The man in the straw hat puffed on his cigarette and looked down the road, bemused.

"You could have fooled me. I t'ought this went to Abbeville," he said.

"No, sir, it don't go nowhere," Marvin said.

'Y’all been fucking?" the man said.

"What?" Marvin said.

"I ain't caught y'all fucking, huh?" he said.

Both Marvin and Zerelda looked at the man, stupefied.

"You t'ink you bad, you?" the man said to Marvin.

He reached out, his cigarette still in his mouth, and grabbed Marvin by his shirt and ripped him away from Zerelda, the Beretta tangling under her blouse, falling to the ground. Almost simultaneously the man removed a blackjack from his side pocket and whipped it down between Marvin's eyes, then across the side and back of his skull as though he were driving nails in wood.

Marvin was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Zerelda's mouth hung open.

"You with Vermilion Parish? The sheriff's department?" she said.

"Ain't none of your bidness who I am, bitch. Where's Barbara Shanahan at?"

"Shanahan?" she said.

His fist seemed to explode in the center of her face.

The rain had stopped altogether when I came around the curve and saw the wood-frame church, the boughs of the persimmon tree, still in leaf, protruding from its crushed roof. I parked on the side of the road and cut the headlights. There were no vehicles in the yard or out in the trees, at least none that I could see, but the wooden bridge over the rain ditch was stenciled with fresh tire tracks. I rolled down the window and listened.

"What's that noise?" Sal, the ex-soldier, asked.

"I don't know," I replied.

It was an irregular, cacophonous sound, like a tractor-mower idling and misfiring, perhaps without a muffler.

I slipped my.45 out of its holster and opened the door of my truck.

"What you gonna do, Loot?" Sal asked.

"I'll be back in a few minutes," I said.

"That don't sound too good. I think I'd better come along," he said.

"Wrong," I said.

He got out of the truck and grinned. "You gonna arrest me?" he said.

"I might," I said.

But he wasn't impressed with my attempt at sternness, and we crossed the bridge and saw two sets of vehicle tracks, one overlapping the other, both leading past the frame house filled with baled hay. Sal stooped down and picked up a Beretta nine-millimeter lying by a puddle of water. He tapped the mud out of the barrel and used his shirttail to wipe the mud off the grips and hammer and trigger guard, then pulled the slide far back enough to see the bright brass glint of a round already seated in the chamber.

I extended my hand for him to give me the gun, but he only grinned again and shook his head.

The moon looked like a piece of burnt pewter inside the clouds now, and in the pale light it gave off I could see hogs rooting at the edge of a flooded woods. I walked on ahead of Sal, past the church and the house where the preacher must have once lived, the sound of a gasoline-or diesel-powered engine growing louder. On the far side of a three-sided tin shed, someone turned on a lantern of some kind, one that exuded a dull white luminescence.

Out in the trees I could see Clete's Cadillac convertible and Legion's red pickup truck. The hatch to the Cadillac was open, gaping, the trunk empty. I bent down, the.45 gripped in two hands, and got closer to the shed and looked through the back window at the collection of tar cookers and road graders and bulldozers that had been stored there by a parish maintenance crew. A battery-powered Coleman lantern burned on the ground, the humidity in the air almost iridescent in the glow of me neon tubing.

Legion Guidry was filling a bucket from a water tap. Marvin Oates lay unconscious on the ground, his hair matted with straw and mud. Close by, Zerelda sat against a wood post. Her wrists were bound behind the post with electrician's tape. But it was Clete Purcel who was obviously in the most serious jeopardy. He was slumped over by the lantern, his head hanging down, his eyes half shut with trauma and blood loss, the back of his shirt a dark red.

A tree-shredding machine idled on the outer edge of the shed, the ejection funnel aimed out into the darkness, the entry chute that fed into the blades pointed back at Clete.

Legion turned off the tap and threw the bucket of water into Marvin's face.

"Get up, boy. You fixing to hep me make some pig food, you," he said.

Marvin blew water out of his nostrils and mouth and pushed himself up on his hands. Legion shoved him in the shoulder with his boot.

"Don't make me tell you twice, no," he said.

"I dint hear you," Marvin said.

"Pick up the other side of that shithog. He going in the grinder. You be good, maybe you won't end up there, too," Legion said.

Marvin glanced at Zerelda.

"What about her?" he asked.

"She lay down wit' the wrong dog. She got his fleas," Legion said.

Marvin rose to his feet, his face dazed, his eyes looking back at Zerelda.

"You'll let me go?" he said, the register of his voice falling. Then the skin on his face seemed to shrink when he heard the fear and cowardice in his own words.

I started to stand up straight, to move around the edge of the shed, where I could have a clear shot at Legion. But I felt an open handcuff come down on my right wrist, the steel tongue ratcheting into the lock. Sal locked the other end of the cuffs on a water pipe that elbowed out of the shed into the ground.

My handcuff key was in my right pocket and I couldn't reach it with my left hand. I tried to grab his arm as he walked away from me, but he only turned and grinned, lifting a finger to his lips.

Sal rounded the corner of the shed and aimed the Beretta with both hands at Legion's chest.

Legion released Clete's arm, his eyes focusing on Sal, as though recognizing an.old enemy.

"Where you come from, you?" Legion said.

"Looks like you been causing folks a lot of grief," Sal said.

"I ain't got no quarrel wit' you."

"Time for you to check out, Jack. I don't mean boogie on down the road, either," Sal said.

Legion stepped backward, tripping over the water bucket, his.38 revolver pushed down in his belt, a loud hiss rising from his throat. Then he bolted for the woods.

Sal began shooting, the recoil of the Beretta jerking against his wrists, sparks flying from the barrel. I had worked my right pants pocket inside out with my left hand now, and I inserted my handcuff key into the lock on my wrist and ran around the corner of the shed with my.45.

I could see Legion running through the woods toward the bay, hogs scattering around him, while Sal fired all ten rounds from the Beretta. A bolt of lightning struck the bay or the woods, I couldn't tell which, and I saw Legion's silhouette in the illumination, like a piece of scorched tin. Then the woods were dark again, and I saw Clete looking up at me in the glow of the Coleman lantern, his face white, a smile at the corner of his mouth.

"Better hook up the pinhead, big mon," he said.

I cuffed Marvin Oates and put him on the ground, then knelt down and used my pocketknife to cut the tape on Zerelda's wrists. A pair of headlights bounced across the wooden bridge over the rain ditch, levering up and down as the car came too fast across the ground. Then Joe Zeroski's Chrysler braked by the shed and Joe and Baby Huey got out on each side. Joe wore a pair of tight slacks and a formfitting strap undershirt, his flat chest rising and falling, his vascular arms pumped. He studied his niece's battered face and stroked her hair.

Then he looked down at Marvin Oates. A small chrome-plated automatic pistol protruded from his pocket.

"This is the man who beat my daughter to death?" he said.