When I had finished talking with Clete, the damp outline of my hand looked like it had been painted on the phone receiver.

I worked in the yard the rest of the afternoon, and when it rained at four o'clock, I sat on the gallery by myself and watched the water drip out of the pecan trees and tick in the dead leaves and ping on top of Tripod's cage. Then at sunset I went back into the bait shop with a hat box, and five minutes later I was on my way to New Orleans.

"You look tired," Bootsie said at the breakfast table the next morning.

"Oh, I'm just a little slow this morning," I said.

"What time did you come in last night?"

"I really didn't notice."

"How's Clete?"

"About the same."

"Dave, what are you two doing?"

I kept my eyes on Alafair, who was packing her lunch kit for a church group picnic.

"Be sure to put a piece of cake in there, Alf," I said.

She turned around and grinned.

"I already did," she said.

"Do you want to talk about it later?" Bootsie said.

"Yeah, that's a good idea."

Ten minutes later Alafair raced out the screen door to catch the church bus. Bootsie watched her leave, then came back into the kitchen.

"I just saw Batist carrying some lumber into the shop.

What's he doing?" she asked.

"A few repairs."

"Did that man Gates do something in our shop? Is that why you wouldn't let anybody in it yesterday?"

"It just wasn't a day for business-as-usual."

"What's Clete's involvement with this?"

"It was Gouza's goons who put him in the hospital. That makes him involved, Boots."

She took the dishes off the table and put them in the sink.

She gazed out the window into the backyard.

"When you go to see Clete, it always means a shortcut," she said.

"You don't know everything that's happened."

"I'm not the problem, Dave. What bothers me is I think you're hiding something from the people you work with."

"Joey Gouza ordered this man Gates to throw Gouza's brother-in-law into an airplane propeller. Then he sent this same man to our house with a-"

"What?"

I caught my breath and pinched my temples with my fingers.

"Gouza has a furnace instead of a brain," I said. "He's left his mark on our home, and I can't touch him. Do you think I'm going to abide that?"

She rinsed the plates in the sink and continued to look out the window.

"Two of the men who murdered the deputy are dead," she said. "One day it'll be Joey Gouza's turn. Can't you just let events take their course? Or let other people handle things for a while?"

"There's another factor, Boots. Gouza's a paranoid.

Maybe today he feels wonderful, he's hit the daily double, the dragons are dead. But next week, or maybe next month, he'll start thinking again about the individuals who've hurt or humiliated him most, and he'll be back in our lives. I'm not going to let that happen."

She dried her hands on a dish towel, then used it to mop off the counter. She brushed back her hair with her fingers, straightened the periwinkles in a vase. Her eyes never looked at mine. She turned on the radio on the windowsill, then turned it off and took a pair of scissors out of a drawer.

"I'm going to cut some fresh flowers. Are you going to the office now?" she said.

"Yes, I guess so."

"I'll put your lunch in the icebox. I have to run some errands in town today."

"Boots, listen a minute."

She popped open a paper bag to place the cut flowers in and went out the back door.

That afternoon the sheriff came into my office with my report on Gates's shooting in his hands. He sat down in the chair across from me and put on his rimless glasses.

"I'm still trying to puzzle a couple of things out here, Dave. It's like there's a blank space or two in your report," he said.

"How's that?"

"I'm not criticizing it. You were pretty used up when you wrote this stuff down. But let me see if I understand everything here. You went down a little early to open up your bait shop?"

"That's right."

"That's when you saw Gates?"

"That's correct."

"You called the dispatcher, then you went after him in your truck?"

"Yeah, that's about it."

"So it was already first light when you saw him?"

"It was getting there."

"It had to be, because the sun was up when you nailed him."

"I'm not following you, sheriff."

"Maybe it's just me. But why would a pro like Gates come around your house at sunrise when he could have laid for you at night?"

"Who knows?"

"Unless he didn't mean to hurt you, unless he was there for some other reason-"

"Like Clete once told me, trying to figure out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet."

He looked down at the report again, then folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

"There's something that really disturbs me about this, Dave. I know there's an answer, but I can't seem to put my hand on it."

"Sometimes it's better not to think about things too much. Just let events unfold." I placed my hands behind my neck, yawned, and tried to look casually out the window.

"No, what I mean is, Gouza just got off the hook in Iberia Parish. Is this guy crazy enough to send a hit man after another one of our people, right to his house, right at the break of day? It doesn't fit, does it?"

"I wish Gates were here to tell us. I don't know what else to say, sheriff."

"Well, I'm just glad you didn't get hung out there. I'll see you later. Maybe you ought to go home and get some sleep. You look like you haven't slept since World War II."

He went out the door. I tried to complete the paperwork that was on my desk, but my eyes burned and I couldn't concentrate or keep my thoughts straight in my head. Finally I shoved it all into a bottom drawer and fiddled absently with a chain of paper clips on top of my desk blotter.

Had I lied to the sheriff, I asked myself? Not exactly. But then I hadn't quite told the truth, either.

Was my report dishonest? No, it was worse. It concealed the commission of a homicide.

But some situations involve a trade-off. In this case the fulfillment of a professional obligation would require that my home and family become the center of a morbid story that would live in the community for decades, and Joey Gouza would succeed in inflicting a level of psychological damage on my daughter, in particular, that might never be undone. Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

I left the office and drove home on the oak-lined dirt road that followed the bayou past my dock. The first raindrops were starting to fall out of a sunny sky, as they did almost every summer afternoon at three o'clock, and I could feel the air becoming close, suddenly cooler, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the bream and goggle-eye perch started feeding on the bayou's surface by the edge of the lily pads. I passed the collapsed wire gate that Jack Gates had shredded when he had pointed the TransAm into the sugarcane field, and I avoided looking at the trashed substation and the bullet-pocked car that a wrecker had winched loose from the transformers and left upside down amid a litter of broken cane stalks. But I wasn't going to brood upon the death of Jack Gates; I had already turned over yesterday to my Higher Power, and I was determined not to relive it. My problems with Bootsie as well as the sheriff were sufficient to keep my mind occupied today. And if that was not enough, a man ahead of me in a pickup truck was stapling Bobby Earl posters on the tree trunks along the road.

By the time I turned in to my drive, he had just smoothed one to the contours of a two-hundred-year-old live oak at the edge of my yard and hammered staples into each of the corners. I closed the truck door and walked over to him, my hands in my back pockets. I even tried to smile. He looked like an innocuous individual hired out of a labor office.