The only person who looked at me was the receptionist. I told her I wanted to see the supervisor about a mineral lease in Montana.

His desk was big, made of oak, his chair covered with maroon leather, the pine walls hung with deer's heads, a marlin, two flintlock rifles. On a side table was a stuffed lynx, mounted on a platform, the teeth bared, the yellow glass eyes filled with anger.

His name was Hollister. He was a big man, his thick, graying hair cut military, his pale blue eyes unblinking. Like those of most managerial people in the Oil Center, his accent was Texas or Oklahoma and his dress eccentric. His gray Oshman coat hung on a rack, his cuff links were the size of quarters and embossed with oil derricks. His bolo tie was fastened with a brown and silver brooch.

He listened to me talk a moment, his square hands motionless on the desk, his face like that of a man staring into an ice storm.

"Wait a minute. You came to my office to question me about my employees? About a murder?" (I could see tiny stretched white lines in the skin around the corners of his eyes."

"It's more than one, Mr. Hollister. The girl in the fire and maybe some people in Montana."

"Tell me, who do you think you are?"

"I already did."

"No, you didn't. You lied to my receptionist to get in here."

"You've got a problem with your lea semen It won't go away because I walk out the door."

His pale eyes looked steadily at me. He lifted one finger off his desk and aimed it at me.

"You're not here about Dixie Pugh," he said.

"You've got something else bugging you. I don't know what it is, but you're not a truthful man."

I touched the ball of my thumb to the corner of my mouth, looked away from him a moment, and tapped my fingers on the leather arm of my chair.

"You evidently thought well enough of Dixie Lee to give him a job," I said.

"Do you think he made all this up and then set himself on fire?"

"I think you're on your way out of here."

"Let me tell you a couple of things about the law. Foreknowledge of a crime can make you a coconspirator. Knowledge after the fact can put you into an area known as aiding and abetting. These guys aren't worth it, Mr. Hollister."

"This discussion is over. There's the door."

"It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form."

"What?"

"Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?"

"No. Who is he?"

"He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs."

"When?"

"Twenty-two years ago. They didn't have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floor man out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money."

"So you got a grudge that's twenty-two years old? I don't know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn't with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you."

I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up.

"Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee," I said.

"You come in here again, I'll have you arrested."

I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck.

"I don't buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think," I said to the therapist.

"You don't have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don't think there's anything complex about depression. It's often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?"

"What do you think I felt?"

"At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn't it?"

"All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it."

"Cut loose from the past. She wouldn't want you to carry a burden like this.", "I can't. I don't want to."

"Say it again."

"I don't want to."

He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned!; his palms up toward me and was silent.

I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn't pleased with his attitude. I didn't know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner.

"You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?" I asked.

"I'm all right."

"I probably won't be back, Dixie. I'm pretty tied up at the dock these days."

"Sure, I understand."

"Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?" I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air.

"Maybe just a little?"

His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep.

"Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?" he said.

"You're looking at the dildo of the planet."

"See you around, Dixie."

"Hell, yes. They're kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It's only second-degree stuff. I've had worse hangovers. We're in tall cotton, son."

And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes.

That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend's farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam.

It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn't grow thorns in a briar patch.

But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot.

"What we doing, Dave?" Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs.

My friend winked and went inside the barn. I "You can't ride Tripod, can you, little guy?" I said.

"What? Ride Tripod?" she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn.