I could feel my finger tightening inside the trigger guard.

"You're a pisspot, Johnny," I said.

"I've heard it all before, Mr. Robicheaux. My father said my mother would have gotten rid of me when I was in the womb but she didn't want to waste a coat hanger," he replied.

Then he opened his palms, as though accepting grace from above, his head tilted, taking my measure.

"Use your left hand and drop your weapon overboard," I said.

"I don't have one."

I waded out from under the dock so he could see me.

"You're under arrest. Pull the pirogue into shore," I said.

"You couldn't pop me, could you?"

I could hear myself breathing and feel the oil and moisture on my finger inside the trigger guard. He stood up in the pirogue, balancing himself, his hands extended outward. He stared at the muzzle of the rifle, his lips pursed, waiting.

"So long, Mr. Robicheaux. Tell Alafair I said hello."

He hit the water in a long, flat dive, his weight flipping the pirogue over. With two strokes he was inside the cypress trees, running across sandspits and through the sloughs, cobwebs and air vines swinging behind him.

I was trembling all over, as though I had malaria. My head thundered and my palms were wet on the plastic stock of the rifle. I leaned over and vomited into the water.

I walked up the boat ramp, then onto the dock, and pulled off my T-shirt and sat down on the planks and pulled my knees up in front of me and rested my face on top of them.

I stayed there until the sun rose, then got up and slung the AR-15 muzzle-down on my shoulder and walked up the slope through the trees with the knowledge I had deliberately set out to murder another human being and had simultaneously failed as both assassin and police officer.

THAT AFTERNOON I got a call from Wally, our departmental comedian.

"Enjoying your days off?" he asked.

"I'm cleaning the grease trap right now. Come on over.

"I got a little problem. I'd like to finish my shift without being taken out of here in a box. My systolic is 190. I don't need race riots. I don't need black people shouting into the phone at me. I don't need no white lesbian crazy woman firing up a mob over on Hopkins."

"You're talking about Helen Soileau?"

"I knew you could think it out. Way to go, Dave."

I drove into town, then over to the west side to Hopkins Street, which, along with Railroad, used to comprise New Iberia 's red-light district. Helen Soileau had just handcuffed two black kids, about age fifteen, through the cap chain on a fire hydrant.

I parked the pickup in front of a liquor store and walked through the crowd that had formed on the sidewalk and the lawn of two houses. Helen was bent over at the waist, her hands on her hips, venting her spleen at the two kids sitting on the cement. A city cop in a uniform was looking nervously up and down the street.

Helen raised up and stared at me, her face still heated. Her slacks were torn at the thigh and mud was smeared on her white shirt. "What are you doing here?" she said.

"I just happened by. What'd these guys do?"

"Not much. One shot a BB into a passing car and hit a six-week-old baby. This other little fuck put an M-80 under an old woman's bedroom floor."

"I think we need to turn the butane down."

"They're going to tell me where that BB gun is or stay here till they have to eat the paint on that hydrant. You hear that, you little pukes?"

"Walk over here with me, Helen," I said.

"You got no business telling me what to do," she replied.

"I can't argue with that. But we're on city turf. Let them handle it."

She lifted her face into mine. Her eyes were blazing, her thick arms pumped.

"I'd like to punch you out, Dave. All the skipper needs is an apology and you're back on the clock," she said.

"So let the city guy do his job and take the kids down."

"Yeah, I give a shit," she said, and bent over and unlocked the handcuffs on the boys' wrists, then cuffed them again and walked them to the city cruiser and shoved them inside and slammed the door behind them. Then she walked back to me and said, "Buy me coffee, Pops."

I expected ONE of Helen's harangues, but I was wrong. We went to the McDonald's on East Main and sat by the window. The sky had turned green and the wind was blowing the oaks on the street, and leaves were rising out of the crown of the trees high in the air.

"I was in Lafayette this morning. You know that tattoo and fortune-telling place right off the four-lane?" she said.

"An old cypress cabin with beads and colored lights hanging all over the gallery?"

"I saw Passion Labiche go in there. That girl bothers me."

"How?"

"Vachel Carmouche was a shithead and everybody knew it. That whole trial sucked. I get pissed off every time somebody tells me Carmouche was a lawman… Why the face?"

"I found evidence she didn't do it by herself."

"You're telling me Passion helped her?"

"Yeah, I am."

"Big revelation," Helen said. "What else is bothering you today?"

"I set up an ambush on Johnny Remeta last night."

"You did what?"

"I was going to flush his grits. I couldn't pull the trigger."

She cleaned up our mess from the table and walked to the trash basket and stuffed it inside and came back to the table.

"This is a noisy place full of teenagers and echoes and cooks yelling and I couldn't quite make out what you were saying. See you around, bwana," she said.

She walked out to her cruiser and drove away.

I SLEPT THAT night with the remote phone under the bed. It rang just after 11 P.M. I picked it up and went into the kitchen before I clicked it on.

"You're in it for the long haul," I said without waiting for him to speak.

"I figured you wrong last night. I thought honor required I tell you that, Mr. Robicheaux."

"Honor?"

"I said you didn't have in it you to drop the hammer on me. I know who popped your mother. That's why you let me live."

"You're not even close, partner."

I could hear him breathing on the mouth of the receiver. "We're alike. I've seen it in your eyes," he said.

"I always thought my mother betrayed me, Johnny. But I learned to forgive her. I did that so I don't have to be a drunk anymore."

"You saying something about my mother now?"

"You're smart. Read Chaucer's story about the three guys who set out to find Death and slay him once and for all. They found him, all right. But things didn't work out as they expected."

"Let me tell you what real revenge is. I'm gonna shake down the people who did your mother, then I'm gonna leave the country and have them killed by somebody else. But you'll never know for sure who they were."

"Pull on your own pud, Johnny. This stuff is a real drag," I said, and clicked off the phone. Then I walked through the house and pulled the phone connections from all the wall jacks.

The sheriff lived up Bayou Teche in a yellow and gray frame house with a wide gallery, set back under huge cedar and oak trees. When I drove out there Saturday afternoon, he was trimming back the climbing roses in his flower bed while his grandchildren played in the side yard. He wore a tattered straw hat to protect his head from the thorns, and his stomach hung heavily over his belt. In his home setting, cupping flowers and placing them gingerly in a bowl of water, his clothes stained with fungicide and house paint, the sheriff looked much older than he did at the department and nothing like a law officer.

I sat down on the front steps and picked up some pieces of bark from a bag of mulch and flicked them out into the grass.