I looked full into his face through his windshield-into his regret that he didn't take me out when he had the chance, his rage at the cosmic conspiracy that had made him the long-suffering soldier of an ulcer-ridden paranoid like Joey Gee.

I pulled the truck diagonally across the road, leaped from the seat, and aimed the.45 across the hood, straight at Jack Gates's face. He stomped on the brakes, and the TransAm bucked sideways in a chuckhole and fishtailed against the trunk of an oak tree, pinwheeling a hubcap down the center of the road. He stared at me momentarily through the open passenger's window, a blue revolver balanced in one hand on top of the steering wheel, his metal-capped teeth glinting in the sun's hot early light, the engine throttling open and subsiding and then throttling open again under the hood.

"Give it up, Jack," I said. "Gouza's a psychotic sack of shit. Let him take his own fall for a change."

The rooster tail of dust from behind the car drifted across his window, and in the second it took for me to lose eye contact with him, he aimed the revolver quickly out the window and popped off two rounds. The first one was low and kicked up dirt three feet in front of the truck, but the second one whanged off the hood and showered leaves out of the tree behind me.

Then he dropped the transmission into reverse and floored the TransAm back down the road, the tires burning into the dirt, spinning with circles of black smoke. He veered from side to side, clipping bark out of the tree trunks, bursting a taillight, ripping loose his bumper. But evidently he had an eye for detail and had remembered passing a collapsed wire gate and a faint trace of a side road that led through a sugarcane field, because he slammed on his brakes, slid in a half circle, then roared over the downed gate-cedar posts, barbed wire, and all.

I ran up the incline by the far side of the road, through a stand of pine trees, splashed across a coulee, and came out on the edge of the field just as the TransAm spun around the corner, rippled back a fender on a parked tractor, and mowed through the short cane toward a flat-topped levee that led back to the main parish road.

He hadn't expected to see me on foot in the field. He started to cut the steering wheel toward me, to drive me back into the trees or the coulee, then he changed his mind, spinning the wheel in the opposite direction with one hand and firing blindly out the window with the other. In the instant that the TransAm flashed by me, his face looked white and round and small through the window, like a spectator's in a theater, as though he had suddenly become aware that he was witnessing his own denouement.

I went to one knee in the wet grass and began firing. I tried to keep the sights below the level of his window jamb to allow for the elevation caused by the recoil, but in reality it was unnecessary. The eight hollow-point rounds, which flattened to the size of quarters with impact, destroyed his automobile. They pocked silvery holes in the doors, spiderwebbed the windows, blew divots of upholstery into the air, exploded a tire off the rim, gashed a geyser of steam out of the radiator, and whipped a single streak of blood across the front windshield.

His foot must have locked down on the accelerator, because the TransAm was almost airborne when it roared along the lip of an irrigation ditch and sliced through the fence surrounding a Gulf States Power Company substation.

The front end crashed right into the transformers, and the tiers of transmission wires and ceramic insulators crumpled in a crackling net on the car's roof.

But he was still alive. He let the revolver drop outside the window, then started to push open the door with the palms of his hands like a man trying to extricate himself from the rubble of a collapsed building.

"Don't get out, Jack! Don't touch the ground!"

He sat back down on the seat, his face bloodless and exhausted, then the sole of one shoe came to rest on the damp earth.

The voltage contorted his face as if he were having an epileptic seizure. His body stiffened, shook, and jerked; spittle flew from his mouth; electricity seemed to leap and dance off his capped teeth. Then his car horn and radio began blaring simultaneously, and a scorched odor, like hair and feces burning in an incinerator, rose from his clothes and head in dirty strings of smoke.

I turned and walked back to the road. The grass was wet against my trouser legs and swarming with insects, the sun hot and yellow above the treeline in the marsh. The drawbridge was down now, and ambulances, firetrucks, and sheriff's cars were careening toward me, emergency lights blazing, under the long canopy of oaks. My saliva tasted like copper pennies; my right ear was a block of wood. The.45, the receiver locked open on the empty clip, felt like a silly appendage hanging from my hand.

Paramedics, cops, and firemen were rushing past me now.

I kept walking down the road, by the bayou's edge, toward my house. Bream were feeding close into the lily pads, denting the water in circles like raindrops. The cypress roots along the far bank were gnarled and wet among the shadows and ferns, and I could see the delicate prints of egrets in the damp sand. I pulled the clip from the automatic, stuck it in my back pocket, and let the receiver slam back on the empty chamber. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my right ear, but it felt like it was full of warm water that would not drain.

The sheriff came up behind me and gently put his hand inside my arm.

"When they deal the hand, we shut down their game," he said. "If it comes out any different, we did something wrong. You know where I learned that?"

"It sounds familiar."

"It should."

"We could have used Gates to get Joey Gee."

"Yeah, so we'll catch up with Fluck and use him. Six of one, half dozen of the other."

I nodded silently.

"Right?" he said.

"sure."

"It's just a matter of time."

"Yeah, that's all it is," I agreed, and looked away into the distance, where I could almost feel the sun's heat cooking the tin roof on the bait shop.

CHAPTER 15

I locked up the bait shop and let no one in it for the rest of the day. I thought about the events of that morning for a long time. Things had worked out for Joey Gouza in better ways than he could have ever planned. I had been responsible for springing him on the phony assault-and-battery charges filed by Drew Sonnier; Weldon's long-sought-after film evidence had turned out to be worthless; Eddy Raintree, a superstitious nimwit as well as a pervert, who would have probably ratted out Joey Gee for an extra roll of toilet paper in his cell, had had his face blown into a bloody mist by Jewel Fluck while he was locked in my handcuffs; then Gates had gotten to Fluck, and I in turn had killed Gates, the only surviving person who could implicate Joey in the Garrett murder.

I wondered if Joey Gee got up in the morning and said a prayer of thanks that I had wandered into his life.

In the meantime one of his hired sociopaths had terrified my daughter, then he had ordered his chief button man to deliver a human head and severed finger to our family business.

I suspected that today had proved special for Joey, a day in which he took an extra pleasure in chopping up lines with his whores, sipping iced rum drinks with them by the pool, or maybe inviting them out to the clubhouse at the track for lobster-steak dinners and rolls of six-dollar parimutuel tickets. I suspected at this moment that Joey Gee did not have a care in the world.

After I wrote up my report at the office, I went back home and sat in the shade on the dock by myself, staring at the sun's hot yellow reflection on the bayou, the dragonflies that seemed to hang motionless over the cattails and lily pads. Even in the shade I was sweating heavily inside my clothes. Then I unlocked the bait shop and used the phone inside to call Clete Purcel. The heat was stifling, and the plastic bag that hung from the post in the center of the room had clouded with moisture.