I tore into their midst. I drove my fist as hard as I could into the back of a man's thick neck; I ripped my elbow into someone's rib cage and felt it go like a nest of popsicle sticks; I lifted an uppercut into another man's stomach and saw him cave to his knees in front of me, his face gray and his mouth hanging open as if he had been eviscerated.

Then they rolled over both Batist and me.

There are moments in your life when you think the last frames in your film strip have just snapped loose from the reel. When one of those moments occurs, you hear your own blood thundering in your ears, or a sound like waves bursting over a coral reef, or hundreds of feet pounding dully on the earth.

Or perhaps the last frame in the strip simply freezes and you hear nothing at all.

Then as though sound and sight, trees and sky and air had all been given back to me, I saw the sunburned police sergeant with the hard, green eyes, knocking people backward with his baton, gripping it horizontally with both hands, swinging it violently from side to side, pushing the crowd back into a wider and wider circle.

Then other cops were in the circle, and you could feel the energies go out of the crowd the way air leaves a punctured balloon. When I got to my feet, I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and wiped my face on it. It was smeared with spittle and blood.

"I'm taking your piece and cuffing you and your friend together till I can get y'all out of here. Don't argue about it," the sergeant said.

"No argument, podna," I said.

He snapped one cuff of a set on my wrist and the other on Batist's. Batist's white shirt hung in strips off his massive shoulders.

Bobby Earl was standing among his bodyguards, his double-breasted tropical suit smudged with grass stains. He held a folded handkerchief to the corner of his mouth and Combed back his wavy hair with his fingers. I felt the sergeant's hand tighten under my arm.

"Just a minute," I said to him. "Hey, Bobby, a black man just saved your worthless pink ass. You and your constituency might think that over. There's another thought I want to leave you with, too, and I don't want you to take it the wrong way. But if you ever try to hurt my friend Cletus Purcel again, they'll have to scrub you out of your garbage grinder with a toothbrush."

Batist and I walked to a squad car, surrounded by cops, our wrists chained together, our clothes in rags, just as lightning flickered across the sky and raindrops as heavy as mar began to strike the leaves of the pin oaks above our heads.

Through the back window of another squad car, his arms manacled behind him, Vic Benson's destroyed face stared out at the cops, the milling crowd, the trees, the park, the slanting rain, the blackened sky, perhaps the earth itself, as though the invisible forces that had driven him' all his life had gathered at this place, in this moment, to finally and irrevocably have their way with him.

EPILOGUE

We took our vacation in Key West in late summer, when the weather is hot and bright, prices are cheap, the streets are empty of tourists, and the Gulf is lime green and streaked with whitecaps as far as the eye can see, and dark patches of water, like clouds of India ink, drift across the coral reefs.

But it was more than simply a respite from police work.

I had taken indefinite leave from the sheriff's department. I let other people's problems, the seriousness, all the fury and mire and complexity, pull out of my grasp, in the same way that you finally tire of grief or guilt or a bonegrinding on going contention with the world. One morning, perhaps just before sunrise, you turn your eyes in a different direction and notice a blue heron rising from the reeds along the bayou's edge, a gator's walnut-ridged eyes moving silently through a milky skim of algae and floating twigs, a glowing radiance on the earth's rim that suddenly breaks through the black trunks of the cypress trees with such a white brilliance that you want to shield your eyes.

Joey Gouza is back with the big stripes in Angola pen, but not for the murder of Garrett or Jewel Fluck, or even the assault-and-battery beef. Joey's final legal chapter was written in the New Orleans city prison. He set fire to his mattress, plugged up the commode with his clothes, flooded the whole cell block, and urinated through the bars on a gunbull. He tried to tell anyone who would listen that both the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia had put a hit on him. No one was interested, or perhaps, more accurately, no one cared.

Finally he was moved into an isolation cell with a solid iron door, because he was convinced that an AB member, with the consent of the Mafioso who had takena Taser dart in the neck that had been intended for Joey, was going to turn him into a flaming object lesson by hurling a Molotov cocktail through his bars.

Two days later a new guard walked him down to the shower stalls and the small concrete room that contained barbells and a broken universal gym, where Joey was supposed to shower and exercise by himself. Then the guard let eight other men out of their cells. Joey Gouza broke off a five-inch shank, made from a jagged sliver of window glass, in another inmate's shoulder.

The investigator's report stated that the other inmate had celled with Jewel Fluck in Parchman, that his upper torso was tattooed with swastikas and iron crosses, and that at the time of the attack he had been carrying a razor blade mounted on a toothbrush handle.

But who cared?

Joey Gouza went down for attempted murder.

I'd like to be able to tell you that Bobby Earl's political career ended, that somehow the events in the park revealed him publicly as a fraud or a physical coward, or that his followers turned against him. But it didn't happen. It couldn't.

I had been determined to prove that Bobby Earl was fronting points for Joey Gouza, or that he was connected with arms and dope trafficking in the tropics. I was guilty of that age-old presumption that the origins of social evil can be traced to villainous individuals, that we just need to identify them, lock them in cages, or even march them to the executioner's wall, and this time, yes, this time, we'll catch a fresh breeze in our sails and set ourselves on a true course.

But Bobby Earl is out there by consent. He has his thumb on a dark pulse, and like all confidence men, he knows that his audience wishes to be conned. He learned long ago to listen, and he knows that if he listens carefully they'll tell him what they need to hear. It's a contract of mutual deceit by which they open up their flak vests and take it right through the breastbone.

If it were not he, it would be someone like himmisanthropic, beguiling, educated, someone who, as an expresident's wife once said, allows the rest of us to feel comfortable with our prejudices.

I think the end for Bobby Earl will come in the same fashion as it does for all his kind. Unlike the members of The Pool and that great army of villainous buffoons trying to sneak through life on side streets, Bobby Earl's ilk want power so badly that at some point in their lives they make a conscious choice to embrace evil. It's not a gradual seduction. They do it without reservation, and that's when they leave the rest of us. You know it when it happens, too. No amount of cosmetic surgery can mask the psychological defonnity in their eyes.

Then unbeknown to themselves they set about erecting their own scaffolds; their most loyal adherents become their executioners, just as Mussolini's people hanged him upside down in a filling station and Robespierre's followers trundled him over their heads to the guillotine.

Then the audience moves on and seeks a new magician.

But people like Bobby Earl don't read history books.