"You know who did it, don't you?" I said to Cisco.

"If I did, I'd have a gun down somebody's mouth," he replied.

"Give the swinging dick act a break, Cisco."

"I can't tell you who, I can only tell you why. It's payback for Anthony."

"Walk down to the water with me," I said, and cupped one hand on his elbow.

We went down the slope to the bayou, where the mudbank had been imprinted at the water's edge by Megan's bare knees and sliced by heavy boots that had fought for purchase while she struggled with at least three men. An oak tree sheltered us from the view of the sheriff and the uniformed deputies in the yard.

"Don't you lie to me. With these guys payback means dead. They want something. What is it?" I said.

"Billy Holtzner embezzled three-quarters of a million out of the budget by working a scam on our insurance coverage. But he put it on me. Anthony worked for the money people in Hong Kong. He believed what Billy told him. He started twisting my dials and ended up with big leaks in his arteries."

"Swede?"

"We were playing chess for a lot of the evening. I don't know if he did it or not. Swede's protective. Anthony was a prick."

"Protective? The victim was a prick? Great attitude."

"It's complicated. There's a lot of big finance involved. You're not going to understand it." He saw the look on my face. "I'm in wrong with some bad guys. The studio's going to file bankruptcy. They want to gut my picture and inflate its value on paper to liquidate their debts."

The current in the bayou was dead, hazed over with insects, and there was no air under the trees. He wiped his face with his hand.

"I'm telling the truth, Dave. I didn't think they'd go after Megan. Maybe there's something else involved. About my father, maybe. I don't understand it all either… Where you going?" he said.

"To find Clete Purcel."

"What for?"

"To talk to him before he hears about this from someone else."

"You coming to the hospital?" he asked, his fingers opened in front of him as though the words of another could be caught and held as physical guarantees.

IT WAS STILL DARK when I parked my truck by the stucco cottage Clete had rented outside Jeanerette. I pushed back the seat and slept through a rain shower and did not wake until dawn. When I woke, the rain had stopped and the air was heavy with mist, and I saw Clete at his mailbox in a robe, the Morning Advocate under his arm, staring curiously at my truck. I got out and walked toward him.

"What's wrong?" he said, lines breaking across his brow.

I told him of everything that happened at Cisco's house and of Megan's status at Iberia General. He listened and didn't speak. His face had the contained, heated intensity of a stainless-steel pan that had been left on a burner.

Then he said, "She's going to make it?"

"You bet."

"Come inside. I already have coffee on the stove." He turned away from me and pushed at his nose with his thumb.

"What are you going to do, Clete?"

"Go up to the hospital. What do you think?"

"You know what I mean."

"I'll fix eggs and sausage for both of us. You look like you got up out of a coffin."

Inside his kitchen I said, "Are you going to answer me?"

"I already heard about you and Helen visiting Ricky Scar. He's behind this shit, isn't he?"

"Where'd you hear about Scarlotti?"

"Nig Rosewater. He said Ricky went berserk after you left his office. What'd y'all do to jack him up like that?"

"Don't worry about it. You stay out of New Orleans."

He poured coffee in two cups and put a cinnamon roll in his mouth and looked out the window at the sun in the pine trees.

"Did you hear me?" I said.

"I got enough to do right here. I caught Swede Boxleiter in the Terrebonne cemetery last night. I think he was prizing bricks out of a crypt."

"What for?"

"Maybe he's a ghoul. You know what for. You planted all that Civil War stuff in his head. I'd love to tell Archer Terrebonne an ex-con meltdown is digging up his ancestors' bones."

But there was no humor in his face, only a tic at the corner of one eye. He went into the other room and called Iberia General, then came back in the kitchen, his eyes filled with private thoughts, and began beating eggs in a big pink bowl.

"Clete?"

"The Big Sleazy's not your turf anymore, Streak. Why don't you worry about how this guy Scruggs got off his leash? I thought y'all had him under surveillance."

"He lost the stakeout at the motel."

"You know the best way to deal with that dude? A big fat one between the eyes and a throw-down on the corpse."

"You might have your butt in our jail, if that's what it takes," I said.

He poured hot milk into my coffee cup. "Not even the perps believe that stuff anymore. You want to go to the hospital with me?" he said.

"You got it."

"The nurse said she asked for me. How about that? How about that Megan Flynn?"

I looked at the back of his thick neck and huge shoulders as he made breakfast and thought of warning NOPD before he arrived in New Orleans. But I knew that would only give his old enemies in the New Orleans Police Department a basis to do him even greater harm than Ricky Scarlotti might.

We drove back up the tree-lined highway to New Iberia in a corridor of rain.

AT IBERIA GENERAL I sat in the waiting room while Clete went in to see Megan first. Five minutes after we arrived I saw Lila Terrebonne walk down the hall with a spray of carnations wrapped in green tissue paper. She didn't see me. She paused at the open door to Megan's room, her eyelids blinking, her back stiff with apprehension. Then she turned and started hurriedly toward the elevator.

I caught her before she got on.

"You're not going to say hello?" I asked.

I could smell the bourbon on her breath, the cigarette smoke in her hair and clothes.

"Give these to Megan for me. I'll come back another time," she said.

"How'd you know she was here?"

"It was on the radio… Dave, get on the elevator with me." When the elevator door closed, she said, "I've got to get some help. I've had it."

"Help with what?"

"Booze, craziness… Something that happened to me, something I've never told anybody about except my father and the priest at St. Peter's."

"Why don't we sit in my pickup?" I said.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS MY reconstruction of the story she told me while the rain slid down the truck's windows and a willow tree by the bayou blew in the wind like a woman's hair.

She met the two brothers in a bar outside Morgan City. They were shooting pool, stretching across the table to make difficult shots, their sleeveless arms wrapped with green-and-red tattoos. They wore earrings and beards that were trimmed in neat lines along the jawbone, jeans that were so tight their genitalia were cupped to the smooth shape of a woman's palm. They sent a drink to her table, and one to an old man at the bar, and one to an oil-field roughneck who had used up his tab. But they made no overture toward her.

She watched them across the top of her gin ricky, the tawdry grace of their movements around the pool table, the lack of attention they showed anything except the skill of their game, the shots they speared into leather side pockets like junior high school kids.

Then one of them noticed her watching. He proffered the cue stick to her, smiling. She rose from her chair, her skin warm with gin, and wrapped her fingers around the cue's thickness, smiling back into the young man's face, seeing him glance away shyly, his cheeks color around the edges of his beard.

They played nine ball. Her father had taught her how to play billiards when she was a young girl. She could walk a cue ball down the rail, put reverse English on it and not leave an opponent an open shot, make a soft bank shot and drop the money balls-the one and the six and the nine-into the pocket with a tap that was no more than a whisper.