I said.

"Not here."

"You're not going to put me off, Connie."

"What is it?"

I gestured at a table.

"I'm leaving here in two minutes. But I'll make you a promise. You follow me anywhere again and I'll have you arrested," she said.

"I have a witness."

"To what?"

"My mother's murder. Two cops in uniform did it. In front of a cabin a few miles off Purple Cane Road in Lafourche Parish. One of them called her an ignorant bitch before he knocked her down."

Her eyes stared into mine, unblinking, her lashes like black wire. Then they broke and she looked at nothing and pulled the dampness of her jersey off the tops of her breasts.

"Bring your witness forward," she said.

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"I think the individual would end up dead," I said.

"You don't want to indicate the person's gender to me? I'm the attorney general of the state. What's the matter with you?"

"You trust Don Ritter. I don't. I think he tried to have both me and Johnny Remeta killed."

She motioned at a black waiter in a white jacket. He nodded and began pouring a club soda into a glass of ice for her. She touched the sweat off her eyes with a towel and hung the towel around her neck.

"I'll say it again. My office is at your disposal. But a lot of this sounds like paranoia and conspiratorial obsession," she said.

"The cops were NOPD." "How do you know this?"

"They killed a Lafourche Parish nightclub owner named Ladrine Theriot and made a local constable take the weight. They weren't backwoods coon-asses, either. They were enforcers and bagmen for the Giacanos. So if they weren't New Orleans cops, where did they come from?"

She took the club soda from the waiter's hand and drank it half-empty. The heat seemed to go out of her face but not her eyes.

"You have a larger agenda, Dave. I think it has something to do with me," she said.

"Not me. By the way, you play a mean game of racquetball for a woman who smokes."

"How kind."

"The other day I noticed your gold and leather cigarette lighter. Did Jim Gable give you that? Y'all must be pretty tight."

She got up from the table with her club soda in her hand.

"My apologies to Bootsie for saying this, but you're the most annoying person I've ever met," she said, and walked toward the dressing room, her pleated skirt swishing across the tops of her thighs.

"You READ my MAIL?" Alafair said. It was evening, the sun deep down in the trees now, and she was grooming Tex, her Appaloosa, in the railed lot by his shed. She stared at me across his back.

"The letter was lying on your bed. Bootsie saw Johnny's name on it. It was inadvertent," I replied.

"You didn't have the right to read it." "Maybe not. Maybe you know what you're doing. But I believe he's a dangerous man."

"Not the Johnny O'Roarke I know."

"You always stood up for your friends, Alafair. But this guy is not a friend. The prison psychologist said he's a sick man who will probably die by his own hand and take other people with him."

"Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit."

"How about it on the language?"

"You admit he saved our lives, but you run him down and take his head apart, a person you don't know anything about, then you tell me to watch my language. I just don't expect crap like that from my father."

"Has he tried to see you?"

"I'm not going to tell you. It's none of your business."

"Remeta's a meltdown, Alf."

"Don't call me that stupid name! God!" she said, and threw down the brush she had been using on Tex and stormed inside the house.

That night I DREAMED about a sugar harvest in the late fall and mule-drawn wagons loaded with cane moving through the fog toward the mill. The dirt road was frozen hard and littered with stalks of sugarcane, and the fog rolled out of the unharvested cane on each side of the road like colorless cotton candy and coated the mules' and drivers' backs with moisture. Up ahead the tin outline of the mill loomed against the grayness of the sky, and inside I could hear the sounds of boilers overheating and iron machines that pulverized the cane into pulp. Immediately behind the mill a stubble fire burned in a field, creeping in serpentine red lines through the mist.

The dream filled me with a fear I could not explain. But I knew, with a terrible sense of urgency, I could not allow myself to go farther down the road, into the mill and the grinding sounds of its machinery and the fire and curds of yellow smoke that rose from the field beyond.

The scene changed, and I was on board my cabin cruiser at dawn, on West Cote Blanche Bay, and the fogbank was heavy and cold on the skin, sliding with the tide into the coastline. To the north I could see Avery Island, like two green humps in the mist, as smooth and firm-looking as a woman's breasts. The waves burst in strings of foam against the white sleekness of the bow, and I could smell the salt spray inside my head and bait fish in a bucket and the speckled trout that arched out of the waves and left circles like rain rings in the stillness of the swells.

When I woke I went into the kitchen and sat in the dark, my loins aching and my palms tingling on my thighs. I held a damp hand towel to my eyes and tried to think but couldn't. Even though I was awake now, I did not want to look at the meaning behind the dreams. I went back to bed and felt Bootsie stir, then touch my chest and turn on her hip and mold her body against me. She was already wet when I entered her, and she widened her thighs and hooked her feet loosely inside my legs, slipping one hand down to the small of my back while she moved in a slow, circular fashion under me, as she always did when she wanted to preserve the moment for both of us as long as she could.

But I felt the heat rise in me, like fire climbing upward along a hard, bare surface, then my mouth opened involuntarily and I closed my eyes and pressed my face between her breasts.

I sat on the edge of the bed, depleted, my face in shadow, one hand still covering the tops of Bootsie's fingers, ashamed that I had used my -wife to hide from the violent act I knew my alcoholic mind was planning.

EARLY SUNDAY MORNING I heard a car with a blown muffler pull into the drive and continue to the back of the house before the driver cut the engine. I slipped on my khakis and went into the kitchen and looked into the backyard and saw Clete Purcel sitting alone at the redwood picnic table, his Marine Corps utility cap on his head. He had a take-out cup of coffee between his hands, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the dirt road.

I went outside and eased the screen shut so as not to wake Bootsie and Alafair.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

He looked sideways, then pulled on his nose and let his breath out.

"I went after Ritter. Nobody's been by?"

"No."

"The shit went through the fan."

"I don't want to know about it."

"I was trying to help. You got somebody else willing to cover your back on a daily basis?"

He looked miserable. He rubbed his face, then knocked over his paper cup and spilled coffee on his hands.

"Tell me," I said.

"Ritter had dials on this stripper, Janet Gish. She'd been washing stolen money at the Indian casinos for some Jersey wise guys. Ritter nailed the wise guys but he left her out of the bust. The deal was she had to come across for him at least once a month. Guess what? Janet developed the hots for Ritter, can you believe it? So he knew he had a good thing and he played along with her and said he was going to marry her as soon as he could dump his wife. In the meantime he was bopping Janet every Friday afternoon at a motel on Airline.