Helen's cheeks were flushed, the back of her neck damp in the heat. I touched her wrist and nodded toward the cruiser. Just as she turned to go with me, I saw Boxleiter draw one stiff finger up his rib cage, collecting a thick dollop of sweat. He flicked it at her back.

Her hand went to her cheek, her face darkening with surprise and insult, like a person in a crowd who cannot believe the nature of an injury she has just received.

"You're under arrest for assaulting a police officer. Put your hands behind you," she said.

He grinned and scratched at an insect bite high up on his shoulder.

"Is there something wrong with the words I use? Turn around," she said.

He shook his head sadly. "I got witnesses. I ain't done anything."

"You want to add 'resisting' to it?" she said.

"Whoa, mama. Take your hands off me… Hey, enough's enough… Buddy, yeah, you, guy with the mustache, you get this dyke off me."

She grabbed him by the shoulders and put her shoe behind his knee. Then he brought his elbow into her breast, hard, raking it across her as he turned.

She slipped a blackjack from her pants pocket and raised it over her shoulder and swung it down on his collarbone. It was weighted with lead, elongated like a darning sock, the spring handle wrapped with leather. The blow made his shoulder drop as though the tendons had been severed at the neck.

But he flailed at her just the same, trying to grab her around the waist. She whipped the blackjack across his head, again and again, splitting his scalp, wetting the leather cover on the blackjack each time she swung.

I tried to push him to the ground, out of harm's way, but another problem was in the making. The two off-duty sheriffs deputies were pulling their weapons.

I tore my.45 from my belt holster and aimed into their faces.

"Freeze! It's over!… Take your hand off that piece! Do it! Do it! Do it!"

I saw the confusion and the alarm fix in their eyes, their bodies stiffening. Then the moment died in their faces. "That's it… Now, move the crowd back. That's all you've got to do… That's right," I said, my words like wet glass in my throat.

Swede Boxleiter moaned and rolled in the dirt among the power cables, his fingers laced in his hair. Both my hands were still squeezed tight on the.45's grips, my forearms shining with sweat.

The faces of the onlookers were stunned, stupefied. Billy Holtzner pushed his way through the crowd, turned in a circle, his eyebrows climbing on his forehead, and said, "I got to tell you to get back to work?" Then he walked back toward his trailer, blowing his nose on a Kleenex, flicking his eyes sideways briefly as though looking at a minor irritant.

I was left staring into the self-amused gaze of Archer Terrebonne. Lila stood behind him, her mouth open, her face as white as cake flour. The backs of my legs were still trembling.

"Do y'all specialize in being public fools, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked. He touched at the corner of his mouth, his three-fingered hand like that of an impaired amphibian.

THE SHERIFF PACED IN his office. He pulled up the blinds, then lowered them again. He kept clearing his throat, as though there were an infection in it.

"This isn't a sheriff's department. I'm the supervisor of a mental institution," he said.

He took the top off his teakettle, looked inside it, and set the top down again.

"You know how many faxes I've gotten already on this? The St. Mary sheriff told me not to put my foot in his parish again. That sonofabitch actually threatened me," he said.

"Maybe we should have played it differently, but Boxleiter didn't give us a lot of selection," I said.

"Outside our jurisdiction."

"We told him he wasn't under arrest. There was no misunderstanding about that," I said.

"I should have used their people to take him down," Helen said.

"Ah, a breakthrough in thought. But I'm suspending you just the same, at least until I get an IA finding," the sheriff said.

"He threw sweat on her. He hit her in the chest with his elbow. He got off light," I said.

"A guy with twenty-eight stitches in his head?"

"You told us to pick him up, skipper. That guy would be a loaded gun anyplace we tried to take him down. You know it, too," I said.

He crimped his lips together and breathed through his nose.

"I'm madder than hell about this," he said.

The room was silent, the air-conditioning almost frigid. The sunlight through the slatted blinds was eye-watering.

"All right, forget the suspension and IA stuff. See me before you go into St. Mary Parish again. In the meantime, you find out why Cisco Flynn thinks he can bring his pet sewer rats into Iberia Parish… Helen, you depersonalize your attitude toward the perps, if that's possible."

"The sewer rats?" I said.

He filled his pipe bowl from a leather pouch and didn't bother to look up until we were out of the room.

THAT EVENING CLETE PURCEL parked his Cadillac convertible under the shade trees in front of my house and walked down to the bait shop. He wore a summer suit and a lavender shirt with a white tie. He went to the cooler and opened a bottle of strawberry soda.

"What, I look funny or something?" he said.

"You look sharp."

He drank out of the pop bottle and watched a boat out on the bayou.

"I'll treat y'all to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville," he said.

"I'd better work."

He nodded, then looked at the newscast on the television set that sat above the counter.

"Thought I'd ask," he said.

"Who you going to dinner with?"

"Megan Flynn."

"Another time."

He sat down at the counter and drank from his soda. He drew a finger through a wet ring on the wood.

"I'm only supposed to go out with strippers and junkies?" he said.

"Did I say anything?"

"You hide your feelings like a cat in a spin dryer."

"So she's stand-up. But why's she back in New Iberia? We're Paris on the Teche?"

"She was born here. Her brother has a house here."

"Yeah, he's carrying weight for a psychopath, too. Why you think that is, Clete? Because Cisco likes to rehabilitate shank artists?"

"I hear Helen beat the shit out of Boxleiter with a slapjack. Maybe he's got the message and he'll get out of town."

I mopped down the counter and tossed the rag on top of a case of empty beer bottles.

"You won't change your mind?" he said.

"Come back tomorrow. We'll entertain the bass."

He made a clicking sound with his mouth and walked out the door and into the twilight.

AFTER SUPPER I DROVE over to Mout' Broussard's house on the west side of town. Cool Breeze came out on the gallery and sat down on the swing. He had removed the bandage from his cheek, and the wound he had gotten at the jail looked like a long piece of pink string inset in his skin.

"Doctor said I ain't gonna have no scar."

"You going to hang around town?" I asked.

"Ain't got no pressing bidness nowheres else."

"They used you, Breeze."

"I got Alex Guidry fired, ain't I?"

"Does it make you feel better?"

He looked at bis hands. They were wide, big-boned, lustrous with callus.

"What you want here?" he asked.

"The old man who made your wife cook for him, Harpo Delahoussey? Did he have a son?"

"What people done tole you over in St. Mary Parish?"

"They say he didn't."

He shook his head noncommittally.

"You don't remember?" I said.

"I don't care. It ain't my bidness."

"A guy named Harpo may have executed a couple of kids out in the Basin," I said.

"Those dagos in New Orleans? You know what they do to a black man snitch them off? I'm suppose to worry about some guy blowing away some po'-white trash raped a black girl?"