"I don't have time to take you back home," I said to the ex-soldier.

"It's all right. I've been taking a nap," he said. He had put his shirt back on but had left it unbuttoned, and the crucifix on his chest shone in the dashboard light.

"What's your real name, Doc?" I said.

"Sal Angelo."

"You sure about that?" I said.

"Pretty sure," he said.

"You're okay, Sal," I said.

He grinned sleepily, then rested his head on his pillow and closed his eyes. I drove into Abbeville, past the old redbrick cathedral and the graveyard that was full of Confederate dead, then continued on south, into the wetlands and wind blowing across sawgrass and clumps of gum trees and swamp maples. My face felt hot to the touch, my jaws like emery paper. I thought I could hear the drone of mosquitoes, but none settled on my skin and I couldn't see any on the windshield or dashboard, where they usually clustered when they got inside the truck. When I swallowed, my spit tasted like battery acid.

My holstered.45 vibrated on the seat beside me. I touched it with my right hand, felt the coolness of the steel, the checkered hardness of the grips against my skin. It was the finest handgun I had ever owned, purchased for twenty-five dollars among a row of cribs in Saigon's Bring Cash Alley. I popped the strap loose with my thumb and slipped the heaviness of the frame into my hand and held it like an old friend against my thigh, although I could not explain the reason why I did so.

It wasn't far to the deserted church now. The rain had slackened and a crack of veiled moonlight shone among the clouds, like a dirty green vapor that had been sucked out of the Gulf during the storm. I rubbed the back of my wrist into my eye sockets and saw red rings recede into my brain, then I experienced a disturbing sense of clarity I had not felt all day, as though all my thought patterns for weeks, my prayers, my personal resolutions and soliloquies at AA meetings, were being made null and void because they were no longer useful to me.

Sigmund Freud was once quoted as saying, "Ah, thank you for showing me all of mankind's lofty ideals. Now let me introduce you to the basement."

I could feel myself descending into that subterranean place in the mind where the gargoyles frolic. The case against Marvin Oates for the murder of Linda Zeroski was tenuous and speculative, without even circumstantial evidence to support it, I told myself. Even if Marvin had harmed Clete and Zerelda and was in possession of the nine-millimeter that had killed Frankie Dogs, the right defense attorney could put him and his scarred back and his hush-puppy accent on the stand and have a jury of daytime soap-opera fans touching tears from their cheeks.

That's what I told myself about the future of Marvin Oates. But my real thoughts were on Legion Guidry and the women he had molested and raped and the methodical beating he had given me. In my mind's eye I once again saw his face lean down into my vision, his hand gripping my hair, his lips fastening on mine, his tongue probing my mouth. Then I swear I could taste the tobacco in his saliva and the tiny strings of decayed meat impacted in his teeth.

I felt my stomach constrict. I rolled down the window and cleared my throat and spit into the darkness. When I rolled up the window and wiped my mouth, I realized the ex-soldier who called himself Sal Angelo was awake, watching me.

"That guy who hurt you is down here, ain't he?" he said.

"Which guy?" I asked.

"We both know which guy, Loot."

"Can't ever tell," I said.

"Remember what I told you about making yourself the executioner? It's like your soul travels out of your body, then it can't find its way back. That's when you forget who you are."

"I may have to drop you off, Sal, and pick you up on my way out," I said.

"Hate to hear you say that, Loot."

"Why?" I asked.

"Our story is already written. You can't change it," he said.

I hit a deep rut and a curtain of gray water splashed across the windshield. I looked across the seat and saw him raise his head off his chest and open his eyes, as though awakening from a deep sleep.

"What did you just say?" I asked.

"I didn't say nothing. I was knocked out. Where are we, anyway?" he replied.

CHAPTER 31

While Zerelda drove the Cadillac, Marvin sat hunched forward in the passenger seat, wired to the eyes, sweating, licking his lips, breathing through his nose like a frightened child, she thought, with a nine-millimeter Beretta resting on his thigh.

"You didn't use your turn indicator back there. You use your turn indicator, Zerelda," he said.

She watched the country slip by them, the cows bunched in the coulees, a tree of lightning pulsing in the clouds. She felt Clete's weight shift in the trunk. It was the first time he had moved since Marvin had forced him to sit in the trunk, then had picked up a thick piece of steel pipe.

"I need to use the rest room," she said.

"There's time for that later," Marvin said.

She heard a clunking sound in the trunk. She clicked on the radio.

"I'm worried about this storm," she said.

He turned the radio off. "Don't do that," he said.

"Do what?"

He took a ragged breath of air and looked hard at the side of her face, his eyes narrowing. Then, for no apparent reason, he reached across the seat and fastened his fingers on the back of her neck, sinking them deep into the tendons.

"You make me mad," he said.

He lifted his fingers from her neck and touched her hair. Then he put both his hands and the Beretta between his legs and sat very still, his chest rising and falling.

"Marvin, no one meant to hurt you."

"Don't talk down to me. Not ever again. 'Cause that's what you been doing since the beginning. I don't like that."

"Then maybe you should get a life and stop feeling sorry for yourself."

Too late, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. She heard him make a grinding sound in his throat, then he struck her across the mouth with the back of his hand.

He grabbed the wheel and hit her again.

"Now, you steer the car and don't make me do what I'm thinking," he said, his voice starting to break.

Her hand was trembling when she touched the cut on her mouth.

"My uncle is Joe Zeroski. Can that fit in your head? What do you think he's going to do when he gets his hands on you, you nasty little pissant?" she said.

She thought he was about to hit her again. But he was hunched forward once more, looking at the road in the headlights, listening.

"Pull over," he said.

"What for?"

"Don't ask," he said.

She took her foot off the accelerator and felt the weight of the Cadillac slow, a tire touch on the shoulder of the road. She heard Clete lack solidly against the hatch. Marvin waited until a pickup truck passed, then flung open the door and walked to the rear of the vehicle.

"Shut up in there!" he said.

Through the backseat she heard Clete's voice: "Tell you what, pinhead. Pop the hatch and I'll take you in without scrubbing out the toilet with your face, the way Frankie Dogs did."

"Suck on this," Marvin said, and stepped back from the vehicle and fired a round into the hatch, the muzzle flash sparking into the darkness.

His hat was peaked in the crown, and rain slid off the brim when he got back in the front seat and pulled the door shut behind him. It was quiet in the back of the Cadillac.

"You motherfucker," she said.

Marvin's eyes closed, then opened, as though he were experiencing a sexual moment. "Drive the car, Zerelda," he said.

He rested the Beretta on the edge of his scrotum, the butterfly safety off, the red firing dot exposed. Minutes later Zerelda glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a vehicle click on its lights and pull out behind them, keeping a respectful distance in the rain. Was that the pickup truck that had just passed them? she asked herself.