It was quiet in the room. The sheriff rubbed his fingers on the back of one hand.

"You were ashamed to tell me this?" he said.

"Maybe."

He nodded. "Write it up and get a warrant," he said.

"It won't stick. Not after all this time," I said.

"If it doesn't, it's because you tore up Jimmy Dean Styles."

"Run that by me again?"

"You do everything in your power to convince people you're a violent, unstable, and dangerous man. Get a warrant. Nobody assaults an officer in my department. I want that son of a bitch in custody."

I started to speak, then decided I'd said enough.

"I think you had another reason for not reporting this," the sheriff said. "I think you planned to pop Guidry yourself."

"I was never big on self-analysis."

"Right," he said.

I got up to leave.

"Hold on," the sheriff said.

"Sir?"

He touched the bald spot in the center of his head, then looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. "My wife and I appreciated the flowers," he said.

I paused in the doorway, my face blank

"I saw you leaving the flower shop at the hospital. I'll never figure you out, Dave. That's not necessarily a compliment," he said.

I guess I should have felt liberated from the deceit I had practiced on the sheriff. In fact, it should have been a fine day. But I stayed restless, discontented, and irritable, without cause or remedy, and the five miles I jogged that evening and the push-ups and bench presses and sets of curls I did with free weights in my backyard did little to relieve the pressure band along one side of my head and the electricity that seemed to jump off the ends of my fingers. That night I thought I heard caterpillars eating inside a pile of wet mulberry leaves under the window, and I pressed the pillow down on my head so I would not have to hear the sound they made.

I dreamed I was teaching a class of police cadets at a community college in north Miami. In my dream I was part of an exchange program with NOPD and Florida law enforcement, and what should have been a vacation in the sun was for me a long drunk in the bars adjacent to Hialeah and Gulfstream Park racetracks. I entered the classroom stinking of cigarette smoke and booze, unshaved, my mouth like cotton, sure that somehow I could get through the hour, with no notes or lesson plan, then find a morning bar in Opa-Locka, where a vodka collins would sweep all the snakes back into their wicker baskets.

Then I realized, as I stood at the lectern, that I had become incoherent and foolish, an object of pity and shame, and the cadets, who had always treated me with respect, had dropped their eyes to the desks in embarrassment for me.

The dream wasn't a fabrication of the unconscious, just an accurate replication of what had actually taken place, and when I woke from it just before dawn, I could not shake the feeling that I was still drunk, still drinking, still caught in the alcoholic web that had made my nights and days a misery for years.

I showered and shaved and went to an early Mass at Sacred Heart, then stayed alone in the church and said the rosary. But when I came out into the daylight the sun and humidity were like a flame on my skin and I curled and uncurled my fists for no reason.

Legion Guidry bonded out of jail at 10 a.m. An hour later I saw him crossing Main Street to eat lunch at Victor's Cafeteria. For just a moment I could taste his tobacco and saliva in my mouth and smell the testosterone on his clothes. My palm ached to fold around the checkered grips of my.45, to feel the heavy, hard, cold weight and the perfect balance of the frame resting securely in my hand.

Zerelda Calucci had tried to find Clete Purcel for two days, then discovered he'd hooked up a bail skip to the D-ring inset in the back floor of his Cadillac and had driven back to New Orleans to deliver the bail skip to the bondsmen for whom he worked.

Zerelda tracked Marvin Oates down on a side street in New Iberia's old bordello district, where he had dragged his roller-skate-mounted suitcase to the porch of a wood-frame store and was eating from a paper plate filled with rice and beans and sausage in the shade of a spreading oak. A half-block away was a stucco crack house, also shaded by an oak tree, the yard filled with trash, the windows broken, the screens slashed and rusted-out and hanging from the frames. White and black crack whores sat on the porch, walking in turns down to the store for beer or food or cigarettes, but Marvin did not look up from his paper plate when they walked past him.

Zerelda pulled her pearl-white Mustang convertible onto the oyster shells and did not cut the engine.

"Throw your suitcase in the back, sweetie, and let's take a drive," she said.

"Where we going?" Marvin asked.

Her eyes roved over a barked area by his eye, a bruise on his chin. Her face became suffused with pity and anger.

"To straighten out somebody who thinks he's a swinging dick because he can knock around someone half his size. Now get in the car, Marvin," she replied.

"I dint want to cause no trouble, Miss Zerelda," Marvin said.

She opened the car door and started to get out.

"I'm coming," he said.

It was almost dusk when Zerelda crossed the Mississippi River and drove down Canal and into the French Quarter and parked around the corner from Clete's office and upstairs apartment on St. Ann Street. The doors were locked, but a note addressed to an infamous nuisance in the New Orleans underworld was stuck in the corner of a window. It read: "Dear No Duh, I'm over at Nig and Willie's-Clete."

The bail bond office of Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater was located just off Basin, just inside the ragged edges of the Quarter, not far from St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park. Zerelda pulled to the curb and parked next to a cluster of overflowing garbage cans. Down the street and across Basin she could see the old redbrick buildings and the green wood porches of the Iberville Project, a community whose crack addicts and gangbangers and teenage prostitutes would not only mug tourists and roll Johns in die adjacent cemetery but occasionally execute them out of pure meanness. In fact, the city had poured cement barricades across some of the streets leading into the Iberville so that tourists would not drive into it by mistake.

But Marvin Oates's attention was focused on the window of the bail bond office, where Clete was playing cards at a desk with a thin, nattily dressed, deeply tanned man who wore an oxblood fedora with a gray feather in the band and a mustache that looked like it had been grease-penciled on his upper lip.

Marvin's face was wind-burned from the trip to the city, and now he was sweating heavily in the dusk, pinching his mouth dryly in his hand.

"I'll wait out here," he said.

"Nobody's going to hurt you," Zerelda said, getting out of the car.

"That's 'cause I'm staying out here."

She walked around to his side of the convertible. "Comb your hair, sweetie. Then I'm going to take you out to dinner. Don't you ever be afraid. Not when you're with me," she said, and smoothed his hair back up on his head.

His face looked like a fawn's.

Then she went through the door of the bail bond office, her purse swinging heavily from a cloth strap wrapped around her wrist.

"Zerelda, what's the haps? Great coincidence. I wanted No Duh here to check out our man Marvin the Voyeur, see if he wasn't a guy No Duh ran across in central lockup," Clete said.

"Where the fuck do you get off knocking around an innocent boy like that?"

"He has a way of showing up in places where he has no business," Clete replied.

"Oh, yeah?" Zerelda said, and swung her purse with both hands at his head, the cloth bottom bulging with the weight of her.357 Magnum.