"I'll pass right now, but I appreciate it, partner," I said.

"Suit yourself. Don't let them shake you up, though, son. I been up in front of this court so many times they don't even mess with me. The judge gives me thirty days and tells me to get out. That ain't nothing. We got them by the short hairs."

A half hour later, Sergeant Motley stood at the tank door with the guard. He smoked a cigar and looked on quietly while the guard turned the key in the lock. He wore his shirt lapels pressed back so the hair on his black barrel of a chest stuck out like wire.

"Come with us, Robicheaux," he said.

"Zoo visitors aren't allowed in until this afternoon," I said.

"Just come along," he said.

I walked between him and the guard to the far end of the jail corridor. A trusty was damp-mopping the floor, and our shoes left wet imprints where he had cleaned. Sunlight came through the windows high up on the corridor wall, and I could hear traffic out on the street. The guard turned the lock on an individual cell. Motley's weight made him breathe as though he had emphysema.

"I got you transferred to a holding cell," he said.

"What for?"

"You want somebody in that tank to make you?"

I stepped inside the cell, and the guard locked me in. Motley remained at the door, his cannonball head beaded with perspiration from the heat outside.

"What are you up to?" I asked.

"I've been in your shoes. I think they're putting a RotoRooter up your hole, and all you've got going for you is your own balls. That's okay, but after a while they get ground down to the size of marbles."

"I have a hard time buying this."

"Who asked you to? We never got along. But I'll tell you a story, Robicheaux. Everybody thinks I let those seven guys die in that elevator to save my own buns. I was responsible, all right, but not because I was afraid. I didn't have the key to the chain. I didn't have the fucking key. I climbed up out of the shaft to find somebody with a master. When we pried the doors open, they looked like smoked oysters in there. Whether you believe me or not, that's some hard shit to live with."

"Why don't you tell that to somebody?"

"You know why I didn't have the key? I got a freebie that morning from one of Julio Segura's broads and she rolled me. The key was in my billfold."

"You tried to get them out, Motley."

"Tell that to everybody in the courthouse and the First District. Tell it to Purcel. He's always got clever things to say to a black man."

"What's he been doing?"

"I don't like those guys in Internal Affairs any more than you do. In my opinion, Purcel is operating in their area. I don't drop the dime on other cops, not even racists, so I don't comment on Purcel."

"He's not a racist."

"Wake up, Robicheaux. You got to get hit in the face with it? The guy's got a hard-on all the time. Quit the Little Orphan Annie routine."

"You're determined to make people love you, aren't you?"

"Read it like you want. I hope you get out of this crap. I don't think you will."

"You're a breath of fresh air, buddy."

"They stiffed you on the charge. I'd get out of town if I were you. I think they're going to put you away."

I touched the side of my face to the bar and looked at him silently. I could feel the pulse working fearfully in my throat.

"They charged you with carrying a concealed firearm," he said, and looked back at me with his knowing, hard brown eyes. It was a lowball morning. I went to court on a chain with four other drunks, a street dealer, a psychotic exhibitionist, and a black kid who had murdered a filling-station attendant for sixty-five dollars. Judge Flowers was what we called at AA a white-knuckler. He had gotten off the booze on his own, but he'd stayed dry only by redirecting his intense inner misery into the lives of others, particularly those who stood before him blowing alcohol in his face. He set my bond on the concealed-firearm charge at ten thousand dollars.

I didn't even have the thousand I would need to pay the bondsman's ten-percent fee. I sat on the bunk of the holding cell and stared at the scatological words scratched all over the opposite wall. It was the lowest morning of my life, except perhaps for the day my wife left me for the Houston oilman. We had gone to an evening lawn party out by the lake, and he had been there and did not even make a pretense about the affair they were having. He touched shoulders with her at the drink table, brushed his palm across the down on top of her arm, smiled good-naturedly at me with his rugged good looks, as though we enjoyed an intelligent understanding of our situation. Then a lesion snapped open somewhere behind my eyes; I felt color rise into my vision, the way a glass might fill with red water, then a woman screamed and I felt men's arms lifting me up from the lawn, pulling me away from his stunned, terrified face.

In the morning I found her note on the table under the big umbrella where we ate breakfast while the sun rose across Lake Pontchartrain.

Dear Dave,

I don't know what it is you're looking for, but three years of marriage to you have convinced me I don't want to be there when you find it. Sorry about that. As your pitcher-bartender friend says, Keep it high and hard, podjo.

Nicole

"What are you doing with your clothes off?" the guard asked through the bars of the holding cell.

"It's hot."

"There's people that walk through here."

"Don't let them."

"Jesus Christ, Dave, get your act together."

"I got it solidly together. I'm very copacetic at the moment." I opened and closed my palms. I watched the way the veins in my forearms filled with blood.

"Unless you bond out, I got to move you. You got to go into the main population unless you want lockdown."

"Do what you need to do, Phil."

"I can't put you in lockdown if you don't request it. Dave, there's some real badasses upstairs."

I fingered the pungi-stick scar on my stomach. Somebody was shouting hysterically in a cell down the corridor, then a cop's baton rang on the bars.

"I'm going to get the doctor. You're going into lock-down whether you like it or not," he said.

I heard him walk away. My head felt as if piano wire were twisted around it. I closed my eyes and saw balloons of orange flame erupt out of a rain forest, GIs locked up to their knees in a muddy shimmering rice field while the shards of Claymores sang through the air with the edges of boiler plate, the souls of children rising like gunsmoke from the ditch where they lay, Sam Fitzpatrick's boyish face lighted in the purgatorial fire of a holy card. The sweat leaked out from under my palms and ran down my naked thighs.

At three o'clock that afternoon, another guard walked down the corridor of the isolation unit, called "Queens' Row," where I was in lockdown with the snitches, psychotics, and roaring homosexuals. The door of my small cell was made of metal grillwork, with a slit and an iron apron for the trusty to pass in the food tray. The guard was having trouble with the key in the lock, and the light behind him made his body seem to jerk and disconnect itself through the squares in the door.

"Pack it up. You're going all the way," he said.

"What happened?"

"Somebody went bail for you. Strip your sheets and throw them into the corridor. Pick up that plastic spoon off the floor and drop your soap in the toilet."

"What?"

"You still drunk or something? Clean out your cell if you want to leave here today."

We walked down the corridor to the hydraulically operated double-barred doors that gave onto the booking room, where two black women were being fingerprinted. I signed at the possessions desk for the large brown envelope tied with string that contained my wallet, car keys, pocket knife, and belt.