"You think he's working for Gouza now?"

"He's got to be. You don't resign from Joey Meatballs. It's a lifetime job."

"Where'd he get that name?"

"His old man ran a spaghetti place on Felicity. In fact, Joey still owns three or four Italian restaurants around town. But the story is when he was a kid in the reformatory a redneck guard made Joey cook him meatballs all the time. Except Joey would always spit in them or mash up dead cockroaches in them. Have you ever seen him? His mother must have been knocked up by a street lamp."

"The little guy with the brass knuckles is probably Fluck, right?"

"Maybe. But a nylon stocking makes everybody look like Cream of Wheat. All I can tell you is I think he wanted to take my eyes out… Why are you looking like that?"

"I got you into this, Clete."

"No, you didn't. It was my idea to go out to Bobby Earl's and pull on his tallywhacker. But I was right about the connection between Earl and Gouza, won't I? I told you that flunky at the gate used to be a mule for Gouza. I think we've got the ultimate daisy chain of Louisiana buttwipes here-Klansmen, Nazis, and wiseguys."

"You took the beating for me."

"Bullshit."

"You haven't heard it all. I received a bribe attempt earlier today. A couple of grand in my mailbox, a letter suggesting I spend a lot of time around New Iberia."

"Ah," he said. The streetcar rattled down the tracks on St. Charles. "The carrot and the stick."

"I think so."

"And I got the stick."

"They don't like to beat up cops."

"They did something else too, Dave, maybe a signal for you about their future potential. After they laid me out, they sprinkled a bagful of rainbows and black beauties all over the room to make it look like a drug deal gone sour. I cleaned them up before I called the First District… Dave, I don't like what I'm seeing on your face."

"What's that?"

"Like you got a piece of barbed wire behind your eyes. You get those thoughts out of your head."

"You're mistaken."

"Like hell I am. Ole Streak turns on the Mixmaster and almost drives himself crazy with his own thoughts, then goes out and strikes a match to their balls. You wait till I'm out of here and we'll 'front these guys together. Are we straight on that, podjo?"

I looked at the square of sunlight on his sheets. The palm trees outside the window lifted and straightened in the breeze.

"I'm not supposed to be a player?" he said.

"You want me to bring you anything?"

"Don't go up against Gouza on your own. An Iberia sheriff's badge is puppy shit to these guys."

"What do you want me to bring you?"

"My piece. It's in a little sock drawer under my bed." He took his keys off the nightstand and dropped them in my palm. "There's also a fifth of vodka and a carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter."

"I'll be back in a little while."

"Dave?"

"Yes?"

"Gouza's a weird combo. He's got an ice cube in the center of his head when it comes to business, but he's also a sadistic paranoid. A lot of the greaseballs in this town are scared shitless of him."

I drove to Clete's apartment on Dumaine in the Quarter, put his.38 revolver and shoulder holster, his vodka and cigarettes in a paper bag and was walking back down the balcony when I saw the apartment manager sweeping dust out his doorway through the railing into the courtyard below.

He was a dark-skinned, black-haired man with bad teeth and turquoise eyes. I opened my badge and asked him if he had seen the men who had beaten Clete.

"Yeah, sho' I seen them. I seen them run down the stairs," he said. He had a heavy Cajun accent.

I asked him what they looked like.

"One man, I didn't see him too good, no, he walked on down Dumaine. I didn't pay him no mind 'cause I didn't know nothing was wrong, me. But there was a little one, a blond-haired fella, he pushed by me on the stair and run out on the street and got on a motorcycle wit' another fella."

"What did this fellow on the motorcycle look like?"

"Big," he said. Then he tapped on his biceps with one finger. "He had a tattoo. A tiger. It was yellow and red. I seen it real good 'cause I didn't like that little fella pushing me on the stair."

"Who'd you tell this to?"

"I ain't said nothing to nobody."

"Why not?"

"Ain't nobody ax me."

After I dropped off the paper sack with Clete's gun, cigarettes, and vodka at the hospital, the sun was low in the sky, red through the oak trees on St. Charles Avenue, and swallows were circling in the dusk. I checked into an inexpensive guesthouse on Prytania, just two blocks off St. Charles, and called Bootsie and told her that I would have to stay over and that I would be home tomorrow afternoon.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I have to run down a couple of things. It's grunt work mostly. Will you be all right?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Are you all right, Boots?"

"Yes. Everything's fine this evening. It was hot today, but it's cooling off this evening. It might rain tonight. There's lightning out over the marsh."

I could feel the day's fatigue in my body. I closed and widened my eyes. The long-distance hum in the telephone receiver was like wet sand in my ear.

"Would you call the dispatcher for me?" I said.

"All right. Don't worry about anything, Dave. We're just fine."

After I hung up I said a prayer to my Higher Power to watch over my home in my absence, then I called Clarise, an elderly mulatto woman who had worked for my family since I was a child, and asked her to look in on Bootsie that evening and to return in the morning to do house chores.

I showered in a tin stall with water that was so cold it left me breathless, put back on the same clothes I had worn all day, ate a plate of rice, red beans, and sausage at Fat Al bert's on St. Charles, then began a neon-lit odyssey through the biker bars of Jefferson and Orleans parishes.

It's a strange, atavistic, and tribal world to visit. Individually its members are usually hapless, bumbling creatures who were born out of luck and whose largest successes usually consist of staying out of jail, paying off their bondsmen, and keeping their appointments with their probation officers and welfare workers. It's probably not coincidence that most of them are ugly and stupid. But collectively they are both frightening and a source of fascination for those who wonder what it might be like if they traded off their routine and predictable lives for a real fling out on the ragged edge.

The first bar I hit was one out on Airline Highway. Think of a shale parking lot covered with chopped-down Harleys whose chrome and lacquered-black surfaces seem to glow with a nocturrial iridescence; a leather jackboot stomping down on a starter pedal, the ear-splitting roar of straight exhaust pipes, the tinkle of a beer bottle flung through the limbs of an oak tree, a man urinating loudly on the shale in front of a pickup truck's headlights, his muscular, blue-jeanclad legs spread with the visceral self-satisfaction of a gladiator; the inside of a clapboard building crowded with men in sleeveless Levi jackets, boots sheathed with metal plates, black leather cutouts that etch the genitals and flap on the legs like a gunfighter's chaps; bodies strung with chains and iron crosses, covered with hair and tattoos of swastikas and snakes with human skulls inserted between the fangs; an odor of chewing tobacco, snuff, cigarette smoke rubbed like wet nicotine into the clothes, grease and motor oil, reefer, and a faint hint of testosterone and dried semen.

I was sure that the man with the tiger tattoo who had ridden away from Clete's apartment was Eddy Raintree, but he was not the same biker who had put the bribe money in my mailbox. Which meant that in all probability there was a connection between bikers, the Aryan Brotherhood, exconvicts, and Bobby Earl or Joey Gouza. It made sense.