'When did Tommy Blue Eyes hook up with the Caluccis?' Clete said. 'They always hated each other.'

'Business is business.'

'Yeah, but the micks always looked down on the greaseballs. They didn't socialize with them.' He took the glasses out of my hand and looked again through the bars. 'If you think Bobo and Max are geeks, check out the cat flopping steaks on the grill.'

A man who must have been six and one half feet tall had come out of the side entrance to the house with a tray of meat. He had a flat Indian face, a cheerless mouth, and wide-set, muddy eyes that didn't squint or blink in the smoke rising from the pit. His hair was jet black and freshly barbered and looked like a close-cropped wig glued on brownish red stone.

'All the guy needs are electrodes inset in his temples,' Clete said.

'I don't think this is going anywhere,' I said. 'I probably should head back to New Iberia.'

His green eyes roamed over my face. 'You don't think Bootsie can handle it?' he asked.

'How do I know, Clete? He humiliated her, he put his tongue in her mouth, he left bruises on her kidney like he'd taken a pair of pliers to her.'

He nodded and didn't speak for a moment. Then he said, 'That blonde doing the aerobics is Tommy's regular punch when his old lady's out of town. No, she's more than that, he got a real Jones for her. Believe me, Tommy and that clunk of radiator hose he's got for a schlong aren't far away. Dave, look at me. You got my word, I'm going to dig this guy Buchalter out of the woodwork. If you're not around, I'll give you a Polaroid, then you can burn it.'

He continued to stare into my face, then he said, 'You're troubling me, noble mon.'

'What's the problem?'

'You look wired to the eyes, that's the problem.'

'So what?'

'You have a way of throwing major monkey shit through the window fan, that's what.'

'I do?'

'Go down to the corner and call Bootsie. Then we'll give it another hour. If Tommy's not back by then, we'll hang it up.'

We waited in the truck for another hour, but Tommy Lonighan didn't return. The metal of my dashboard burned my hands when I touched it, and the air smelled of salt and dead water beetles in the rain gutters. I started the engine.

'Wait a minute. They're coming out. Let's not waste an opportunity, mon,' Clete said.

The electronic piked gate opened automatically, and the Calucci brothers, in a light blue Cadillac convertible, with the two younger women in the backseat, drove out of the shade into the sunlight. I started-to block their exit with the truck, but it was unnecessary. Max Calucci, the driver, and one of the women in back were arguing furiously. Max stepped hard on the brakes, jolting everyone in the car forward, turned in his leather seat, and began jabbing his finger at the woman. The woman, the one who had been doing lines through a soda straw earlier, climbed out of the backseat in her shorts and spiked heels, raking a long, paint-curling scratch down the side of the Cadillac.

Max got out of the car and struck the woman full across the mouth with the flat of his hand. He hit her so hard that a barrette flew from her lacquered red hair. Then he slapped her across the ear. She pressed her palms into her face and began to weep.

None of them saw us until we had walked to within five feet of their car.

'Better ease up, Max. People might start to think you abuse women,' Clete said.

'What are you doing here?' Max said. He was bald down through the center of his head, and drops of sweat the size of BB's glistened in his thick, dark eyebrows. Up close, the scabs on his face and neck looked like curlicues of reddish brown, fine-linked chain.

'Art didn't let you know we were out here?' Clete said. 'That's why you didn't invite us in?'

'You blindsided me the other night, Purcel. It's not over between us. You better haul your fat ass out of here,' Max said.

'Y'all know a dude by the name of Will Buchalter? Streak here'd really like to talk to him,' Clete said.

'No, I don't know him. Now get out of here-' He stopped and raised his finger in the face of the woman with the dyed red hair. 'And you, get back in the car. You're gonna polish that scratch out if you have to do it with your twat. Did you hear me, move! You don't open that mouth again, either, unless I want to put something in it.'

He clamped his hand on the back of her neck, squeezed, and twisted her toward the car while tears ran from her eyes.

The shovel lay propped among some rosebushes against the brick wall. It had a long, work-worn wood handle with a wide, round-backed blade. Max Calucci did not see me pick it up. Nor did he see me swing it with both hands, from deep behind me, as I would a baseball bat, until he heard the blade ripping through the air. By then it was too late. The metal whanged off his elbow and thudded into his rib cage, bending him double, and I saw his mouth drop open and a level of pain leap into his eyes that he could not quite find words to express.

Then I reversed the shovel in my hands and swung the blade up into his face, as you would butt-stroke an adversary with a pugil stick. I saw him tumble backwards on the grass, his knees drawn up in front of him, his face bloodless with shock, his mouth a scarlet circle of disbelief. I heard feet running down the drive, Bobo Calucci blowing the car horn with both hands in desperation, then Clete was standing in front of me, pressing me back with his palms, his armpits drenched with perspiration, the strap of his nylon shoulder holster biting into one nipple.

'For Christ's sakes, back off, Dave, you're gonna kill the guy,' he was saying. 'You hear me? Let it slide, Streak. He's not the guy we care about.'

Then his big hands dropped to the handle of the shovel and twisted it from my grasp, his Irish pie-plate face two inches from mine, his eyes filled with pity and an undisguised and fearful love.

chapter eight

That night, as I lay next to Bootsie in our bed, I did not tell her about the incident with the Calucci brothers. Even though I had been in Alcoholics Anonymous a number of years, and to one degree or another had been through the twelve steps of recovery and had tried to incorporate them into my life, I had never achieved a great degree of self-knowledge, other than the fact that I was a drunk; nor had I ever been able to explain my behavior and the way I thought, or didn't think, to normal people.

I always wanted to believe that those moments of rage, which affected me almost like an alcoholic blackout, were due to a legitimate cause, that I or someone close to me had been seriously wronged, that the object of my anger and adrenaline had not swum coincidentally into my ken.

But I had known too many cops who thought the same way. Somehow there was always an available justification for the Taser dart, the jet of Mace straight into the eyes, the steel baton whipped across the shinbones or the backs of the thighs.

The temptation is to blame the job, the stressed-out adversarial daily routine that can begin like a rupturing peptic ulcer, the judges and parole boards who recycle psychopaths back on the street faster than you can shut their files. But sometimes in an honest moment an unpleasant conclusion works its way through all the rhetoric of the self-apologist, namely, that you are drawn to this world in the same way that some people are fascinated by the protean shape and texture of fire, to the extent that they need to slide their hands through its caress.

I remember an old-time gunbull at Angola who had spent forty-seven years of his life shepherding convicts under a double-barreled twelve-gauge out on the Mississippi levee. During that time he had killed four men and wounded a half dozen others. His liver had been eaten away with cirrhosis; the right side of his chest was caved in from the surgical removal of a cancerous lung. To my knowledge, he had no relatives with whom he kept contact, no women in his life except a prostitute in Opelousas. I asked him how he had come to be a career gunbull.