Their tattoos were a marvel: spiders in purple webs stretched across the shoulder blades, serpents twined around biceps and forearms, beret-capped skulls, hearts impaled on knives, swastikas clutched in eagle claws, green dragons blowing fire across the loins, Confederate flags, lily-wrapped crucifixes, and the face of Christ with beads of blood upon his tortured brow.

For a moment we almost had trouble. A tall white man with a black goatee, wearing only a jockstrap and tennis shoes, sat against the wall and wiped his chest and stomach with a tattered gray towel. His eyes focused on my face and stayed there; then he said, "I know that guy. He's a cop."

The clanking of the barbells stopped. The room was absolutely quiet.

Then a big black man, with a nylon stocking crimped on his head, set down his weights and said to me, "What about it, Home?"

"I look like heat? Take a look at my charge sheet," I said.

"No, we don't look at nothing. This guy came in with me," Tony said. He looked down at the tall white man sitting on the floor with his knees splayed open. "You saying I brought a cop in with me?"

The man's eyes met Tony's, then became close-set and focused on nothing.

"He looked like a guy I used to see around," he said. "Some other guy."

The room remained quiet. I could hear traffic out on the street. Everyone was watching Tony.

"So don't worry about it," he said. He laughed, pulled the towel from the man's hand, and rubbed the man's head with it. "Hey, what's with this crazy guy? Y'all made him weird or is that the way they come in from Jump Street these days?"

The man grinned sheepishly; then everyone was laughing, clanging the barbells again, grabbing themselves, nodding to one another in admiration of Tony's intelligence and wit or whatever quality it was that allowed him to charm a snake back into a basket.

Tony walked past me out the door, his smile welded on his face, and nudged me in the side with his thumb. We walked side by side back toward our cell. He kept his face straight ahead. He whistled a disjointed tune and then said, "Do you know who that guy was?"

"No, I don't remember him."

"He did a snitch with an ice pick in Angola for twenty bucks. Let's play a lot of checkers today, hang around the cell, talk about books, you get my drift?"

"You're a piece of work, Tony."

"What I am is too old for this shit."

But our worries about the group in the weight room were unnecessary. Tony's lawyer had us sprung by noon, all charges dropped. Nate Baxter had not had probable cause to stop and search us, Tony's lawyer produced the permit for Tony's pistol, and the charge against me-interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty-was a manufactured one that the prosecutor's office wouldn't waste time on. The only loser was Jess, who had his.410 shotgun pistol confiscated.

We picked up the Lincoln at the car pound and Tony treated us to lunch at an outdoor café on St. Charles. It was a lovely fall day, seventy-five degrees, perhaps, with a soft wind out of the south that lifted the moss in the oak trees along the avenue. A Negro was selling snow cones, which people in New Orleans call snowballs, out of a white cart, with a canvas umbrella over it, on the esplanade. The dry fronds of a thick-trunked palm tree covered his white uniform with shifting patterns of etched lines. I heard the streetcar tracks begin to hum, then farther up the avenue I saw the street car wobbling down the esplanade in a smoky cone of light and shadow created by the canopy of oaks.

"When we were kids we used to put pennies on the tracks and flatten them out to the size of half-dollars," Tony said, wiping the tomato sauce from his shrimp off his mouth with a napkin. "They'd still be hot in your hand when you picked them up."

"That's not all you done when you were a kid," Jess said. "You remember when you and your cousins found them arms behind the Tulane medical school?" Jess looked at me. "That's right. They got this whole pile of arms that was supposed to be burned in the incinerator. Except Tony and his cousins put them on crushed ice in a beer cooler and got on the streetcar with them when all the coloreds were just getting off work. They waited until it was wall-to-wall people, then they hung a half dozen of these arms from the hand straps. People were streaming all over the car, trampling each other to get out the door, climbing out the windows at thirty miles an hour. One big fat guy crashed right on top of the snowball stand."

"Hey, don't tell Dave that stuff. He's going to think I'm a ghoul or something," Tony said.

"Tony used to flush M-80s down the commode at the Catholic school," Jess said. "See, the fire would burn down through the center of the fuse. They'd get way back in the plumbing before they'd explode, then anybody taking a dump would get douched with pot water."

People at the other tables turned and stared at us, openmouthed.

"You finished eating, Jess?" Tony said.

"I'm going to get some pecan pie," Jess said.

"How about bringing the car around? I've got to get home," Tony said.

"What'd I do this time?"

"Nothing, Jess. You're fine."

"You make me feel like I ought to be in a plastic bubble or something. I was just telling a story."

"It's okay, Jess. Just get the car," Tony said. Then after Jess was gone, he said to me, "What am I going to do? He's the one loyal guy I got. When it comes down to protecting me, you could bust a chair across his face and he wouldn't blink."

A few minutes later Jess came around the corner in the convertible and waited for us in front of the restaurant. Leaves blew under the wire wheels.

"You guys drop me by my apartment so I can get my truck," I said. "I'll be back out to your house a little later."

Tony grinned. "I bet you're off to see Bootsie. Tell her hello for me," he said.

His presumption that Bootsie should have been uppermost in my mind was right-but she wasn't. After they left me at my apartment on Ursulines I called Minos at the guesthouse.

"I'm sorry you had to spend a night in the bag. How was it?" he said.

"What do you think?" Through the window I could see my neighbor's bluetick dog urinating against a banana tree in the flower bed.

"Look, I've got some news about Boggs, some of which I don't understand. An informant told our Lafayette office that Boggs was in New Iberia two days ago. What would he be doing in New Iberia?"

"Where'd your snitch see him?"

"In a black neighborhood, out in the parish. Why would Boggs be in a black neighborhood?"

"Tony said Boggs told him he was going to blackmail a Negro woman who owned a hot-pillow joint. It had something to do with the murder of a redbone. I think the redbone was a migrant-labor contractor named Hipolyte Broussard. But Boggs told all this to Cardo before he ripped off the coke out on the salt. I don't know why he'd be interested in some minor-league blackmail when he's holding a half-million dollars' worth of cocaine."

"I don't either. Anyway, we have some other information, too. We've got some taps on the greaseballs over in Houston. It's not an open contract on Cardo anymore. Boggs has got the hit. It's fifty grand, a big-money whack even for these guys. But they want it to go down in the next week."

"Why the hurry?"

"They're afraid of him. Tony C. isn't one to take prisoners. One guy on the tape says it might have to be a slop shot. Have you heard that one before?"

"Yes."

"There's no innocent bystanders. His wife, his kid, anybody around him, they're all targets if necessary. Dave, if Boggs was in New Iberia, do you think it has something to do with you?"

"Why?"

"Who has more reason to want you off the board? It's turned around on him. I bet he gets up thinking about you in the morning."