On his way upstairs Clete saw a Bible on the top step, barely visible in the shadows, a rose stem inserted under the cover.

"Did you see him?" Barbara said when he came back through the door of her apartment. "No," he replied.

He put on his shirt and tucked it in his trousers, then stuffed his socks into his coat pocket and slipped on his shoes without tying them.

"What are you doing?" Barbara said. "That kid with the mush-mouth accent, Marvin something or other? Where does he live?" he asked.

The next day, Saturday, Clete parked his car in my drive and walked across the road and down the boat ramp, where I had propped a ladder against one of the dock pilings and was painting termicide and tar on some of the wood that had started to rot. He sat down heavily in a moored outboard, in the dock's shade, and told me of the previous evening.

"You slapped Marvin Oates around?" I said.

"Yeah, I guess that's fair to say," he replied. He pulled on his nose and looked into space. "He told me he left the Bible earlier in the evening."

"I think you got the wrong guy. Marvin doesn't smoke."

"There was a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard of his car," Clete said.

"Unfiltered cigarettes?"

"No."

"You got the wrong guy, Clete. In more ways than one."

"Meaning?"

"Bad things seem to happen to people who hurt Marvin Oates."

"Why did I have all those weird feelings when I saw that milk truck passing by the convent?" he asked.

"Maybe you're like me. You wonder about where you've been and who you are now and what you'll eventually become. It has something to do with mortality."

"My old man could be a decent guy. He'd take me to ball games and out fishing for green trout. Then he'd get drunk and tell me the best part of me ran down my mother's leg."

"Time to cut loose from it, Cletus."

"You think Barbara and I could have a serious go at it? I mean, marriage, lads, stuff like that?"

He lifted his head and looked up at me from his seat on the boat, the water chucking against the aluminum hull in the silence, one of his eyes watery from a shaft of sunlight that fell through the slats in the dock

Later that afternoon Alafair, Bootsie, and I went to Mass. After I took them back home I drove to Iberia General and asked at the reception desk for the room number of Sonny Bilotti. I bought a magazine in the gift shop and walked down the corridor to a double-occupancy room. Bilotti was in the room by himself, propped up against pillows, his jaws wired shut, his eyes raccooned, his lips black with stitches. The windowsill was lined with bouquets of carnations, roses, and hollyhocks, but they obviously did little to cheer the man in the bed, who had probably taken one of the worst beatings I had ever seen.

"Your friend already check out?" I asked.

He didn't answer, his eyes following me across the room as I pulled a chair up to his bedside.

"Here's an Esquire magazine in case you need something to read," I said. "My name is Dave Robicheaux. I'm a detective in the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department."

Before he could speak, I heard someone behind me. I turned and saw Zerelda Calucci standing in the doorway, wearing white jeans, cowboy boots, and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt cut off at the armpits.

"Shit," she said.

"This is official business, so please get out of here," I said.

"I have a bone to pick with Clete Purcel. Where is he?" she said.

"I don't think you're hearing me. You need to move yourself out of this immediate environment," I said.

She leaned against the doorjamb, her arms folded, chewing gum, her black hair hanging almost to her breasts. "Then hook me up, darlin'. I get wet just thinking about it," she said.

"You were a rumdum in the First District. You used to hang in Joe Burton's piano bar on Canal," Sonny Bilotti interjected himself, compressing his words flatly, his head motionless against the pillows.

"That's me, partner," I said. "The word is you shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. You've got to be stand-up to 'front the A.B., Sonny. Don't let a sack of shit like Legion Guidry get away with what he did. File against him and we'll bust his wheels."

Bilotti's head shifted slightly on the pillow so that he could look directly at me. His eyes possessed the luminosity of obsidian, but they were also marked by an uncertain glimmer, a conclusion or perhaps a new knowledge about himself that would plague him the rest of his days.

"You scared of this guy, Sonny?" I said.

His eyes went to Zerelda.

"You're done here," she said to me.

"If that's the way you want it," I said, and walked outside.

She followed me to the front door of the hospital, then out into the parking lot under the trees. The air was warm, golden, smelling of smoke from Saturday-afternoon leaf fires.

"I did some checking on you. You were in this same hospital. Somebody made you count your bones. Maybe with a blackjack I have a feeling it was Legion Guidry," she said.

"So?" I replied, my eyes focused across the street on the bayou.

"You didn't bring charges against him. You're trying to use Sonny to get even. Because you're too gutless to do it head-on," she said.

I turned from her and walked to my truck. But she wasn't finished with me yet. She stepped between me and the door.

"Guidry did something to you that makes you feel ashamed, didn't he?" she said.

"I'd appreciate your moving out of the way."

"I bet you would. Here's another flash. You got a beef with Legion Guidry, take it to Perry LaSalle. He got Guidry his job at the casino. Then ask yourself why Perry has influence at the casino."

"Is there any particular reason I've earned your anger?" I asked.

"Yeah, Sonny Bilotti is my cousin and you're an asshole," she replied.

CHAPTER 20

I awoke early Sunday morning and drove 241 miles to Houston, then got lost in a rainstorm somewhere around Hermann Park and Rice University. When I finally found the Texas Medical Center and the hospital where the sheriff's wife had just undergone a double mastectomy the previous week, the rain had flooded the streets and was thundering on the tops of cars that had pulled to the curb because their drivers could not see through the windshields. I parked in an elevated garage, then splashed across a street and entered the hospital soaking wet.

She was asleep. So was the sheriff, his body curled up on two chairs he had pushed together, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I walked back to the nurses' station. No one was there except for a physician in scrubs. He was a tall, graying man, and he was writing on a clipboard. I asked him if he knew how the sheriff's wife was doing.

"You a friend of the family?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"She's a sweetheart," he said, and let his eyes slip off mine so I could read no meaning in them.

"Is the flower shop open downstairs?" I asked.

"I believe it is," he said.

On the way out of the hospital I paid for a mixed bouquet and had it sent up to the sheriffs wife. I signed the card "Your friends in the department" and drove back to New Iberia.

The next morning, Monday, the sheriff and I were both back at work I knocked on his office door and went inside.

"Got a minute?" I said.

He sat behind his desk in a pinstripe suit and turquoise western shirt, his eyes tired, trying not to yawn. "You sound like you have a cold," he said.

"Just some sniffles."

"You get caught in the rain?"

"Not really."

"What's up?" he asked.

I closed the door behind me.

"It was Legion Guidry who worked me over with a blackjack. When he finished, he held my head up by the hair and put his tongue in my mouth and called me his bitch," I said.