"Did you file a report at the department?" I asked.

"They was real hepful. Man kept looking down my top to make sure Johnny Remeta wasn't hiding there."

"I doubt Remeta will bother you again."

"Where Fat Man at?"

"Why?" I asked.

"'Cause he ain't like you. 'Cause he don't fool hisself. 'Cause people mess wit' him only once."

"Remeta might try to kill my daughter, Little Face. I'm sorry about what happened to you. But I'm tired of your anger," I said.

I left her on the bench with her baby. When I went back inside the restaurant, Bootsie was gone.

The sheriff was at the bait shop before dawn Monday morning, but he did not come inside the building right away. He propped his hands on the dock railing and stared across the bayou at the cypress trees inside the fog. In his cowboy boots and pinstripe suit and Stetson hat, he looked like a cattleman who had just watched his whole herd run off by dry lightning. He took off his hat and walked through the cone of light over the screen door and entered the shop.

"You gave Jim Gable a concussion Friday night. Now you take a vacation day and don't even have the courtesy to call me?" he said.

"Johnny Remeta is stalking my daughter and leaving notes at my house. I don't care what happens with Gable," I replied.

"Everything's personal with you, Dave. You use the department the way a prizefighter uses a rosin box. You're an employee of the parish. Which means I'm your supervisor, not a guy who follows you around with a dustpan and whisk broom. I don't like coming out here to explain that."

"Did Gable press charges?"

"No."

"Then it's a private matter."

"As of this moment you're on suspension."

"That's the breaks."

"That casual, huh?"

"How'd you like Remeta creeping your place?"

"Do what you're thinking and I've got your cell already waiting for you."

"I didn't call you because I can't prove what Gable was doing behind my wife's person in that pavilion. It would only bring her embarrassment."

"Behind her person? What the hell does that mean?"

"End of conversation."

"You're right. It does no good to talk to you. I wish I hadn't come here," he said. He tapped his Stetson against his leg and walked out into the mist, his mouth a tight seam.

I worked with Batist at the dock all day, then drove to the Winn-Dixie in town, filled the back of the pickup with soda pop and loaded the ice chest with lunch meat for the bait shop cooler. Right down the street was the ancient motel where Clete was living. I had not seen him since Saturday afternoon, when I had left him bleary-eyed and alcne with a scrap of paper in his hand that could have been torn from the Doomsday Book.

I pulled into the motel entrance and drove under the canopy of oaks to the stucco cottage he rented at the end of the row. Leaves were drifting out of the oak branches overhead and he was dusting the exterior of his Cadillac with a rag, flicking the leaves off the finish as though no others would drop out of the tree, the hair on his bare shoulders glowing like a blond ape's in a column of sunlight.

"What's the haps, Streak?" he said without looking up from his work.

"You doing all right?" I said.

"I used the medical dictionary at the City Library. From what it says, that stuff's like going to hell without dying."

"There're treatments."

"The victims look like they're wrapped in sheets of plastic?"

"How's Passion?"

"She doesn't talk about it. At least not to me." His voice was without tone or inflection. "It's true, you tore up Jim Gable at the Shrimp Festival?"

"I guess I have to lose it about every six months to remind myself I'm still a drunk."

"Save the dish rinse. You didn't lose it. He took it from you."

"What?"

"Gable never does anything without a reason. You're trying to bring him down. Now nobody will believe anything you say about him."

I stared at him. I felt like the confidence game mark who realizes his gullibility has no bottom. Clete threw his dust rag through the open front window of the Cadillac onto the front seat and walked over to my truck.

"You're just like me, Streak. You never left the free-fire zone. You think aspirin and meetings and cold showers are going to clean out your head. What you want is God's permission to paint the trees with the bad guys. That won't happen, big mon," he said.

"I'm sorry about Passion."

"Life's a bitch and then you die," he replied.

BED CHECK CHARLEY still visited me in my dreams, crawling on his stomach through the rice fields, his black pajamas twisted like liquid silk on his dehydrated body. He used a French bolt-action rifle with iron sights, and Japanese potato mashers that he whacked on a banyan root, igniting the impact fuse prematurely, before he flung one into our midst. But even though his ordnance was antiquated, Bed Check was punctual and did his job well. We used him in our day as we would a clock.

We were almost disappointed when a stray gunship caught him under a full moon, running across a rice paddy, and arbitrarily took him out.

A predictable enemy is a valuable one.

I knew Remeta would be back. And I knew where he would come from.

He returned three nights after the sheriff put me on departmental suspension.

I heard the outboard deep in the swamp, then the engine went dead. I slipped on my khakis and shoes and lifted the AR-15 from under the bed and went outside and crossed the lawn. The trees were dripping with night damp, and I could barely see the bait shop in the fog.

But I could hear a boat paddle dipping into the water, knocking against a cypress root, scudding softly against the worn gunnel of a pirogue.

I walked down the concrete boat ramp into the water and stepped under the dock and waited. The bayou was moving northward, rising with the tide, and I saw a dead nutria in the current with a bluepoint crab hooked onto its side.

It was airless under the dock, the water warm inside my clothes, and I could smell dead fish among the pilings. Then the breeze came up and I saw the fog roll like puffs of cotton on the bayou's surface and the bow of a pirogue emerge out of the swamp twenty yards down from the bait shop.

I had inserted a thirty-round magazine in the rifle. The bow of the pirogue moved into the bayou and now I could see the outline of a kneeling man, drawing the paddle through the water in silent J-strokes. Farther down the bayou, at the four corners, the owner of the general store had left on a porch light, and the man in the pirogue was now lighted from behind, his features distorting like a figure moving about under the phosphorescent glow of a pistol flare.

I steadied the rifle against a piling and sighted along the barrel, no longer seeing a silhouette but in my mind's eye a human face, one with teeth, a hinged jawbone, an eye glinting in profile, a skull with skin stretched over its bladed surfaces.

A line of sweat ran through my eyebrow. You just squeeze off and not think about it, I told myself. How many times did you do it before, to people you didn't even know? You just step across the line into E-major rock 'n' roll and the concerns of conscience quickly disappear in the adrenaline rush of letting off one round after another. The only reality becomes the muzzle flashes in the darkness, the clean smell of smokeless powder, the deadness in the ears that allows you to disconnect from the crumpling figure in the distance.

But I hadn't yet actually seen the face of Johnny Remeta.

I clicked on the electric switch mounted on the dock piling. Suddenly the bayou was flooded with light.

"You must get mighty tired if you stay out here in the mosquitoes every night," he said. He was grinning, his face bathed with white light, his mouth strangely discolored in the brilliance of the flood lamps, as though it were painted with purple lipstick.