"I gonna be wit' them dead people soon," she said.

"Where'd you do time?"

"A year in St. John the Baptist. Two years in St. Gabriel."

"Let us help you."

"Too late." She pulled the car door shut and started the engine. The exhaust pipe and muffler were rusted out, and smoke billowed from under the car frame.

"Why does he want the lockbox now?" I said.

She shot me the finger and gunned the car out into the street, the roar of her engine reverberating through the crypts.

THERE ARE DAYS THAT are different. They may look the same to everyone else, but on certain mornings you wake and know with absolute certainty you've been chosen as a participant in a historical script, for reasons unknown to you, and your best efforts will not change what has already been written.

On Wednesday the false dawn was bone-white, just like it had been the day Megan came back to New Iberia, the air brittle, the wood timbers in our house aching with cold. Then hailstones clattered on the tin roof and through the trees and rolled down the slope onto the dirt road. When the sun broke above the horizon the clouds in the eastern sky trembled with a glow like the reflection of a distant forest fire. When I walked down to the dock, the air was still cold, crisscrossed with the flight of robins, more than I had seen in years. I started cleaning the congealed ash from the barbecue pit, then rinsed my hands in an oaken bucket that had been filled with rainwater the night before. But Batist had cleaned a nutria in it for crab bait, and when I poured the water out it was red with blood.

At the office I called Adrien Glazier in New Orleans.

"Anything on the Scarlotti shooter?" I said.

"You figured out he's a French Canadian. You're ahead of us. What's the matter?" she said.

"Matter? He's going to kill somebody."

"If it will make you feel better, I already contacted Billy Holtzner and offered him Witness Protection. He goes, 'Where, on an ice floe at the South Pole?' and hangs up."

"Send some agents over here, Adrien."

"Holtzner's from Hollywood. He knows the rules. You get what you want when you come across. I told him the G's casting couch is nongender-specific. Try to have a few laughs with this stuff. You worry too much."

IT BEGAN TO RAIN just after sunset. The light faded in the swamp and the air was freckled with birds, then the rain beat on the dock and the tin roof of the bait shop and filled the rental boats that were chained up by the boat ramp. Batist closed out the cash register and put on his canvas coat and hat.

"Megan's daddy, the one got nailed to the barn? You know how many black men been killed and nobody ever been brought to cou't for it?" he said.

"Doesn't make it right," I said.

"Makes it the way it is," he replied.

After he had gone I turned off the outside lights so no late customers would come by, then began mopping the floor. The rain on the roof was deafening and I didn't hear the door open behind me, but I felt the cold blow across my back.

"Put your mop up. I got other work for you," the voice said.

I straightened up and looked into the seamed, rain-streaked face of Harpo Scruggs.

THIRTY-TWO

HIS FACE WAS BLOODLESS, SHRIVELED like a prune, glistening under the drenched brim of his hat. His raincoat dripped water in a circle on the floor. A blue-black.22 Ruger revolver, with ivory grips, on full cock, hung from his right hand.

"I got a magnum cylinder in it. The round will go through both sides of your skull," he said.

"What do you want, Scruggs?"

"Fix me some coffee and milk in one of them big glasses yonder." He pointed with one finger. "Put about four spoons of honey in it."

"Have you lost your mind?"

He propped the heel of his hand against the counter for support. The movement caused him to pucker his mouth and exhale his breath. It touched my face, like the raw odor from a broken drain line.

"You're listing," I said.

"Fix the coffee like I told you."

A moment later he picked up the glass with his left hand and drank from it steadily until it was almost empty. He set the glass on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His whiskers made a scraping sound against his skin.

"We're going to Opelousas. You're gonna drive. You try to hurt me, I'll kill you. Then I'll come back and kill your wife and child. A man like me don't give it no thought," he said.

"Why me, Scruggs?"

"'Cause you got an obsession over the man we stretched out on that barn wall. You gonna do right, no matter who you got to mess up. It ain't a compliment."

WE TOOK HIS PICKUP truck to the four-lane and headed north toward Lafayette and Opelousas. He didn't use the passenger seat belt but instead sat canted sideways with his right leg pushed out in front of him. His raincoat was unbuttoned and I could see the folds of a dark towel that were tied with rope across his side.

"You leaking pretty bad?" I said.

"Hope that I ain't. I'll pop one into your brisket 'fore I go under."

"I'm not your problem. We both know that."

With his left hand he took a candy bar from the dashboard and tore the paper with his dentures and began to eat the candy, swallowing as though he hadn't eaten in days. He held the revolver with his other hand, the barrel and cylinder resting across his thigh, pointed at my kidney.

The rain swept in sheets against the windshield. We passed through north Lafayette, the small, wood, galleried houses on each side of us whipped by the rain. Outside the city the country was dark green and sodden and there were thick stands of hardwoods on both sides of the four-lane and by the exit to Grand Coteau I saw emergency flares burning on the road and the flashers of emergency vehicles. A state trooper stood by an overturned semi, waving the traffic on with his flashlight.

"Was you ever a street cop?" Scruggs said.

"NOPD," I said.

"I was a gun bull at Angola, city cop, and road-gang hack, too. I done it all. I got no quarrel with you, Robicheaux."

"You want me to bring down Archer Terrebonne, don't you?"

"When I was a gun bull at Angola? That was in the days of the Red Hat House. The lights would go down all over the system and ole Sparky would make fire jump off their tailbone. There was this white boy from Mississippi put a piece of glass in my food once. A year later he cut up two other convicts for stealing a deck of cards from his cell. Guess who got to walk him into the Red Hat House?

"Lightning was crawling all over the sky that night and the current didn't work right. That boy was jolting in the straps for two minutes. The smell made them reporters hold handkerchiefs to their mouths. They was falling over themselves to get outside. I laughed till I couldn't hardly stand up."

"What's the point?"

"I'm gonna have my pound of flesh from Archer Terrebonne. You gonna be the man cut it out for me."

He straightened his tall frame inside his raincoat, his face draining with the effort. He saw me watching him and raised the barrel of the Ruger slightly, so that it was aimed upward at my armpit. He put his hand on the towel tied across his side and looked at it, then wiped his hand on his pants.

"Terrebonne paid my partner to shoot my liver out. I didn't think my partner would turn on me. I'll be damned if you can trust anybody these days," he said.

"The man who helped you kill the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?"

"That's him. Or was. I wouldn't eat no pigs that was butchered around here for a while… Take that exit yonder."

We drove for three miles through farmland, then followed a dirt road through pine trees, past a pond that was green with algae and covered with dead hyacinths, to a two-story yellow frame house whose yard was filled with the litter of dead pecan trees. The windows had been nailed over with plywood, the gallery stacked with hay bales that had rotted.