She was breathing hard now, her throat was aflame with color, and her eye shadow had started to run. She licked her lips and started to speak.

"This time listen to me for a minute," I said. "I'm going to take this stuff down to the prosecutor's office and they can make of it what they want. In the meantime I recommend you drop the charges against Joey Gouza. Do it without comment or explanation."

She nodded her head. Her eyes were glistening, and she kept shutting them to clear the tears out of the lashes.

"It happens all the time," I said. "People change their minds. If anyone tries to build a case against you, you keep an attorney at your side and you turn to stone. You think you can do that?"

"Yes."

I wanted to put my arms around her shoulders. I wanted to press her against me and touch her hair.

"Will you be okay?" I asked.

"Yes, I believe I'll be fine."

"Call Weldon."

"I will."

"Drew?"

"Yes."

"Don't mess with Gouza anymore. You're too good a person to get involved with lowlife people."

She kept closing and unclosing her good hand. Her knuckles were white and as tight against her skin as a row of nickels.

"You liked me, didn't you?" she said.

"What?"

"Before you went away to Vietnam. You liked me, didn't you?"

"A woman like you makes me wish I could be more than one person and have more than one life, Drew."

I saw the sunlight bead in her eyes.

A few minutes earlier she had asked me whose side I was on. I felt I knew the answer now. The truth was that I served a vast, insensate legal authority that seemed determined to further impair the lives of the reckless and vulnerable while the long-ball hitters toasted each other safely at home plate.

That night the sheriff called me at home and told me that Joey Gouza was being moved from the hospital back to a jail cell. He also said that in light of the evidence I had found at Drew Sonnier's, the prosecutor's office would probably drop charges against Gouza in the morning.

When I got to the jail on East Main early the next morning, the sun was yellow and hazy through the moss-hung canopy of oak trees over the street, and the sidewalks were streaked with dew. I left my seersucker coat on when I went inside and stopped in the men's room. I took my.45 out of the holster, pulled the clip out of the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and slipped the pistol and the clip in the back of my belt under my coat. Then I unclipped the holster from my belt and dropped it in my coat pocket.

I waited for the guard to open the barred door that gave onto the row of cells where Joey Gouza was housed.

"You want to check your weapon, Dave?" he asked.

"They've got it up front."

"Somebody said he might walk. Is that true?"

"Yep."

"How the hell'd that happen?"

"Long story."

"The sonofabitch is eating his soft-boiled eggs now. Can you beat that? Fucking soft-boiled eggs for a piece of shit like that."

He opened the door, then walked with me down the corridor to Gouza's cell and turned the key in the lock.

"You sure you want inside with this guy?" he asked. "He won't shower. He thinks somebody's gonna shank him if he leaves his cell."

"It's all right. I'll yell when I'm ready," I said.

The guard closed the door behind me and went away.

Gouza lay on his bunk in his jockey underwear. A band of dark hair grew in a line from his navel to his sternum. An empty bowl streaked with egg yolk and a wastebasket filled with torn and stained newspaper sat on the floor by his bunk. His face looked as pale as it had been in the hospital.

His seemingly lidless black eyes studied me as I pulled up the single chair in the cell and sat on it.

"They're going to kick you loose," I said.

"Yeah, I owe you one."

"You really believe that somebody is going to do you in the shower?"

"Put it this way. One guy in this place got poisoned. Me. Your people say it was an accident. Maybe so. But I don't want any more accidents. Does that seem reasonable?"

I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs. "I've got a problem," I said.

"You've got a problem?"

"Yeah, a serious one, Joey."

"What are you talking-"

"You're a made guy. A made guy worries about respect, about what people think of him."

"So?"

"When you get out of here, you'll probably have a nice dinner somewhere, maybe drink a glass of wine, maybe do a few lines with one of your whores. Then after a while all kinds of thoughts will start to turn over in your head. Are you with me?"

"No."

"You'll think about how you were humiliated, how a woman set you up for a fall, how Elmer Fudd and company turned you into a sideshow. Then you'll remember how you got scared and asked for your own hot plate and canned food and told the screw you wanted to stay in lockup. You'll wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night, then you'll wonder if the people around you are figuring you for a guy who's about to lose it, maybe a guy who's ripe for replacement. That's when you'll decide it's time for an object lesson. So that's what's been on my mind, partner. Sooner or later we'll have a visit from one of your people, a button man from Miami or maybe some AB sex deviate you turn loose on women."

He leaned over the bunk and spat into the wastebasket, then took a sip from a brown bottle of chalky medicine and screwed the cap back on.

"Think anything you want," he said. "I got nothing on my mind except getting treatment for my ulcers before they have to cut out half my stomach. Any beef I got against this shithole I let my lawyers handle with a civil suit. You can thank Fudd and the broad if y'all have to pass a sales tax to pay off the damages."

"What I'm really trying to do is apologize to you, Joey."

He raised his elon ated head up on his elbow. The skin at the corner of his mouth wrinkled with a smile.

"You're gonna apologize? You're good, man. You ought to get yourself some kind of nightclub act. I can probably book you into a couple of places."

"Because I was going to pull a cheap ruse on you. I was going to treat you like a punk instead of a made guy. So I'm apologizing."

"You talk like you got clap in your brain or something. What's with you? You never make sense. Can't you talk to people like you got sense?"

I reached behind me and pulled the.45 from under my coat. I rested it on my thigh.

"You ain't supposed to have that in here, man," he said.

"You're right. That's what I've been trying to tell you. I want to apologize for what I had in mind."

He was rigid in the bunk. I stared intently at the floor, then cocked the hammer with my thumb and raised the barrel and fitted it into the hollow of his cheek. His eyes closed, then opened again, and his Adam's apple worked up and down with a dry click in his throat.

I squeezed the trigger, and the hammer snapped on the empty chamber. He gasped, and his face jerked like he'd been slapped.

"I was going to pull a cheap trick like that to scare you," I said. "But you're a made guy, Joey, and you deserve more respect than I've shown you. And even if I rattled you a little bit, you'd be back, wouldn't you?" I winked at him.

"You'd really rip some ass, right or wrong?"

A sweat had broken on his ashen face.

"You're a head case, man," he said. "You stop this shit. You get the fuck out of my life."

I pulled the clip from my belt and let it rest against my thigh. The hollow-points were loaded tightly against the spring. I rubbed my thumb casually over the top round in the clip. The fingers of both my hands made tiny, delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil on the steel surfaces of the pistol and the clip. I could hear him breathing loudly through his nose and smell the odor of fear that rose from his armpits.