"That's when I felt it for the first time. It kicked through both my arms just like I grabbed hold of an electric fence. It made my teeth rattle. She straightened her back, and the pain and misery drained out of her face like somebody had poured cool water through her whole body. I'd never seen anything like it. I was trembling so bad I couldn't get off my knees. Something broke inside me and I started crying. The whole tent went crazy. But I knew, even at that moment, the power had come up through that old woman, through the faith in that old, sweaty, tormented black head. Sometimes in my sleep I can still feel her hair on my palms.

"It won't work for you, Dave. You came here for magic. You don't believe in the world I belong to. It's going to make you remorseful later, too."

I hadn't eaten any of the pie. I pushed it away from me with the back of my wrist and looked through the side window at the headlights of a car clicking whitely along the dark line of oak trees on Highland Drive.

"What I'm saying is, you gave up on your own belief," he said. "But don't beat up on yourself about it. You got desperate and you came here to get help for somebody else, not yourself. Just go back to doing what you were before. Sometimes you got to hump it a long way before you get out of Indian country, Loot."

I looked down between my knees at the linoleum. I didn't think I had ever been so tired.

"I appreciate your time, Lyle," I said.

He touched the teardrop scar tissue that ran from his right eye.

"Long as you're here, there's something I want to own up to," he said. "The last time I saw you, I tried to push buttons on you. I mean, when I mentioned that stuff about you poking my sister."

"I already forgot it."

"No, you don't know everything involved, Dave. Drew had the hots for you back in college, and maybe she's still got them. But maybe for a reason you don't understand. You're a lot like Weldon."

I raised my head and looked at him.

"You're both big, nice-looking guys," he said. "You were both officers in the war. Neither one of you likes rules or people telling you what to do. Both of you. have electric sparks leaking off your terminals."

I stared into his eyes.

"Growing up, we didn't have anybody but ourselves," he said. "It screws you up. What's sick behavior to one person is love to another. We didn't care what other people said was right or wrong. They were the same people burning us with hot cigarettes or sticking us in foster homes. Weldon and Drew weren't just brother and sister for each other. And I'm not innocent in this, either. But it was always Weldon she loved."

I looked away from the fine bead of pain in his eyes.

"Why do you think I've had three wives?" he asked. "Or why's Weldon married to an addict who hangs on him like a child? Or why does Drew get it on with anybody who's got hair sticking out the top of his shirt? It's like your feelings and your head are never on the same wavelength. Every time you make love with somebody, you get mad at them and resent them. Figure that one out.

"Dave, you've got a lock on sanity. Don't come to the likes of us for insight."

He forked a piece of pie into the back of his mouth and chewed it silently, his eyes never leaving my embarrassed averted face.

Sunday morning Bootsie, Alafair, and I went crabbing down the coast. We tied chicken necks inside the weighted traps, whose sides would collapse on the bottom of the wire bay and then snap back into place with a jerk of the cord that was strung through a ring on the top. In three hours we filled a washtub with bluepoint crabs, washed them later with a garden hose in the backyard, and boiled them in a black iron pot on top of my brick barbecue pit. There was a breeze through the oaks, and the sky had a blue sheen to it, like stretched silk, and white clouds were piled high as a mountain on the western horizon.

It was a wonderful day. I had been to Mass and communion the previous evening, I had done a step on my lapse of faith in my Higher Power, and I had determined once again to stop keeping score in my ongoing contention with the world, time, and mortality, and to simply thank providence for all the good things that had come to me through no plan of my own.

Eddy Raintree, with all the instincts of a mainline con and trapped animal, had tried to trade off information about a hit on Weldon, Drew, and perhaps even me. So far I hadn't talked with either of them about Raintree's possible knowledge of a contract on them, primarily because it was a waste of time; I had already warned them repeatedly about the possible consequence of not cooperating with the investigation, and I was tired of being dismissed as an adverb in their lives.

Also, I didn't take Raintree seriously. Every sociopath or recidivist about to go down for a serious jolt suddenly has access to information about armored-truck scores, judges on the pad for the syndicate, the assassination of John Kennedy, or dope sales to a U.S. vice president.

I would leave Sunday intact, keep it the fine day it was, and let tomorrow and its uncertainties take care of themselves. We drove into New Iberia in the purpling light and ate ice cream under a spreading oak by Bayou Teche and listened to a Cajun band play in the park. I hugged Bootsie and Alafair against me.

"What's that for?" Alafair said, her eyes squinting with her grin.

"I have to make sure you guys don't get away from me," I said.

At eleven o'clock that night, just as raindrops started to splash on the window fan in our bedroom, the sheriff called and said that Drew Sonnier had been found nailed to the gazebo in her backyard.

CHAPTER 11

A neighbor had found her seated on the steps, half conscious, white with shock, her left hand impaled on the gazebo floor with a sixteen-penny nail, a pool of vomit in her lap.

"Hey, are you all right?" the sheriff said.

"Yes."

"She's at the hospital, she's doing okay. At least under the circumstances."

"Who did it?"

"I don't know if you're ready for this."

"The guys from the Garrett killing?"

"Joey Gouza himself. Or at least he gave the orders and watched while two of his goons held her down and drove it through her hand."

"What?" I said incredulously.

"She said it was Gouza. She can identify him, she'll testify against him. Maybe we just hit the big one… What's the matter?"

"She can make Joey Gouza? How does she know him?"

"All I know is what the city cops told me, Dave."

"What's the motive?"

"Since it's your day off, I was going to send somebody else to take her statement. But I think maybe you'd better do it. Or had you rather somebody else do it?"

He was a good man, but he was basically an administrator and more conscious of the need for professional civility than dealing with realities.

"I'll go on over there in a few minutes," I said. "Besides the neighbor, who was the first person at the scene?"

"I think the paramedics got there first, then the city cops." He paused a moment. The rain was clattering on the tin roof of the gallery now. "They're cutting a warrant on Gouza now. I don't care if he's in the city jail or ours, but I want that sonofabitch in a cage. Nobody's going to do that to a woman in this parish while I'm sheriff."

I was surprised. He wasn't given to profanity or anger. I had an idea that Joey Meatballs was about to wish that he had not gotten involved with the Sonnier family and the rural unsophistication of Iberia Parish.

I went to the hospital, but I didn't go up to Drew's room.

Instead, I questioned one of the paramedics who had brought her in. I sat next to him on a wood bench by the emergency-room entrance while he drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He told me he had been a navy corpsman before he had gone to work for the parish as a paramedic.