I saw the headlight and the starlit silhouette of the bike and a small rider bounce down the side of the levee and come hard along the line of train cars. I could already see Eddy Raintree trying to rise to one knee, as he realized that he might still have another frolic in the funhouse.

It was very quick after that.

I pulled the.45 from my belt and broke into a run. The motorcycle passed Eddy Raintree, skidded in the gravel, and circled back in the direction it had come from, the headlight beam bouncing off the sides of the train. At first I thought the small rider was trying to swing Eddy up behind him, the way a rodeo pickup man scoops up a thrown cowboy. Then I saw a rigid object about two feet long in his hand, saw him extend it out beside him, and in my naivety I thought it might be bolt cutters, that Raintree would lift up his manacled wrists, and the small rider would snap him free and I would be left breathless and exhausted while they disappeared over the levee into the darkness.

But I was close enough now to see that it was a shotgun, with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump. Eddy Raintree had made it to one knee and was frozen in the headlight's radiance, like an armless man trying to genuflect in church, when the shotgun roared upward three inches from his chin.

Then the small rider opened up his bike, one boot skipping along the rocks for balance, and wove the bike up the levee in a shower of dirt and divots of grass and buttercups.

My chest was heaving, my arm shaking, when I let off two rounds at his toylike silhouette just before he hit it full-bore, his head bent low, and disappeared in a long roll of diminishing thunder between the levee and the willow islands.

Eddy Raintree's buttocks were collapsed on his heels. His head was turned away from me, as though he were trying to hide his facial expression or a secret that he wished to take with him to another place. The animals in the circus car crashed wildly about in their wire cages. I touched Eddy Raintree lightly on the shoulder, and it rotated downward with gravity on the severed tendons in his neck.

One of the gandy walkers vomited.

"Oh Lord God, look what they done to that po' man," the other said. "His face hanging off the wrong side of his head."

CHAPTER 9

It was after midnight before I finished with the paramedics, local sheriff's deputies, an angry detective who accused me of operating in his jurisdiction without first contacting his office, and the parish medical examiner, who, like many of his kind, had aspirations to be a comedian.

"You could can that guy's B.O. as a chemical weapon and bring the Iranians to their knees," he said. "I'd consider rabies shots."

When I got into my truck I knew I should drive straight back to New Iberia. That would have been the reasonable thing to do. But my late-night hours had never been characterized by reason, neither as a practicing or as a recovering drunk.

Less than an hour later I was on Highland Drive, west of the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, and I turned out of the long corridor of oaks into a brick-paved driveway lined with a brick fence and rosebushes. It led to an enormous white house with antebellum pretensions that might have been built five minutes ago on a Hollywood movie set. The trim on the front door was pink, the brass-work as bright and portentous as gold.

When he opened the front door in his pajamas, the breeze made the chandelier over his head ring with sound and light.

"Bootsie needs your help," I said. "No, that's not really true. I need it for her. I'm out there on the rim, Lyle."

CHAPTER 10

The next morning was Saturday, and I should have been Toff for the day, but the dispatcher called at 9 A.M.

"What do you want to do with these four guys Levy and Guillory brought in?" he asked.

What four guys?"

"The bums Levy and Guillory brought in from the shelters. Levy said you were looking for guys who'd been in an ugly-man contest. You've got some beauts here, Dave."

I had completely forgotten.

"Where are they now?" I said.

"In the drunk tank."

"How long have they been there?"

"Since yesterday."

"Get them out of there. I'll be right down."

Fifteen minutes later I was at the office. I walked down a corridor to a holding cell, where the four men patiently waited for me on a single wood bench. In the center of the cell floor was a urine-streaked drain hole. The men all had the emaciated characteristics of people whose lives existed on a straight line between the blood bank and the wine store. Like most professional tramps, they had a strange chemical odor about them, as though their glands had long ago stopped functioning properly and now secreted only a synthetic substitute for natural body fluids. I opened up the barred door.

One man's head was misshapen, broken on one side like a dented walnut; the second's face was eaten with a skin disease that looked like skin cancer; the third had a bad harelip and virtually no cartilage in his nose; but it was the face of the fourth man on the bench that made me wince inside.

"Have you guys eaten?" I said.

They nodded that they had, except the man on the end.

His eyes never blinked and never left my face.

"I'm sorry about what happened," I said. "I didn't mean for you to be locked up. I had just wanted to talk to you, but I went out of town and my orders got a little confused."

They made no reply. They shuffled their shoes on the concrete floor and looked at the backs of their hands. Then the man with the skin disease said, "It ain't bad. They got TV."

"Anyway, I apologize to you guys," I said. "A deputy will drive you back to wherever you want to go. He'll also give you a voucher for a meal at a cafe in town. Here's my business card. If you ever want to pick up a dollar or two sanding down some boats, call that number."

They rose as one to go out the open cell door.

"Say, podna, would you stay a minute with me?" I said to the last man on the bench.

He sat back down indifferently and began rolling a cigarette. I took a chair from the corridor and sat opposite him.

His whole head looked like it had been put in a furnace.

The ears were burnt into stubs; the hairless red scar tissue looked like it had been applied in layers to the bone with a putty knife; part of the lips had been surgically removed so that the teeth and gums were exposed in a permanent sneer.

He rolled the tobacco into a tight cylinder, wet down the glued seam, and crimped the edges. He lifted his eyes up to mine. They looked as lidless, as reptilian and liquid as a chamelcon's. He popped a match aflame on his thumbnail.

It was as thick and purple as tortoise shell.

"You like my face?" he asked.

"What's your name?"

"Vic."

"Vic what?"

"Vic Who-gives-a-shit? One name's good as another, I figure."

"How about giving me your last name?"

"Benson."

"How'd you get hurt, podna?"

He put his cigarette in the hole where his lips were pared away at the corner of his mouth. He blew smoke out toward the bars. "In a tank," he said.

"You were in the service?"

"That's right."

"Where'd you serve?"

"Korea."

"Your tank got nailed?"

"You got it."

"Where in Korea?"

"Second day, at Heartbreak Ridge. What's all this stuff about?"

"There're some people who say they've seen a man with your description looking through their windows."

"Yeah? Must be my twin brother." He laughed, and saliva welled up on his gum.

"There's a preacher in Baton Rouge who thinks a man who looks like you might be his father."

"I had a son once. But I didn't raise no preacher."