"Don't worry about it."

I walked up through the shade of the pecan trees to the gallery. Bootsie was sitting in the swing with Alafair beside her. Alafair looked up at me from under the brim of her ball cap, her face filled with a pinched light.

"It was just a drunk man, little guy," I said. "He thought I was somebody else."

"His voice, it was-" she began. "It made me feel bad inside." She swallowed and looked out into the deep shadows of the trees.

"That's the way drunk people sound sometimes. We just don't pay any attention to them," I said. "Anyway, Bootsie had the call traced to New Orleans, and the cops went to pick this guy up. Hey, let's don't waste any more time worrying about this character. I need you to help me get ready for our lunch customers."

I felt Bootsie's eyes searching my face.

I went inside the house, took my.45 out of the dresser, slipped it down into my khakis, and pulled my shirt over it.

At the dock I put Alafair in charge of turning the sausage links and split chickens on the barbecue grill. Her shoulders barely came above the top of the pit, and when the grease and sauce piquant dripped onto the coals her head and cap were haloed in smoke.

I put the.45 on a top shelf behind a stand-up display of Mepps spinners. I wouldn't need it, I told myself, not here, anyway. Fluck had too many problems of his own to worry about me. His kind took revenge only when they had nothing at risk, when it came to them as a luxury they could savor. I was sure of that, I told myself.

CHAPTER 14

The sheriff learned of Fluck's phone call early Monday from the dispatcher. As soon as I walked into my office, he tapped on the doorjamb and followed me in.

"Jewel Fluck called you at your house?" he said.

"That's right." I opened the blinds and sat down behind my desk.

"Why do I have to hear that from the dispatcher?"

"I didn't see any point in disturbing you on the weekend."

"What'd he say?"

"Most of it was douche water. His clock's running out."

"Come on, Dave, why'd he call you?"

"He wanted to give up Joey Gouza for immunity on Garrett and Eddy Raintree. I told him the store's closed."

"You did what?"

"I indicated that cop killers don't get any slack, sheriff."

He sat down in the chair across from me and brushed one hand across the top of the other. He puffed out his cheeks.

"Maybe that's not yours to decide, Dave. There're a halfdozen agencies that want Joey Gouza salted away. The DEA, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-"

"Cut a deal with the lowlifes and in the long run you always lose."

"In law enforcement every man's vote doesn't count the same. Wyatt Earp belongs in the movies, Dave."

"I tried to keep him on the phone so we could trace the call. You lose the edge on these guys as soon as you let them think they have something you want. That's the way it works, sheriff."

"What else did he say?"

"He believes Gouza's got a five-grand open contract on him. If you want, you can tell NOPD about it, but I don't think they'll wring their hands over the news."

"It's still Bobby Earl, isn't it?" he said.

"What?"

He scratched his clean-shaven soft cheek with a fingernail.

"Fluck, Gouza, this button man Jack Gates, I think they're all secondary players for you, Dave. It's Bobby Earl who's always on your front burner, isn't it?"

"Fluck frightened my little girl, sheriff. He also threatened me. You figure who's on my mind."

"You sound a little sharp, podna."

"This is the second time you've told me maybe it's me who's got a problem."

"It wasn't my intention to do so."

"Look, sheriff, we haven't turned the key on one guy in this case, except Gouza, and that was on a bum charge. When something like that happens, everybody gets impatient. Then a guy like Bobby Earl marshals a little pressure and convinces a few political oil cans that he's a victim, a federal agency decides that it's more interesting to throw a net over a mainline wiseguy like Gouza than a termite like Jewel Fluck, we local guys go along with it, and before you know it, half the cast is on the beach in the Virgin Islands and we're trying to figure out why people think we're schmoes."

"Maybe after this one's over, you should take a little vacation time."

"It won't change who's out there."

He did a ratatat-tat on his thighs with his palms, then stood up, smiled, and walked out of my office without saying anything else.

I drove to Baton Rouge that afternoon to question the burned man who called himself Vic Benson. It wasn't to be the kind of interview that I had planned. I parked my truck at the end of Lyle's brick driveway on Highland and walked up onto the columned porch to lift the brass door knocker that rang a set of musical chimes deep in the interior of the house, when Lyle walked out of the side yard with a garden rake in his hand, wearing a T-shirt and jeans that hung off his hips. There were flecks of dirt and leaves in his mussed hair.

"Hey, Dave, what's happening?" he said. "You're just in time to fang down some barbecued pork chops. Come on around back."

"Thanks anyway, Lyle. I just need to ask Vic Benson a few questions. Is he staying over at your mission?"

"No."

"He took off?"

"No." He was smiling now.

"He's here?"

"In the backyard. We just put in some pepper plants. It's a little late but I think they'll take."

"He's living with you?"

"Out in the garage apartment."

"I think what you're doing isn't smart."

"I've never done anything smart in my life, Dave. Like Waylon says, 'I might be crazy but it's kept me from going insane."

"I'm not sure you want to hear everything I have to say to this man."

"The words ain't been made that's gonna upset me, son… I mean Loot. Come on around back."

The sweeping expanse of backyard was dotted with live oaks, lime trees, myrtle bushes, and circular weedless beds of roses and purple hydrangeas. Meat smoke from a stone fire pit drifted across the lawn and hung in the trees, and the Saint Augustine grass was so thick, so deeply blue and green in the evening shadows, that you felt you could dive into it as you would a deep pool of water.

Vic Benson was cutting back a clump of banana trees with a pair of garden shears. The blades of the shears were white and gummy with pulp. Each time he snapped the blades on a dead frond, the muscles in his face and neck flexed like snakes under his red scar tissue.

A thick-bodied black woman in a maid's uniform began setting a table on the flagstone patio.

"Let's sit down to eat, then you can ask the old man whatever you want," Lyle said.

"This isn't what I had in mind, Lyle."

"Quit trying to plan everything. What the Man on High plans for you is better than anything you could plan for yourself. Isn't that what y'all learn in AA? Look out yonder." He pointed across the brick wall and bamboo that bordered his property. "See it, just above the trees out on Highland, my cross, right up there on top of my Bible college. Look, it's silver and pink in the sunlight. Inside all that chrome is a charred wooden cross that was burned by Klansmen to terrorize black folk. Then the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock made it his so me and him could run scams on a bunch of north Mississippi country people who didn't have two quarters to rub together in their overalls. Now it's on top of a Bible college where kids go to school free and study for the ministry. You think that's all accident? I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity. That's the way I like to think about that cross up there."

"I don't like to cut into your sense of religiosity, Lyle, but how in the name of God do you justify all this?" I gestured at his house, his manicured lawns.