Pike nodded.

We made our way back to the Thunderbird, then drove to the Bayou Lounge, just west of Ville Platte off the State 10 near Reddeli. It was a small, white building set back from the road in a little clearing carved into the woods. An abandoned bait shop sat nearby, its windows boarded over, painted ground to roof with ICE and WORMS in ten-foot letters. Both buildings were surrounded by crushed oyster shells and little patches of grass and weeds, and felt sort of like LeRoy Bennett's place. Crummy. A rusted steel pole jutted up from the side of the bar with a sign that said SCHLITZ. The Bayou Lounge didn't look like a hotbed of criminal activity, but you never know.

We eased off the road past the bait shop, stopped, and looked back. It was thirty-six minutes after three. A blue Ford Ranger was parked on the side of the lounge and a Lone Star truck was parked out front. If there was a bayou around, you couldn't see it from the road. A guy in a blue-and-white Lone Star uniform pushed a hand truck out the door, followed by a woman with a clipboard. The woman with the clipboard had a lot of bright red Clairol hair piled atop her head and red nails and red lipstick. Thin in the shoulders and wide in the butt, with white denim pants that were ten years and fifteen pounds too tight. She talked with the guy as he loaded the dolly onto his truck, then watched him drive away before she went back inside. Pike said, "I make it for her Ford. You want to check it, or me?"

"Me."

We pulled around to the front of the lounge and parked by the Schlitz sign, and I went in. Six cases of Lone Star were stacked at the end of the bar, and the woman was frowning at a thin Hispanic guy as he lugged them one at a time behind the counter. Eight or nine small square tables were scattered around the place, all with upended chairs on top of them, and a Rockola jukebox was against the back wall beside a door that said RESTROOMS. An industrial wash bucket was by the jukebox, and the back door was open for the breeze. The woman looked over at me and said, "Sorry, sugah. We closed."

"I'm supposed to meet a guy here. What time you open?"

"Bout five, give or take. Who you lookin' by?" She gave me a loose smile. She was maybe forty-five, but looked older, with rubbery skin pulled tight by all the smiling. The Hispanic guy stopped working to look at us.

"Oh, just a friend." Mr. Mysterious.

"You keepin' it a big secret or what, sug? I'm here all the time." When she said it she noticed the Hispanic guy and snapped at him. "Don't just stand there, goddammit! Put that stuff away! Endelay!"The Hispanic guy spun back to his work with a vengeance. I wasn't sure if he understood what had been said to him, but he understood that she was pissed. The Clairol Queen flipped her hand at him, disgusted. "These spics are somethin'. Gimme a good nigger any day."

I said, "A guy named LeRoy Bennett said I could find him here."

She went back to the smiling and folded herself against the bar. It was probably a pose that played well with the older guys after a dozen or so beers. "Oh, yeah. LeRoy's here all the time. I can take a message, you want."

"Nah. I'm on my way to Biloxi. I'll catch him on the way back."

I went back to the car and climbed in beside Pike. "They open at five. LeRoy's here all the time."

"Who could blame him?"

We drove up the road for a mile and a half, then turned around and went back. One hundred yards past the bait shop I eased onto the shoulder, and Pike got out with his duffel and moved into the trees. I drove on for maybe another four hundred yards until I found a gravel timber road running across a plank bridge, and pulled off. I locked the car, then trotted back to the bait shop. By the time I got back Pike was inside and set up, watching the bar through a clean spot he'd made on the dusty plate glass.

The Bayou Lounge might have opened at five, but no one showed up until six, and then it was mostly younger guys with deep tans and ball caps, looking like they had just gotten off work and wanted to have a couple of cold ones before heading home. Someone cranked up the Rockola at nine minutes before seven, and we could hear Doug Kershaw singing in French.

Pike and I made cold sandwiches and drank Diet Coke and watched the people come and go, but none of them were Milt Rossier or LeRoy Bennett or even René LaBorde. Crime might have been rampant, but if it was, we didn't see it.

The bait shop was an empty cinder-block shell containing the remnants of a counter and a couple of free standing shelves and a cement floor. We sat on the floor, surrounded by the odd-cut piece of plywood and about a million rat pellets. Everything was covered with a thick layer of heretofore undisturbed dust, and everything smelled of mildew. "Just think, Joe, some guys have to wear a tie and punch a time clock."

Pike didn't answer.

At 8:15 that night, seven cars were parked in the oyster shell lot and maybe a dozen people were inside the Bayou Lounge, but Milt Rossier and LeRoy Bennett were not among them. Pike rarely spoke, and there wasn't a great deal to do in our watching, and I found myself thinking of Lucy, wondering where she was and what she was doing, seeing her in her office, seeing her on the couch in her family room, seeing her snuggled with Ben watching Star Trek. After a while I got tired of all the thinking about it and tried to stop, but then I thought that maybe I could walk across to the Bayou and use the pay phone to call her. Of course, if I did, ol' Milt and LeRoy would probably amble in at exactly that time. It's one of those laws of nature. Pike said, "You deserve someone."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ms. Chenier."

I stared at him. Do you think he reads minds? "We enjoy each other's company."

He nodded.

"I like her and she likes me. It's nothing more or less than that."

He nodded again.

By 9:15 we were down to two cars, and by ten the lot was empty except for the blue Ford Ranger. Pike said, "This place is a gold mine."

At twenty minutes before eleven, a beat-up Mercury station wagon bumped into the lot and sat with its engine running. The little Hispanic man and a Hispanic woman I had not seen came out, got in, and the wagon lurched away. The woman was carrying what looked like a brown paper grocery bag. Pike said, "Latin guy driving."

I squinted, but couldn't be sure. "Joe? Do you find it odd that there are so many Latin people down here on the bayou?"

Pike shrugged.

At ten minutes after eleven, the Bayou Lounge went dark, and the woman who ran the place got into her Ford and drove away. Pike and I gathered our things, walked up the road to our car, then returned to the motel. I wanted to phone Lucy, but it was just before midnight, and I thought I might wake her or, if not her, Ben.

The last thing I remember that night was the sound of Lucy's laugh and the smell of her skin, and the deep, hollow feeling of her absence.