So I told her about Jimmie.

"I thought it was probably in the newspaper," I said. "He's a well-known guy in the Quarter."

"I don't-" she began.

"You don't read those kinds of stories."

She looked away, her eyes hurt.

"I'm sorry. Jimmie might not make it, and I might not be around to help him, either. I'm in some very big trouble right now."

Her blue eyes looked intently into mine.

"The roses and the pralines in the delicatessen," she said. "That's why you didn't want to see me. You were going somewhere, and you thought I'd try to stop you."

"There's no reason I should bring all my problems into your life. Loving a girl shouldn't include making her miserable."

"Dave, why do you think you're the only person who can bear hardship? A relationship is more than just sleeping with somebody, at least it is with me. I don't want to be your part-time lover. If you really want to do some damage, keep treating me like somebody who can't take it, who has to be protected."

"I'm going to hurt you tonight, and I don't have any way around it."

"I don't understand."

"I had to kill Philip Murphy last night in Biloxi."

Her face jumped, and I saw her throat swallow.

"He didn't give me a choice," I said. "I guess I wanted to do it when I went over there, but wanting to do something and deliberately choosing to do it are two different things. I was going to take him back to New Orleans. I got careless, and he thought he could drop me."

"Was he the one who shot your brother?" Her voice was quiet, the knowledge I had given her an enormous pain behind her eyes.

"I don't think so."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm not quite sure yet. Somebody'll find the body soon. In this weather, even with the air conditioning on-"

I saw her mouth form a tight line and her nostrils dilate slightly.

"The point is, sooner or later I'll be arrested," I said.

"You did it in self-defense."

"I broke into somebody's house with a shotgun, with no legal authority. Then I left the scene of a homicide. It'll take them a while, but they'll run my prints and eventually get a warrant out."

"We have to talk with somebody. It isn't fair," she said. "Everything you do turns back on you. You're an innocent man. It's these other people who should be in jail. Doesn't anybody in that police department see that?"

"I've told you all this for another reason, Annie." I let out my breath. "Murphy said some things I have to ask you about. He was an evil man who tried to make others think the world was as evil as he was. But if any part of what he said is true, he had connections with a government agency or somebody in one."

"What-"

"He said you were a peace groupie back in Kansas. He said you got pregnant and lost the child riding a horse."

I waited. Her face flushed and her eyes filmed with tears.

"They reach far into your life, don't they?" she said.

"Annie-"

"What else did he have to say?"

"Nothing. Don't let a man like that wound you."

"I don't care about him. It's you. Do you think I aborted my own child on a horse?"

"I don't think anything."

"You do. It's in your face. Is she the person I thought she was? Was she an easy piece for those weird people back in Kansas?"

"I don't have a doubt in the world about who or what you are. Annie, you're everything to me."

She put her fork down on her plate and looked into the evening shadows on the yard.

"I don't think I can handle this," she said.

"There's nothing to handle. It's over. I just had to find out if he was wired into the government. The Treasury people told me he wasn't."

But she wasn't hearing me.

She looked down at her plate, then back at me again. Her eyes were wet and her chin was dented with tiny dimples.

"Dave, I feel just like I did the night that man put his hands on me."

"Your family is involved with the peace movement, and the FBI probably collected some gossip on you all. It doesn't mean anything. They have files on all kinds of people, most of it for no explainable reason. They followed Ernest Hemingway around for twenty-five years, even when he was receiving electroshock treatments right before his death. Joe Namath's and John Wayne's names were on a White House enemies list." I touched her on the arm and smiled at her. "Come on, who was more American than the Duke?"

"I was seventeen. He was a Mennonite student from Nebraska, working in the home-repair program in Wichita for the summer."

"You don't need to tell me this."

"No, goddamn it, I'm not going to have the lies of those people in our lives. I didn't tell him about the baby. He was too young to be a husband. He went back to school in Nebraska and never knew about it. When I was seven months pregnant we had a terrible electric storm at the farm. My parents had gone to town, and my grandfather was harrowing on the edge of an irrigation ditch. He was an old-order Mennonite and he harrowed with a team instead of a tractor. But he'd never quit work because of weather, unless it washed him right out of the field. I was watching him from the front porch, and I could see the wind blowing dust around him and lightning jumping all over the horizon. The sky was blue-gray, the way it gets in Kansas when you see tornadoes start spinning out of the earth, way off in the distance. Then a bolt of lightning hit a cottonwood tree next to the irrigation ditch, and I saw him and the team and the harrow topple over the side.

"I ran across the field in the rain. He was under the harrow, with his face pressed down in the mud. I couldn't get him out, and I thought he was going to suffocate. I cleaned the dirt out of his mouth and nose and put my shirt under his head. Then I got one of the mules untangled from the harness. The phone in the house was dead, and I had to ride four miles down the road to a neighbor's house to get help. I miscarried in their front yard. They put me in the back of a pickup with a roof on it and drove me to the hospital in Wichita. I almost bled to death on the way."

"You're one hell of a girl, Annie."

"Why did that man tell you those things?"

"He wanted to rattle me, get my mind on something else. He figured he had one play left, and he was going to take it."

"I feel afraid for you."

"You shouldn't. Four of them are dead, and I'm still walking around. When I was in Vietnam I used to try and think everything through. Then one day a friend told me, 'Forget the complexities. The only thing that counts is that you're still on top of the ground, sucking air.'"

"Except you don't believe that."

"A person has to act and think in the way that works for him. I can't control all this bullshit in my life. I didn't deal any of it. In fact, I tried to deal myself out. It didn't work out that way."

I saw the sadness in her eyes, and I took her hands in mine.

"The only thing I'm sorry about is having brought problems into your life," I said. "It's the cop's malaise."

"Any problems I have with you are problems I want."

"You don't understand, Annie. When I told you about Biloxi I made you an accessory after the fact. So when I came over here this evening, I guess I did know what I have to do. I'd better go now. I'll call later."

"Where are you going?"

"I've got to set things straight. Don't worry. Things always work out before the ninth race."

"Stay."

She stood up from the table and looked down at me. I got up and put my arms around her, felt her body come against me, felt it become small and close under my hands, felt her head under my chin and her sandaled foot curve around my ankle. I kissed her hair and her eyes, and when she opened them again, all I could see was the electric blueness in them.

"Let's go inside," she said. Her voice was a low, thick whisper in my ear, her fingers like the brush of a bird's wing on my thigh.