"I'm not following you."

He drew in on his pipe, his eyes hazy with a private knowledge. It was overcast, and his lips looked sick and purple against his liver-spotted skin.

"We had two white boys shanked in the Block this year," he said. "One a trusty, one a big stripe. We think the same nigger got both of them, but we can't prove it. If you was a white person living up there, what would you do?"

"So maybe there's something like the AB in Angola?"

"Call it what you want. They got their ways. The goddamn Supreme Court's caused all this." He paused, then continued. "They carve swastikas, crosses, lightning bolts on each other, pour ink in the sores. The black boys don't tend to mess with them, then. Wait a minute, I'll show you something. Shorty! Get it up here!"

"Yow boss!" A coal-black convict, with a neck like a fire hydrant, his face running with sweat, heaved a sandbag against the levee and lumbered up the incline toward us.

"What'd Boss Gilbeau put you in isolation for?" the captain asked.

"Fightin', boss."

"Who was you fighting with, Shorty?"

"One of them boys back in Ash." He grinned, his eyes avoiding both of us.

"Was he white or colored, Shorty?"

"He was white, boss."

"Show Mr. Robicheaux how you burned yourself when you got out of isolation."

"Suh?"

"Pull up your shirt, boy, and don't act ignorant."

The convict named Shorty unbuttoned his sweat-spotted denim shirt and pulled the tail up over his back. There were four gray, thin, crusted lesions across his spine, like his skin had been branded by heated wires or coat hangers.

"How'd you burn yourself, Shorty?" the captain said.

"Backed into the radiator, boss."

"What was the radiator doing on in April?"

"I don't know, suh. I wished it ain't been on. It sure did hurt. Yes, suh."

"Get on back down there. Tell them others to clean it up for lunch."

"Yes, suh."

The captain knocked his pipe out on his boot heel and stuck it back in his holster belt. He gazed out on the wide yellow-brown sweep of the river and the heavy green line of trees on the far side. He didn't speak.

"That's the way it is here, huh?" I said.

"Besides dope, Raintree's problem is his prick. He's got rut for brains. It don't matter if it's male or female, if it's warm and moving he'll try to top it. The other thing you might look for is fortune-tellers. He had astrology maps all over his cell walls. He give a queer in Magnolia a carton of cigarettes a week to read his palm. By the way, it ain't the AB you ought to have on your mind. Them with the swastikas I was telling you about, they get mail from some church out in Idaho calestian Identity. Hayden Lake, Idaho."

He raised himself up on his cane to indicate that our interview was over. I could almost hear his bones crack.

"I thank you for your time, captain," I said.

Then as an afterthought he said, "If you bust that boy, tell him he just as lief hang himself as come back here for killing a policeman."

His pupils were like black cinders in his washed-out blue eyes.

I arrived back at my office just in time to shuffle some papers around on my desk and sign out at five o'clock. I was tired from the round-trip drive up to Angola; my shoulder still hurt where Eddy Raintree had caught me with the crowbar, and I wanted to go home, eat supper, take a run along the dirt road by the bayou, and maybe go to a movie in Lafayette with Alafair and Bootsie.

But parked next to my pickup truck was a waxed fireengine-red Cadillac, with the immaculate white canvas top folded back loosely on the body. A man in ice-cream slacks lay almost supine across the leather seats, one purple suede boot propped up on the window jamb, a sequined sunburst guitar hung across his stomach.

"Allons i Lafayette, pour voir les Itites franCaises, " he sang, then sat up, pulled off his sunglasses with his mutilated hand, and grinned at me. "What's happening, lieutenant?"

"Hello, Lyle."

"Take a ride with me."

"How many of these do you own?"

"They actually belong to the church."

"I bet."

"Take a ride with me."

"I'm on my way home."

"You can blow a few minutes. It's important."

"Do you have anything against talking to me during office hours?"

"Somebody broke into Drew's house last night."

"I didn't hear anything about it. Did she report it to the city police?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Maybe I'll explain that. Take a ride with me." He lifted his guitar over into the back seat. I opened the door and sat back in the deep flesh-colored leather seat next to him. We clanked across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove out of town on East Main. He picked up a paper cup from the floor and drank out of it. A familiar odor struck my nostrils in the warm air.

"Did you give yourself a dispensation today?" I said.

"I preach against drunkenness, not drinking. There's a big difference."

"Where are we going, Lyle?"

"Not far. Right there," he said, and pointed across a sugarcane field to a collapsed barn, a rusted and motionless windmill, and some brick pilings that had once supported a house. The field behind the barn was unplowed, and in it were a half-dozen oil wells.

We pulled off the parish road into a weed-grown dirt lane that led back to the barn. Lyle cut the engine, removed a pint bottle of bourbon from under the seat, and unscrewed the cap with one thumb. His hair, which he wore on-camera in a waved conk that reminded me of a washboard, was windblown and loose and hanging in his eyes.

"I own a third of it, a third of them wells out there, too," he said. "But I'm not fond of coming out here. I surely ain't."

"Why are we here, then?"

"You got to go back where the dragons live if you want to get rid of them."

"I tried to make myself clear before, Lyle. I sympathize with the problems your family had in the past, but my concern now is with a murdered police officer."

"Drew came home last night from her Amnesty International meeting and she noticed the light on the back porch was out. She went on into the house, and there was a guy in the kitchen, in the dark, looking at her. He had something in his hand, a screwdriver or a knife. She ran back out the front of the house to the neighbor's and tried to get hold of Weldon, then she called me up in Baton Rouge."

"Why didn't she call the cops, Lyle?"

"She thinks she's protecting Weldon from something."

"What?"

"I'm not sure. Neither one of them is real convinced about my religious conversion. They tend to think maybe my brain cells soaked up a little too much purple acid when I came back from Vietnam. So they don't always confide everything in me. But it doesn't matter. I know who that fellow was."

"Your father?"

"I don't have a doubt."

"Everybody else seems to, including me."

He took a sip from his pint bottle and looked away at the red sun over the bayou. The wind was warm, and I could smell the reek of natural gas from the wells.

"What does Drew say? What did this man look like?" I asked.

"She didn't see his face."

"I'll talk to her tomorrow. Now I'd better get back home."

"All right, I'm going to tell you all of it. Then you can do any damn thing you want with it, Loot. But by God, first, you're going to listen."

The scars dripping down the side of his face looked like smooth pieces of red glass in the late sunlight.