Hi, sailor, she said.

How you doing, sweetheart? You know I don't like it when it rains. Bad memories and all that. So we found a dry place for a while.

"Your buddies from your platoon don't like the rain, either. They say it used to give them jungle sores. Can you hear me with all that thunder? It sounds like cannon!"

Sure.

It's lightning up on top of the water. That night I couldn't tell the lightning from the gun flashes. I wish you hadn't left me alone. I tried to hide under the bed sheet. It was a silly thing to do. Don't talk about it.

It was like electricity dancing off the walls, you're not drinking, are you?

No, not really.

Not really?

Only in my dreams.

But I bet you still get high on those dry drunks, don't you? You know, fantasies about kicking butt, 'fronting the lowlifes, all that stuff swinging dicks like to do.

A guy has to do something for kicks. Annie?

What is it, baby love?

I want Tell me.

I want to It's not your time. There's Alafair to take care of, too.

It wasn't your time, either.

She made a kiss against the air. Her mouth was red.

So long, sailor. Don't sleep on your stomach. It'll make you hard in the morning. I miss you.

Annie She winked at me through the rain, and in my dream I was sure I felt her fingers touch my lips.

It continued to rain most of the next day. At three o'clock I picked up Alafair at the school and kept her with me in the bait shop. The sky and the marsh were gray; my rental boats were half full of water, the dock shiny and empty in the weak light. Alafair was restless and hard to keep occupied in the shop, and I let Batist take her with him on an errand in town. At five-thirty they were back, the rain slacked off, and the sun broke through the clouds in the west. It was the time of day when the bream and bass should have been feeding around the lily pads, but the bayou was high and the water remained smooth and brown and un dented along the banks and in the coves. A couple of fishermen came in and drank beer for a while, and I leaned on the window jamb and stared out at the mauve- and red-streaked sky, the trees dripping rain into the water, the wet moss trying to lift in the evening breeze.

"Them men ain't gonna do nothing. They just blowing they horn," Batist said beside me. Alafair was watching a cartoon on the old black-and-white television set that I kept on the snack shelf. She held Tripod on her lap while she stared raptly up at the set.

"Maybe so. But they'll let us wonder where they are and when they're coming," I said.

"That's the way it works."

"You call them FBI in Lafayette?"

"No."

"How come?"

"It's a waste of time."

"Sometime you gotta try, yeah."

"There weren't any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine."

I could see in his face that he didn't understand.

"There's nothing to tell the FBI," I said.

"I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn't accomplish anything. There's nothing I can do."

"So you want get mad at me?"

"I'm not mad at you. Listen"

"What?"

"I want her to stay with you tonight. I'll pick her up in the morning and take her to school."

"What you gonna do, you?"

"I don't know."

"I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don't tell me that."

"I'll tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There's still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in."

"Dave-" But I was already walking up toward the house in the light, sun-spangled rain, in the purple shadows, in the breeze that smelled. of wet moss and blooming four-o'clocks.

It was cool and still light when I stopped on the outskirts of Lafayette and called Dixie Lee at the hospital from a pay phone. I asked him where Vidrine and Mapes were staying.

"What for?" he said.

"It doesn't matter what for. Where are they?"

"It matters to me."

"Listen, Dixie, you brought me into this. It's gotten real serious in the last two days. Don't start being clever with me."

"All right, the Magnolia. It's off Pinhook, down toward the river. Look, Dave, don't mess with them. I'm about to go bond and get out of here. It's time to ease off."

"You sound like you've found a new confidence."

"So I got friends. So I got alternatives. Fuck Vidrine and Mapes."

The sun was red and swollen on the western horizon. Far to the south I could see rain falling.

"How far out are these guys willing to go?" I said.

He was quiet a moment.

"What are you talking about?" he said.

"You heard me."

"Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that's what you mean. They'll go down where it's so dark the lizards don't have eyes."

I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun's last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside.

Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner's. But Vidrine wasn't as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes's thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to say something.

I got back in the truck, took my World War II Japanese field glasses out of the glove box, and watched them out of the shadows for an hour. The underwater lights in the swimming pool were smoky green, and a thin slick of suntan oil floated on the surface. The waiter took away their dishes, brought them more rounds of tropical drinks, and their gaiety seemed unrelenting. They left the table periodically and went back through the sliding glass door into the motel room, and at first I thought they were simply using the bathroom, but then one of the women came back out touching one nostril with her knuckle, sniffing as though a grain of sand were caught in her breathing passage. At ten o'clock the waiter began dipping leaves out of the pool with a long-handled screen, and I saw Mapes signal for more drinks and the waiter look at his watch and shake his head negatively. They sat outside for another half hour, smoking cigarettes, laughing more quietly now, sucking on pieces of ice from the bottoms of their glasses, the women's faces pleasant with a nocturnal lassitude.

Then a sudden rain shower rattled across the motel's tile roof, clattered on the bamboo and palm fronds, and danced in the swimming pool's underwater lights. Vidrine, Mapes, and the women ran laughing for the sliding door of the room. I waited until midnight, and they still had not come back out.