I started to speak, then saw Molly Boyle come through the door, the sun bright and hot at her back. "There was a man in a boat up the bayou. The children say he had a rifle in his boat," she said.

The angry, fat woman pulled her child down the hall and slammed the door behind her.

"Where's this guy now?" I said to Molly.

She went to a window and looked across the lawn at a line of cypress trees on the bayou. I stood behind her and could smell the heat from the grill in her clothes and a warm odor like flowers and shampoo in her hair. "He's gone. He was just behind those trees. He had a pair of binoculars. I think he was watching you walk into the building," she said.

When she turned around, her chin was pointed upwards. She seemed smaller, shorter, her face both beautiful and vulnerable, in a way that made my throat dry and caused my loins to tingle. "Can you describe what he looked like, Sister?" I said.

"Don't call me that again, will you?" she said.

"I won't."

"He was white. He had a cap on. But I didn't get a good look at him. Is someone after you?"

"Could be."

Her eyes moved over my face. "Are you feeling okay? Our air-conditioning is broken," she said.

"The heat doesn't bother me," I said.

"Would you like a glass of water?"

"No. No thanks," I said. I opened my cell phone and punched in a 911 call.

She stepped away from me, then looked back over her shoulder, waiting for me to follow her down the hall. "I'm glad you came today. The children really enjoyed meeting you. Spend more time with us," she said.

I stared at her, puzzled, unsure what I should say next. "By the way, I helped a little boy go to the restroom. I'm afraid I angered his mother."

"That's Mrs. Poche. You're lucky she didn't club you with her purse. She was angry the day she was born."

In the next five minutes cruisers from both Jeanerette and New Iberia arrived on the drawbridges to the north and south of us. But no one saw any sign of a man in a boat with binoculars and a rifle. I talked to a little black boy who had seen the man in the boat through a canebrake.

"He had a rifle. It looked like he had a tin can stuck on the end of the barrel," the boy said.

A silencer?

But contract killers don't pop you in broad daylight in front of large numbers of witnesses, I told myself.

Tell that to President Kennedy or Jimmy Hoffa, I thought.

Jimmie had gone back to New Orleans and I was alone again. I had never done well with solitude. But I had another enemy, too, one that did not depart with age. I suspect monastic saints tossed in their sleep with it, waking fatigued and throbbing at first light, their fingers knotted in prayer as they tried to extricate themselves from the soft shapes that beckoned to them from their dreams. For that reason alone I always admired them, but my admiration for them did not make my own problem with celibacy any the less, perhaps because I was a drunk as well as one of those for whom the sybaritic life was only a wink of the eye away.

Sometimes I thought I heard Bootsie telling me I should not be alone. Didn't the story in Genesis indicate the same? Was it not a form of pride to set a standard above that of ordinary men?

That evening I went to Clete's cottage at the motor court, where he was waxing his Caddy under a mimosa tree. He was bare-chested and wore a Marine Corps utility cap on the back of his head and a huge pair of electric-blue Everlast boxing trunks that hung to his knees. The shadows of the mimosa branches looked like feathers moving on his skin.

"Where have you been for the last three days?" I said.

"Chasing down a couple of child molesters. They run every time. I don't know why Nig and Willie -"

"Why don't you answer your cell phone?" I said.

"I lost it somewhere. I think maybe a gal rolled me. I can't deal with working for Nig and Willie anymore. It's really affecting my stability. You think I could get on with the department?"

"In Iberia Parish?" I said.

"Something wrong with that?"

"Nothing," I said, my face empty.

"Can you run it by Helen? Salary is not a factor. Long as it's detective grade," he said.

"Sure," I said.

"I'd really like that," he said, rubbing a soft rag along a tailfin on his Cadillac, whistling to himself, as though somehow I had reassured him that people such as ourselves were not out of sync with the rest of the world.

Then I told him about the death of Billy Joe Pitts. "Pitts got hit in the head with his own motorboat?" he said.

"That's what the sheriff says."

Clete opened a Budweiser and drank from it, his throat working, his eyes flat. "You figure somebody took him off the board?" he asked.

"Who knows?"

He watched the way I was looking at him. He wiped the beer off his lips with his hand. "Get yourself a Dr Pepper out of the icebox."

"I don't want one," I said.

"What's bugging you?" he said.

"Nothing," I replied.

He picked up a pint bottle of whiskey from inside the open top of his Caddy. It was wrapped inside a brown paper bag, a shaft of sunlight flashing on the broken seal affixed to the cap. He took a hit from the neck and chased it with beer from his Budweiser can. He lit a cigarette and drank again from the whiskey, then ground the cigarette out in the gravel, his cheeks blooming with color. Unconsciously I wet my bottom lip. His eyes wandered over my face and I saw a great sadness in them.

"I'm a bad example. You stop having the thoughts you're having," he said.

"I'm not having any thoughts. I worry about you," I lied.

"Right," he said.

I headed for my truck.

"I'll put the booze up. I'll drive you to a meeting. Dave, come back here. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" he said.

I put on my running shorts and lifted weights in the backyard, did three sets of push-ups, with my feet propped on a picnic bench – thirty reps to each set – and jogged two miles through City Park, then hit it hard back across the drawbridge to home. But I could not rid myself of the restlessness that seemed to invade my metabolism without cause, nor the thoughts and images that kept drifting before my eyes.

There was no question about their nature. They had to do with the smell of perfume, the amber splash that sour mash makes when it's first poured on ice, a woman's face framed softly inside the thickness of her hair, the shine of bar light on the tops of her breasts, perhaps a cherry held between her teeth, her hand curved on the neck of a freshly opened bottle of champagne, bursting with white foam.

I opened a bottle of Talking Rain and drank it empty, then showered, put on my pajama bottoms, and tried to read, my shield, handcuffs, slapjack, and.45 on the nightstand beside me. The last of the summer light had gone out of the sky, and in the yard I could hear the bamboo rattling in the breeze and the first patter of rain on the trees. Sometime just before midnight I fell asleep with my hand over my eyes. I had not locked the front door.

When I woke, the room was black. I went to the bathroom and got back in bed. Outside, dry lightning flickered on the trees. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed I was inside a cave, my arm twisted behind me. That's when I heard the rocking chair moving back and forth in the corner.

I opened my eyes and saw a silhouette seated in the chair. When I tried to sit up, my right wrist came tight against the handcuffs that were clipped around it and the brass bedstead. I reached with my left hand for the nightstand, where my.45 should have been. It was gone, along with my slapjack. The figure in the chair stopped rocking.

"I was watching you sleep," a woman's voice said.

"Honoria?" I said.

"Your front door was unlocked. That's a dangerous thing to do," she said.