hollowing into marrow.

He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand.

I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wet newspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn't have raised my arms to ward off the blow.

He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me.

"How you feel?" he asked.

He waited in the silence for my reply.

"I'll ax you again," he said.

"Go fuck yourself," I whispered.

He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his tongue inside. I could taste tobacco and decayed food and bile in his saliva and smell the road dust and body heat and dried sweat in his shirt.

"Go tell them all what I done to you. How I whipped you like a dog and used you for my bitch. How it feel, boy? How it feel?" he said.

CHAPTER 10

The sunrise in the morning was pink and misty, like the colors and textures inside a morphine dream, and through the window at Iberia General I could see palm trees and oaks hung with moss along the Old Spanish Trail and a white crane lifting on extended wings off the surface of the bayou.

The sheriff sat hunched in a chair at the foot of my bed, staring at the steam rising from his paper coffee cup, his face angry, conflicted with thought.

Clete stood silently against one wall, rolling a match-stick from side to side in his mouth, his massive arms folded on his chest. Through the open door I saw Bootsie in the hall, talking to a physician in green scrubs.

"The guy comes out of nowhere, beats the shit out of you with a sap, gives no explanation, and drives off?" the sheriff said.

"That's about it," I said.

"You didn't get a license number?" he asked.

"The lights were off on the dock. There was mud on the tag."

The sheriff started to look at Clete, then forced his eyes back on me, not wanting to recognize Clete as a legitimate presence in the room.

"So I'm to conclude maybe one of our clientele got discharged from Angola and decided to square an old beef? Except the cop he clocked, one with thirty years' experience, didn't recognize him. That makes sense to you?" he said.

"It happens," I said.

"No, it doesn't," he replied.

I kept my eyes flat, my expression empty. My face felt out of round, my forehead as large as a muskmelon. When I moved any part of my body, the pain telegraphed all the way through my system and a wave of nausea rose into my mouth.

"You mind if we have a minute alone?" the sheriff said to Clete.

Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and flipped it into the wastebasket.

"No, I don't mind. You might check the walls for bugs, though. You can never tell in a place like this," he said.

The sheriff stared at Clete's back as he went out the door, then turned back toward me. "What's with that guy?" he asked.

"Everybody wants respect, Sheriff. There're times Clete doesn't get it. He was a good cop. Why not give credit where it's due?"

The sheriff leaned forward in his chair. "I learned in the Corps a good officer takes care of his people first Everything else is second. But you don't allow that to happen, Dave. You think you operate in your own time zone and zip code. And every time you get in trouble, your friend out there seems to be belly deep in it with you."

"Sorry to hear you feel that way."

The sheriff stood up from his chair and pulled at his coat sleeves until they were even on his wrists. "You know why the world's run by clerks? It's because our best people flame out across the sky and never leave anything behind but a good light show. Is that what you want to be, Dave? A light show? Damn, if you don't piss me off."

After he was gone, Clete put ice in a water glass and inserted a straw in the ice and held the glass for me to drink.

"What happened out there?" he asked. I told him of the systematic beating from head to foot, the contempt shown my person, the sense that I no longer possessed control over my life, that my confidence in myself, my ability to deal with the world, had always been the stuff of vanity.

Then I told him about the kiss, a male tongue rife with nicotine pushed inside my mouth, over the teeth, into the throat, his saliva like an obscene burn on my chin.

I looked up into Clete's face. His green eyes were filled with a mixture of pity and the kind of latent thoughts that made his enemies back out of rooms when they recognized them.

"You're not going to file on this guy?" he asked.

"No."

"You feel ashamed because of what he did to you?" he asked.

When I didn't reply, he walked to the window and looked at the trees out on the road and the moss on the limbs lifting in the wind.

"I can set it up. He'll never know what hit him. I've got the throw-down, too, all numbers acid-burned and ground on an emery wheel," he said.

"I'll let you know."

"Yeah, I bet," he said, turning from the window. He picked his porkpie hat off the sill and slanted it on his brow. "I'll see you this afternoon, Streak. But with or without you, that cocksucker is going to get blown out of his socks."