"I've got to get next to him with a wire."

"Why not get a Pap smear while you're at it?" He lit a cigarette and blew smoke off into the dappled sunlight. "We used to call the FBI 'Fart, Barf, and Itch,' remember? Why do you think these DEA cocksuckers are any different? If you ask me, this deal down at Cocodrie stinks."

There was no point in arguing. I also felt that he was more disappointed in being cut out of the sting than anything else. But his eyes continued to wander over my face while he smoked.

"For God's sakes, what is it?" I said.

"I don't know if you need this right now, but a colored kid was in the bar looking for you this morning. He wouldn't give his name, but I have an idea who he is."

"Oh?"

"That kid from New Iberia you were taking up to Angola with Jimmie Lee Boggs."

"What did he say?"

"'Tell Mr. Dave I seen Jimmie Lee yesterday on Bourbon.'" Clete continued to look at my face. "I'm right, that's the kid who got loose from you?"

"Yes."

"You're in contact with him?"

"More or less."

"Are you out of your mind?"

"Does he look like a dangerous and violent man to you? You think I ought to send him to the chair?"

"I think you ought to watch out for your own butt once in a while."

"What else did he say?"

"Nothing. A weird kid. If a black ant wore a pizza uniform, that's what it'd look like. You really think he saw Boggs?"

"I don't know."

"Why would Boggs be walking around on Bourbon?"

"I don't know, Clete."

"Come on, don't look so disturbed. The kid's probably imaginative." Then he pressed his lips together in a tight line. "Listen, Dave, keep your attitudes simple about this guy. You see him, you smoke him. No warning, no talk, you just blow his fucking head off. Case closed."

I didn't finish my plate. I rolled it up, dropped it in a trash barrel, then sat back down at the wood table under the tree. Clete kept pushing a ring around on his index finger while his eyes studied me.

"You think you lost your guts?" he said.

"No."

"Like Boggs has got the Indian sign on you or something?"

"I'm cool. Don't worry about it."

"You bothered because you want to do this guy?"

"No."

"You listen to me. It's a perk when you get a chance to grease a guy like that. You take him off at the neck and the world applauds." But he saw his words were having no effect. "What happened in that coulee?"

"I thought my clock had run out. I don't think I behaved very well. I always thought I would do better."

"Nobody handles it well. They cry, they call out for their mother. It's a bad moment. It's supposed to be."

"You don't feel the same about yourself later."

He picked at the calluses on his hands, his eyes downcast.

"My noble, grieving mon," he said.

"Look, Clete, I appreciate-"

"You know what I think all this is about? You want to drink. Whenever I went out on the edge of the envelope, I'd mellow out with some skull-fuck muta and JD on the rocks. You can't drink anymore, so you walk around with this ongoing horror show inside you."

"How about we put the cork in the five-and-dime psychology? Look, I think Cardo's heavy into crank."

"He's a speed freak?"

"He came into my apartment in the middle of the night and snapped a revolver under his chin."

Clete grinned, shook his head, and rolled a match-stick across his teeth.

"What's funny?" I said.

"This is the guy you're going to get next to with a wire? And you worry about Boggs or whether you still got your guts? Streak, you're a pistol."

I talked with Minos Dautrieve that afternoon and made arrangements to have my converted jugboat moved from Morgan City to a commercial dock at Cocodrie, near Terrebonne Bay. Over the phone I sensed a fine wire of anxiety in Minos's voice.

"What is it?" I said.

"It bothers me they don't want Purcel with you."

"He got in Fontenot's face. Clete has a way of scaring the hell out of people he doesn't like."

"Maybe."

"Are you worried about the half million?"

"I'm worried about you. But some other people are having misgivings about the operation. It's a big expenditure. Cardo's not getting brought into things the way he should."

"I can't help that."

"They're thinking about their own butts. They don't want to get burned. But that's not your problem. The Coast Guard's going to track the mother boat and nail it after you're gone. So the government'll get its money back. I don't know why these guys are sweating it. They piss me off."

"Run Cardo's military record for me."

"What for?"

"Something about Vietnam is eating his lunch."

"What's new about that?"

"I think he's a complex man. You didn't tell me about his son."

"Yeah, that's a sad case."

"Evidently he really looks after him."

The phone was silent a moment.

"Cardo's a drug dealer, and his hired shitheads kill people. Anything else is irrelevant. It's important to understand that, Dave."

"I'm just saying you can't dismiss the guy as a geek."

"Right. He hires them instead. Like Jimmie Lee Boggs. Get your head on straight. I'll be back with you later. Carry your piece out there on the salt. I want your ass back home safe on this one."

He hung up the phone.

That night I wanted to take Bootsie out for supper, but she had to work late at her office, and when she finally finished it was after ten o'clock. So I read a book in bed and went to sleep sometime after midnight with the light on and a pillow over my head.

The twilight is purple and the willow trees along the banks of the Mississippi are filled with fireflies when they take the black kid out of the van and walk him inside the Red Hat House in a waist chain. His hair has been shaved down to the scalp and his ears look abnormally large on the sides of his head. The wind is blowing off the river, ruffling the corn and stalks of sugarcane in the fields, but his face is dripping with sweat as though he's been locked inside an iron box. He smokes an unfiltered cigarette without being able to take it from his lips, because his hands are manacled at his sides. Before they go inside the squat, off-white concrete building, a gun-bull takes the cigarette out of the boy's mouth and flips it into a pool of rainwater, where it is suddenly extinguished.

Inside, I sit on one of the wood benches with the other witnesses-television and newspaper reporters, a medical examiner, a Negro preacher, and the parents of the girl the convict shot to death in a filling station robbery. They're Cajuns from New Iberia. They sit rigidly and without expression, their eyes never quite focusing on the boy while he is being strapped arm and leg to the electric chair. The woman keeps twisting a handkerchief in her fingers; finally, her husband wipes his hand across his mouth and puts a cigarette between his lips, but he looks at the gun-bull and doesn't light it. Through the barred window the tip of the setting sun is crimson above the green line of willow trees on the river.

Then suddenly the boy begins fighting. It's the moment that no one wants, that embarrasses and shames. His terror has eaten through the Thorazine he's been fed all day, and he gets afoot loose and kicks wildly at a guard. But the guard is a professional and knows how to grab the ankle and calf and use his weight to press the leg firmly back against the oak chair and buckle the leather strap quickly across the shinbone.

The heat and humidity inside the room are almost unbearable. I can smell my own odor and the sweat in the clothes of the people around me. The mother of the murdered girl is looking at the floor now with one white knuckle pressed against her teeth. No one speaks, and I hear the boy's breath sucking in and out of his throat. His eyes are bloodshot and wide, his mouth quivering, and his neck so swollen with fear and blood that it looks as rigid as afire hydrant. Before the cloth hood and metal skullcap go down over his head he stares straight into my face. An unanswered expectation bulges from his eyes.