"Got it, big guy."

I put on my tennis shoes and running shorts and started down the dirt road toward the drawbridge over the bayou. The rain looked like flecks of spun glass in the air now, and the reflection of the dying sun was blood-red in the water. After a mile I was sweating heavily in the damp air, but I could feel the day's fatigue rise from my body, and I sprang across the puddles and hit it hard all the way to the bridge.

I did leg stretches against the rusted girders and watched the fireflies lighting in the trees and alligator gars turning in the shadows of a flooded canebrake. The sound of the tree frogs and cicadas in the marsh was almost deafening now.

At this time of day, particularly in summer, I always felt a sense of mortality that I could never adequately describe to another person. Sometimes it was like the late sun was about to burn itself into a dead cinder on the earth's rim, never to rise again. It made sweat ran down my sides like snakes. Maybe it was because I wanted to believe that summer was an eternal song, that living in your fifty-third year was of no more significance than entering the sixth inning when your sidearm was still like a resilient whip and the prospect of your fork-ball made a batter swallow and step back from the plate.

And if it all ended tomorrow, I should have no complaint, I thought. I could have caught the bus any number of times years ago. To be reminded of that fact I only had to touch the punji-stick scar, coiled like a flattened, gray worm, on my stomach; the shiny, arrow-shaped welts from a bouncing Betty on my thigh; the puckered indentation below my collarbone where a.38 round had cored through my shoulder.

They were not wounds received in a heroic fashion, either. In each case I got them because I did something that was careless or impetuous. I also had tried to destroy myself in increments, a jigger at a time.

Get outside your thoughts, partner, I told myself. I waved to the bridge tender in his tiny house at the far end of the bridge and headed for home.

I poured it on the last half mile, then stopped at the dock and did fifty pushups and stomach crunches on the wood planks that still glowed with the day's heat and smelled of dried fish scales.

I walked up the incline through the trees and the layer of moldy leaves and pecan husks toward the lighted gallery of my house. Then I heard a car behind me on the dirt road and I turned and saw a taxicab stop by my mailbox. A man and woman got out, then the man paid the driver and sent him back toward town.

I rubbed the salt out of my eyes with my forearm and stared through the gloom. The man drained the foam out of a long-necked beer bottle and set the empty behind a tree trunk. Then the woman touched him on the shoulder and pointed toward me.

"Hey, there you are," Elrod Sykes said. "How you doin', Mr. Robicheaux? You don't mind us coming out, do you? Wow, you've got a great place."

He swayed slightly. The woman, Kelly Drummond, caught him by the arm. I walked back down the slope.

"I'm afraid I was just going in to take a shower and eat supper," I said.

"We want to take y'all to dinner," he said. "There's this place called Mulate's in Breaux Bridge. They make gumbo you could start a new religion with."

"Thanks, anyway. My wife's already fixed supper."

"Bad time of day to knock on doors, El," Kelly Drummond said, but she looked at me when she said it, her eyes fixed directly on mine. She wore tan slacks, flats, and a yellow blouse with a button open that exposed her bra. When she raised her hand to move a blond ringlet off her forehead, you could see a half-moon sweat stain under her arm.

"We didn't mean to cause a problem," Elrod said. "I'm afraid a drunk-front blew through the area this afternoon. Hey, we're all right, though. We took a cab. Did you notice that? How about that? Look, I tell you what, we'll just get us some liquids to go down at the bait shop yonder and call us a cab."

"Tell him why you came out, El," Kelly Drummond said.

"That's all right. We stumbled in at a bad time. I'm real sorry, Mr. Robicheaux."

"Call me Dave. Would you mind waiting for me at the bait shop a few minutes, then I'll shower and drive y'all home."

"You sure know how to avoid the stereotypes, don't you?" the woman said.

"I beg your pardon?" I said.

"Nobody can ever beat up on you for showing off your southern hospitality," she said.

"Hey, it's okay," Elrod said, turning her by the arm toward the bait shop.

I had gone only a short distance up the slope when I heard the woman's footsteps behind me.

"Just hold on a minute, Dick Tracy," she said.

Behind her I could see Elrod walking down the dock to the shop, where Batist, the black man who worked for me, was drawing back the canvas awning over the tables for the night.

"Look, Ms. Drummond-"

"You don't have to invite us into your house, you don't have to believe the stuff he says about what he sees and hears, but you ought to know that it took guts for him to come out here. He fucks up with Mikey, he fucks up with this film, maybe he blows it for good this time."

"You'll have to excuse me, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department."

She carried a doeskin drawstring bag in her hand. She propped her hand on her hip. She looked up at me and ran her tongue over her bottom lip.

"Are you that dumb?" she asked.

"You're telling me a mob guy, maybe Baby Feet Balboni, is involved with your movie?"

"A mob guy? That's good. I bet y'all really send a lot of them up the road."

"Where are you from, Ms. Drummond?"

" East Kentucky."

"Have you thought about making your next movie there?"

I started toward the house again.

"Wait a minute, Mr. Smart Ass," she said. "Elrod respects you. Did you ever hear of the Chicken Ranch in LaGrange, Texas?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what it was?"

"It was a hot-pillow joint."

"His mother was a prostitute there. That's why he never talks about anyone in his family except his gran'daddy, the Texas ranger. That's why he likes you, and you'd damn well better be aware of it."

She turned on her heel, her doeskin bag hitting her rump, and walked erectly down the slope toward the bait shop, where I could see Elrod opening a beer with his pocket knife under the light bulb above the screen door.

Well, you could do a lot worse than have one like her on your side, Elrod, I thought.

I TOOK A SHOWER, DRIED OFF, AND WAS BUTTONING ON A FRESH shirt in the kitchen when the telephone rang on the counter. Bootsie put down a pan on the stove and answered it.

"It's Batist," she said, and handed it to me:

"Qui t'as pr'estfaire?" I said into the receiver.

"Some drunk white man down here done fell in the bayou," he said.

"What's he doing now?"

"Sittin' in the middle of the shop, drippin' water on my flo'."

"I'll be there in a minute," I said.

"Dave, a lady wit' him was smokin' a cigarette out on the dock didn't smell like no tobacco, no."

"All right, podna. Thanks," I said, and hung up the phone.

Bootsie was looking at me with a question mark in the middle of her face. Her auburn hair, which she had pinned up in swirls on her head, was full of tiny lights.

"A man fell in the bayou. I have to drive him and his girlfriend home," I said.

"Where's their car?"

"They came out in a cab."

"A cab? Who comes fishing in a cab?"

"He's a weird guy."

"Dave-" she said, drawing my name out in exasperation.

"He's one of those actors working out at Spanish Lake. I guess he came out here to tell me about something."

"Which actor?"

"Elrod Sykes."

"Elrod Sykes is out at the bait shop?"

"Yep."