I saw Lionel and Fontenot stop and turn around. The fog drifted across their bodies like strips of torn cotton. They started back toward the pilothouse.

"It's all a sting," I said. "Minos Dautrieve's been running it from the start. You know who Minos Dautrieve is, right?"

Boggs's fingers laced in my hair; then he slammed my head forward on the instrument panel. I felt the skin split above my right eye, and the blood and the salt water leaked down across my eyelid.

"Hold on, listen to him," Fontenot said.

"You guys rattle too easy," Boggs said.

"Dautrieve's a narc out of Lafayette," Lionel said.

"So he knows that," Boggs said.

"Clete Purcel is DEA undercover, too," I said. "You clip me, he'll even the score. Ask anybody in New Orleans. Check out what he did to Julio Segura."

Boggs held the automatic by the barrel and raked it across my mouth as though he were wielding a hammer. My bottom lip burst against my teeth, and a socket of pain raced deep into my throat and up into my nose. I leaned forward on the wheel with my mouth open, as though my jaws had become unhinged, while a long string of blood and saliva dripped between my legs.

"This deal's going sour," Lionel said.

"There's nothing wrong with the deal. Stop acting like a cunt," Boggs said.

"I ain't going back to Angola," Lionel said. "I ain't going down for snuffing a cop, either."

"This guy's shark food. Count on it. He don't have to be the only one to go over the gunwale, either. You getting my drift?" Boggs said.

"You got nothing to lose, Jimmie Lee. We do," Lionel said.

"You got a lot to lose, man. It's important you understand that," Boggs said. He had shifted the barrel of the automatic so that it now hovered between me and Lionel.

"We just wanted to hear a little more of what Mr. Robicheaux had to say," Fontenot said.

"I'll show you what he's going to say," Boggs said, and he knotted my shirt in his fist at the back of my neck, pulled me erect, and pushed the barrel of the automatic hard into my spine. "He's gonna say 'please,' and he's gonna say, 'I'll pay you money,' and he's gonna say, 'Mr. Boggs, I'll do anything you want if you don't hurt me.'"

He pushed me ahead of him on the deck, his clenched hand trembling with energy, then stomped on my leg just above the calf, as though he were breaking a slat, and knocked me to my knees. He let the automatic swing loosely over the back of my neck. In the reflection of the running lights the blood from my mouth looked purple on the backs of my hands. My ears were filled with sound: the waves bursting against the bow and hissing back along the hull, Jimmie Lee Boggs's heated breathing, a buoy clanging somewhere beyond the oil platform, a thick, obscene noise like wet cellophane crackling when I tried to swallow.

"Lionel, you got two minutes to load the stash and come back with my shotgun," Boggs said. "Don't fuck up my morning."

"We'll transfer the goods. There's no problem, Jimmie Lee," Fontenot said.

"I didn't think there was," Boggs said.

Out of the corner of my vision I could see Fontenot and Lionel carrying the crates back to Boggs's boat. Their rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the deck.

"I'll hand it up to you," I heard Fontenot say.

"Why don't you take swimming lessons, go to the Y?" Lionel said.

"You know why I like a shotgun?" Boggs asked me. His dungarees were bell-bottomed and dark with water above his white socks.

"No hands, no face," he said. "Think of a broken cherry pie."

The jugboat dropped off the edge of a big wave and slapped hard against the water. Then I heard someone behind me.

"Here it is," Lionel said.

"Thank you, my man," Boggs said.

"What do you want to do with his boat?" Lionel said.

"I'll open up the cocks and down she goes."

"Hurry all this up, it's gonna be light."

"Just get the fat man on board and let me worry about the rest of it."

Lionel walked away toward the stern, and I saw Boggs's feet and legs move in front of me. I heard him rack a shell into the chamber of a shotgun.

"Would you look up here so I could have your attention a minute?" he said.

I raised my head slowly, my eyes traveling over his thighs, which were tensed against the roll of the deck, his flat stomach under his gray suspenders, his sawed-off pump shotgun with a stock that had been wood-rasped into a pistol grip, his red mouth crimped in expectation, as though he had just sucked on a salted lime. My split eye throbbed, blood and saliva ran off my lip, my pulse roared in my ears.

"Boggs…" I said.

He didn't answer.

"Boggs…"

I opened my mouth to let it drain. I spit on myself.

"Boggs…"

"What?" he said.

"You'd fuck up a wet dream. Shoot and be done with it."

I saw his eyes narrow. They were liquid and rheumy, like a lizard's, the whites flecked almost entirely red with broken blood veins. His right hand, wrapped around the trigger guard, was white and ridged with bone. The edges of his eyes trembled with anger. His tongue tasted his lip, and he looked like a man whose sexual satisfaction was about to be denied him.

"We gotta go, Jimmie Lee," Lionel said from the stern.

But Boggs's attention had shifted. He stared out into the fog, the shotgun at port arms, his dyed, threadlike hair wet and stuck against his scalp like a duck's feathers. Then I saw and heard it, too: the glow of running lights in the fog, the drone of a big engine, of boat screws that cut a deep trough in the water.

Suddenly no one was interested in me. I raised up slowly from all fours and sat back on my heels. Lionel had been trying to push Fontenot's huge weight up onto the bow of the cabin cruiser, but they were both frozen now on the stern of the jugboat. Fontenot's neck looked like a turtle's inside his life jacket.

The electric arc of a searchlight burst through the fog. It was hot and white and blinding to the eyes, and now the jugboat and the green, white-capping waves had the strange luminescence of objects lighted by a pistol flare.

A man's voice boomed through a bullhorn across the water: "This is the New Orleans Police Department. You're under arrest. Put down your weapons and lace your hands on your head."

Lionel's arm went up, and he aimed the nine-millimeter across the roof of the pilothouse.

"No!" Fontenot shouted. Then he shouted it again, "No!" His face was round and soft and full of disbelief.

But it was too late. Lionel and Boggs were both shooting now, the muzzle flashes from their guns almost lost in the searchlight's hot glare. I could hear the brass hulls from Lionel's pistol clinking on the pilothouse roof. Then the searchlight glass shattered and almost simultaneously two kneeling figures on the bow of the police boat, bill caps turned backward on their heads, began firing M-16 rifles on full automatic bullets off the deck rails, gear boxes, pots and pans and stove in the galley, scissored through the tin side of a bait well, and trapped Ray Fontenot helplessly against the back rail of the jugboat.

He tried to crouch down behind the corner of the pilothouse, his mouth wide and pink with words that no one could hear. His fists were balled, his wrists crossed in an X in front of his eyes; then the bullets danced across his life jacket, split the canvas like dry blisters popping, and his throat and great heaving chest erupted with red flowers. His mouth hung open as though he had swallowed a chicken bone.

I lay flat on the deck, my arms folded across the crown of my skull. Boggs was hunkered down behind the iron gear box that had held the crates of cocaine, and the M-16 rounds whanged off the top and the sides and sparked in the darkness. But he didn't wince. He kept firing, pumping the empty shell casings out on the deck, his body small and constricted with muscle like a rifleman's. His shotgun must have been loaded with double-aughts or deer slugs, because I could hear the damage to the police boat, the glass breaking, the hard slap of heavy shot across wood surfaces.