Two black kids and a white man in his thirties were taking cars from under the porch at the entrance and parking them in back. The white man had crewcut brown hair and small moles all over his face, as though they had been touched there with a paintbrush. I drove up to the entrance, and one of the black kids took my car. I went inside and ate a five-dollar club sandwich that I didn't want. When I came back out, the white man walked up to me for my parking ticket.

"I can get it. Just show me where it is," I said.

He stepped out of the light from the porch and pointed toward the lot.

"The second-to-last row," he said.

"Where?"

He walked farther into the dark and pointed again.

"Almost to the end of the row," he said.

"My girlfriend said you can sell me some sneeze," I said.

"Sell you what?" He looked me up and down for the first time. The neon light from a liquor store next door made his lips look purple.

"A little nose candy for the sinuses."

"You got the wrong guy, buddy."

"Do I look like a cop or something?"

"You want me to get your car, sir?"

"I've got a hundred bucks for you. Meet me someplace else."

"Maybe you should talk to the manager. I run the valet service here. You're looking for somebody else."

"She must have told me about the wrong place. No offense," I said, and I walked to the back of the lot and drove out onto the boulevard. The palm trees on the esplanade were crashing in the wind.

I drove through a residential neighborhood away from the beach, then circled back and parked on a dark street a block inland from the restaurant. I took my World War II Japanese field glasses from the glove compartment and focused them on the lighted porch where the man with the moles was parking cars.

In the next three hours I watched him go twice to the trunk of his own automobile before he delivered a car to a customer out front. At midnight the restaurant closed, and I followed him across town to an unpaved neighborhood of clapboard houses, open drainage ditches, and dirt yards littered with rusted engine parts and washing machines.

Most of the houses on the street were dark, and I left my car a block away and walked to a sandy driveway that led up to the lighted side door of a boxlike wooden house surrounded by unwatered and dying hedges. Through the screen I could see him in his undershirt, with a beer in his hand, changing the channels on his television set. His shoulders were as white as a frog's belly and speckled with the same brown moles that covered his face. He sat back in a stuffed chair, a window fan blowing in his face, salted his beer can, and sipped at it while he watched television. The first raindrops clicked flatly on the roof.

I slipped my hand through the screen-door handle, then jerked it backward and tore the latch loose from the jamb. He sat erect, his eyes wide, the beer can rolling across the floor in a trail of foam.

"Some customers are persistent as hell," I said, stepping inside.

But I should have come in holding the.25 Beretta that was in my pocket. He reached behind him on a workbench, grabbed a ball-peen hammer, and flung it into my chest. The steel head hit me just to the right of my breastbone, and I felt a pain, a breathlessness, shoot through my heart cavity as though I had been stunned with a high-voltage wire. Then he charged me, his arms flailing like a kid fighting on a school ground, and he caught me once on the eye and again on the ear before I could get my guard up. But I had been a good boxer at New Iberia High, and I had learned long ago that either in the ring or in a street fight there was nothing to equal setting your feet square, tucking your chin into your shoulder, raising your left to guard your face, and coming across with a right hook aimed somewhere between the mouth and the eyes. I got him right across the bridge of the nose. His eyes snapped straight with shock, the light glazed in them, and I hit him again, this time on the jaw, and knocked him over his chair into the television set. He looked up at me, his face white, his nose bleeding on his upper lip.

"You want to do it some more?" I said.

"Who are you, man?"

"What do you care, as long as you come out of this all right?"

"Come out of what? What you want with me? I never saw you before tonight."

He started to get up. I pushed him down on the floor.

"You come here to rip me off, you're going to deal later with a couple of bad dudes. That's no joke, buddy," he said.

"You see this in my hand? I'm not going to point it at you, because I don't think you're up to it. But we're upping the stakes now."

"You come in my goddamn house and attack me and wave a gun around, and I'm in trouble? You're unbelievable, man."

"Get up," I said, and pulled him erect by his arm. I walked him into the bedroom.

"Turn on the light," I said.

He flicked the light switch. The bed was unmade, and dirty clothes were piled on the wood floor. A jigsaw puzzle of Elvis Presley's face was half completed on a card table. I pushed him through the hallway into the tiny kitchen at the back of the house.

"You forget where the light switch is?" I said.

"Look, man, I just work for some people. You got a problem with the action around here, you take it up with them. I'm just a small guy."

I felt the wall with my hand and clicked on the overhead light. The kitchen was the only clean room in the house. The drainboards were washed down, the dishes put away in a drying rack, the linoleum floor waxed and polished. A solitary chair was placed at the large Formica-topped table in the center of the room, and on the table were three black plastic bags closed with masking tape, an ether bottle, and boxes of powdered milk and powdered sugar.

He wiped his nose on his hand. The moles on his face looked like dead bugs. Beyond the drawn window shades I could hear the rain falling in the trees.

"It looks like you've been watering down the stock," I said.

"What do you want? You're looking at everything I got."

"Where's Philip Murphy?"

He looked at me curiously, his brow furrowed.

"I don't know the guy," he said.

"Yes, you do. He's a two-poke-a-day regular."

"That's lots of people. Look, if I could give you the dude and get you out of my life, you'd have him."

"He's in his fifties, wears glasses, tangled gray hair and eyebrows, talks a little bit like an Englishman sometimes."

"Oh, that fucker. He told me his name was Eddy. You out to pop him or something?"

"Where is he?"

"Look, this dude has a lot of money. Around here we piece off the score. Everybody gets along that way."

"Last chance," I said, and moved toward him. His back bumped against the sink and he raised his hands up in front of his chest.

"All right," he said. "The last stucco duplex on Azalea Drive. It's straight north of Jefferson Davis's house. Now get the fuck out of here, man."

"Do you rent or own this place?"

"I own it. Why?"

"Bad answer," I said, and I unscrewed the cap from the ether bottle and poured it over the black plastic bags on the kitchen table.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Better get moving, partner," I said, and folded back the cover on a book of matches.

"Are you crazy? That stuff's like napalm. Don't do it, man."

He stared at me wild-eyed, frozen, waiting until the last second to see if I was serious. I lighted the whole book, and he broke for the window, put one foot through the shade, balanced for a moment on the sill like a clothespin while he stared back at me incredulously a last time, and then crashed to the ground outside with the torn shade dangling behind him.

I backed out the door and threw the flaming matchbook at the table. The air seemed to snap apart with a yellow-blue flash like lightning arching back on itself. Then the Formica tabletop erupted into a cone of flame that was absolutely white at the center. Within seconds the paint on the ceiling burned outward in a spreading black blister that touched all four walls.