I could hear her breathing in the receiver.

"Lyle told you?" she said.

"As well as Lyle can tell me anything, without trying to sell glow-in-the-dark Bibles at the same time. I'll tell you I've pretty well had it with your family's attitude. I don't want to be unkind, but the three of you behave like y'all have been shooting up with liquid Drano."

She was quiet again, then I heard her begin to weep.

"Drew?"

But she continued to cry without answering, the kind of unrelieved and subdued sobbing that comes from deep down in the breast.

"Drew, I apologize. I've had some bad concerns on my mind and I was taking them out on you. I'm truly sorry for what I said. It was thoughtless and stupid."

I squeezed my temples with my thumb and forefinger.

"Drew?"

I heard her swallow and take a deep breath.

"Sometimes I'm not very smart," I said. "You know I've always admired you. You have more political courage than anybody I've ever known."

"I don't know what to do. I've always had choices before. Now I don't. I can't deal with that."

"I don't understand."

"Sometimes you get caught. Sometimes there's no way out. I've never let that happen to me."

"Do you want to come into the office? Do you want me to come out there? Tell me what you want to do."

"I don't know what I want to do."

"I'm going to come over there now. Is that all right?"

"I have to take the maid home, and I promised to stop by the market with her. Can you come out about four?"

"Sure."

"You don't mind?"

"No, of course not."

"It doesn't make you uncomfortable?"

"No, not at all. That's silly. Don't think that way."

After I had hung up the phone, I looked wanly at the damp imprint of my hand on the receiver. Were her tears for her brother or herself, I wondered. But then what right had I to be judgmental?

Oh Lord, I thought.

I was almost out the door when the dispatcher caught me in the hallway.

"Pick up your line," he said. "A sergeant in the First District in New Orleans has been holding for you."

"Take a message. I'll call him back."

"You'd better get it, Dave. He says somebody stomped the shit out of Cletus Purcel."

After I had finished talking with the sergeant in New Orleans, who had not been the investigative officer and who couldn't tell me much other than Clete's room number in the hospital off St. Charles and the fact that Clete wanted to see me, that somebody had worked him over bad with a piece of pipe, I told the dispatcher to send a uniformed deputy out to Drew's house and to call Bootsie and tell her that I would be home late and would call her from New Orleans. The wind was hot through my truck windows as I drove across the causeway over the Atchafalaya marsh. The air tasted like brass, like it was full of ozone, and I could smell dead fish on the banks of the willow islands and the odor of brine off the Gulf. The willows looked wilted in the heat, and the few fishermen who were out had pulled their boats into the warm shade of the oil platforms that dotted the bays.

I thought of an event, a low moment in my life, that had occurred almost fifteen years ago. I had been sent to Las Vegas to pick up a prisoner at the county jail and escort him back to New Orleans. But the paperwork and the court clearance had taken almost two days, and I walked in disgust from the courthouse down a palm-lined boulevard in 115-degree heat to a casino and cool bar, where I began drinking a series of vodka collinses as though they were soda pop. Then I had a blackout and seven hours disappeared from my day. I woke up in a rented car out on the desert about 10 PM., my head and body as numb and devoid of feeling and connection with the day as if stunned from crown to sole with novocaine, the distant neon city blazing in the purple cup of mountains.

There was blood on my shirt and my knuckles, and a woman's compact was on the floor. My wallet was gone, along with my money, traveler's checks, credit cards, identification, and finally my shield and my.38 special. I remembered nothing except walking from the bar to a twenty-one table with my drink in my hand and sitting among a polite group of players from Ocala, Florida.

I drove trembling back to the hotel and tried to drink myself sober with room-service Jim Beam. By midnight I went into the DTs and believed that the red message light on my phone meant that once again I had received a long-distance call from the dead members of my platoon. When I finally became rational enough to pick up the receiver and talk to the desk clerk, I was told that I had a message from Cletus Purcel.

I had to use both hands to dial his number, while the sweat slid out of my hair and down the sides of my face.

Six hours later he was standing in my hotel room in his Budweiser shorts, sandals, porkpie hat, and cutoff LSU T-shirt that looked like a tank top on a hippo.

He sat on the side of the bed and listened to my story again, chewing gum, nodding, looking between his knees at the floor; then he left and didn't come back until three in the afternoon. When he did, he dropped a paper sack on the dresser and said, smiling, "Time to pick up our prisoner and boogie on down the road. The Chinese broad got away with your traveler's checks, but I got your money, credit cards, your shield, and your piece back. The American guy working with her is heading back to the Coast by Greyhound to make some long-range dental plans. He's looking forward to it, he said. There's no paperwork on this one, mon."

"What Chinese? What are you talking about?"

"She and her pimp picked you up in a parking lot outside a bar at the end of the Strip. You were too drunk to start your car. They said they'd drive you back to the hotel.

You're lucky he didn't put a shank in you. I took a gut ripper off him that must have been eight inches long."

"I don't remember any of it." My hands still felt thick and wooden when I tried to open and close them.

"Sometimes you lose. Forget it. Come on, let's eat a steak and blow this shithole. I think they got the architects for this place out of a detox center."

Then he looked at me quietly, and I saw the pity and concern, in his eyes.

"You dropped your brains in a jar of alcohol for a few hours," he said. "Big deal. When I worked Vice I got rolled by one of my own snitches. Plus she gave me the gon. What bothers me is I think I knew she had it when I got in the sack with her."

He grinned and blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the stale refrigerated air.

That was my old partner before whiskey and uppers and shylocks made him a fugitive from his own police department.

His face whitened when he tried to sit farther up in bed and reach the water glass and the glass straw on the nightstand.

"Don't try to move around with broken ribs, Clete," I said, and handed him the glass.

His green eyes were red along the rims, and they blinked like a bird's while he sucked on the straw with the corner of his mouth. Divots of hair had been shaved out of his head, and his scalp was sewn with butterfly stitches in a half-dozen places.

"Man, what a drag," he said. "They say I'm supposed to be in here two more days. I don't think I can cut it. You ought to see my night nurse. She looks like the Beast of Buchenwald. She tried to shove a thermometer up my butt while I was asleep."

"They hit you with pipes?"

"No, the little guy had brass knuckles, and Jack Gates, the guy I made for sure, had a baton."

"The cop I talked to said they beat you up with pipes."

"Then they got it wrong in the report. They sound like the same incompetent guys we used to work with."

"How'd they get into your apartment?"

"Picked the lock, I guess. Anyway, Jack Gates was behind the door when I walked in. He caught me right across the ear with the baton. Damn, those things hurt. I crashed right over my new TV set. Then that little fuck was all over me. The last thing I remember I was falling through the furniture, trying to get my piece untangled from my coat, those brass knuckles bouncing off my head, and Gates trying to get a clear swing to take me off at the neck. That's when I grabbed him around the head and tore the stocking off his face. The first thing I saw was all the metal in his teeth. Then it was lights out for Cletus. That sawed-off little fart caught me right at the base of the skull. "It was just like you said, Gates has a scrap yard for a mouth. I should have made the connection before. He was a button man for Joey Gouza, but I heard he moved to Fort Lauderdale or Hallendale two or three years ago and got ice-picked by a chippy or something. But it was Jack Gates, mon, a real barf bucket. I heard Joey Gouza caught his brother-in-law skimming off his whores, so he told Gates to create an object lesson. The brother-in-law was a big, soft mushy guy who couldn't climb a stairs without pulling himself up the banister with both hands. Gates wined and dined him at Copeland's, got him stinking drunk, and kept telling him about these hot-assed Mexican broads over in Galveston. So the tub got his ovaries fired up, and Gates drove them out to a private airport in Kenner, all the time telling the tub what these broads would do for his sex life. Then ole Jack walked him out to the runway, lit a cigar for him, and pushed him into an airplane propeller."