"You heard me."

"I wasn't on the radio."

"You had the mike in your hand, partner."

He wiped the water out of his eyes, then focused on my face again.

"Maybe I got a weather report. Maybe I moved it to pick up my coffee cup. Maybe you need glasses." He dropped the crate on top of the first one. "It doesn't matter. Tony C. cut you in as a favor. If you want to know, the weight and quality are right. You got a sweet deal, man. I don't think you deserve it."

He flipped the top of the gear box shut and walked away toward the pilothouse, balancing himself against the roll of the deck.

It had stopped raining, but the fog was thick and white on the water and I could hardly see the bow of the jugboat.

"This stuff will probably start to lift with first light," I said. "When we come out of it, I'm going to turn northwest for Atchafalaya Bay. Where do you guys want to go ashore?"

Lionel was looking out into the fog through the front glass. His eyes were narrowed and red-rimmed with fatigue.

"Where do y'all want me to put you off?" I repeated.

We passed a shut-down oil platform. The waves were black and streaked with oil as they slid through the steel pilings.

Still neither Lionel nor Fontenot answered me. Then I heard a boat engine out in the fog before I saw its running lights. Fontenot looked up from his cup of coffee. I turned to port, away from the sound of the engine, just as the hull of a thirty-foot white cabin cruiser came out of the fogbank. I could see the silhouette of a solitary figure at the wheel. I turned to look again at Lionel and Fontenot, as though all the frames in a strip of film negatives had suddenly made sense, and I guess my right hand was already moving toward the.25-caliber Beretta strapped to my ankle, but it was too late. Lionel had taken a nine-millimeter automatic from the canvas carry-on bag at his foot, and he placed the iron sight hard behind my ear. His free hand went down my right leg and pulled the Beretta from its holster.

"Cut the engine," he said.

I didn't move.

"It's not a time for thought," he said.

I heard his thumb cock the hammer. I turned off the ignition switch, and we drifted sideways with the waves and dipped down breathlessly into a trough.

"Oops," Fontenot said, and his mouth made an O inside the yellow hood of his raincoat.

"Go forward and throw out the anchor, Ray," Lionel said. "We'll swing tight against the rope, and he can come around and tie on the stern."

"I think we're doing it the hard way," Fontenot said.

"It's the way he wants it. I ain't arguing with him."

"The tropics beckon, Lionel. We don't want to waste time out here."

"Tell him that. The guy's got a hard-on about our man here. It's like talking to a vacant lot."

Fontenot got up from his chair and made his way along the deck, holding on to the rail. His yellow raincoat glistened in the turning fog. I heard the clank of the chain and the X-shaped welded pieces of railroad track that I used for an anchor as he pitched them off the bow. The jugboat swung with the incoming tide toward the coast and straightened against the anchor rope. The cabin cruiser idled past us, then turned in a circle and came up astern. It was a Larson, built for speed and comfort, its paint as white and flawless as enamel.

"I want you to know something before all this goes down," Lionel said.

I started to turn my head toward him. He nudged the automatic against my ear.

"No, keep your eyes straight ahead," he said. "I want you to know it's not personal. I don't like ex-cops, I don't think they should have ever let you in on a buy, but that's got nothing to do with this. We've been somebody's fuck too long, it's time we got what's ours. You just came along at a real bad time."

I heard the engine of the cabin cruiser die; then somebody threw a knotted rope from the bow onto the roof of the jugboat's pilot-house.

"That other thing," he said, "that other thing I didn't have anything to do with."

From the direction of his voice I could tell that he was now looking toward the stern.

"What other thing?" I said.

Then his voice came back toward the side of my face: "Are you kidding, man? You were taking the guy up to Angola to fry. What do you think a guy like that feels about you? I'm sorry for you, man, but I got nothing to do with it."

I didn't care about the pistol behind my ear now. I turned woodenly in the pilot's seat and looked up at the bobbing, moored bow of the cabin cruiser. As Tee Beau had said, Jimmie Lee Boggs had cut his hair short and dyed it black, but every other detail about him was as though he had walked out of a familiar dream: the mannequinlike head, the pallid skin, the lips that looked like they were rouged, the spearmint-green eyes with a strange light in them.

He wore rubber-soled canvas shoes, dungarees, a heavy blue wool shirt with wide gray suspenders, and when he stepped from the cabin cruiser onto the back rail of the jugboat and grabbed Ray Fontenot's hand, his forearm corded with muscle and his stomach looked as flat and hard as boiler plate.

He put one hand on the edge of the pilothouse's roof and leaned over me. Salt spray dripped from his face, and I could smell snuff on his breath.

"Been thinking of me?" he asked.

"I thought maybe you couldn't find us," Fontenot said. "It's thick out there."

"Lionel told me on the radio y'all would be coming past an oil platform," Boggs said. "I just lay south of the rig and listened for your engine. This thing sounds like a garbage truck."

Then Boggs looked down at me again. I still sat in the pilot's seat. His wrists looked as thick as sticks of firewood.

"This guy give you any trouble?" he said.

"Not really," Fontenot said. He had removed his raincoat and was putting on a life jacket.

"You guys get the stuff on board. I'll take care of it here," Boggs said. He took the nine-millimeter from Lionel's hand.

Fontenot cleared his throat. "We wonder if you… if we really need to do that, Jimmie Lee," he said.

"You got a problem with it?" Boggs said.

"The man isn't likely to call the law," Fontenot said.

"You got that right," Boggs said.

"I don't see the percentage," Fontenot said. "Right now we're simply transferring some product. Why complicate it?"

"I ain't telling you what to think, Jimmie Lee," Lionel said, "but the guy's not going to do anything. He's a fired cop, a drunk. He tries to make any trouble later, you can have him hit for five hundred bucks."

"I don't pay to clip a guy. Besides, you did a guy with a piano wire, Lionel. Why you giving me this bullshit?"

"I got out of it, too. I don't want to go that route anymore," Lionel said. "Look, he's an amateur. You let the amateurs slide, Jimmie Lee. You whack out an amateur, their families make a lot of trouble."

Lionel blew out his breath. The fog was white and so thick you could lose your hand in it as it rolled off the water and across the deck.

"I don't want to have to lose my piece. I just bought it," he said.

"Get the coke on board and bring me the shotgun. It's clipped under the forward hatch," Boggs said.

"You guys got to deal with Tony," I said to Lionel and Fontenot.

"Good try, prick, but Tony's history. He just don't know it yet," Boggs said.

"Sorry, Mr. Robicheaux," Fontenot said. Then he looked at Lionel and said, "See no evil."

The two of them started up the deck toward the forward gear box, where the two crates of cocaine were stowed. I was sweating heavily inside my clothes, and my breath was coming irregularly in my chest. The jugboat dipped in the ground swell, and the barrel of the automatic touched the side of my head like a kiss.

"I'll say it once, and you guys can believe it or not," I said. The front glass of the pilothouse was pushed ajar, and they could hear me out on the deck. "I'm still a cop. I'm undercover for the DEA. We're on Coast Guard radar right now."