"Take this man out of here," he said, lifting his chin.

But this time Val wasn't speaking to his security personnel. Three uniformed street cops had just walked through the door. They were Cajuns like myself, basically decent men who pumped iron at Red Lorille's Gym and had families and worked extra jobs to make ends meet. Their hands rested awkwardly at their sides, their eyes avoiding mine. Val Chalons waited for my removal from his office, as though it were a foregone conclusion. In the silence I was sure I heard my watch ticking. "Hey, Robicheaux, come have coffee wit' us," one of the cops said.

"Sounds great," I said.

"Yeah?" he said.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," I said.

He and his two colleagues were relaxed and confident as we left the building. A potentially embarrassing moment had come and gone, they had not had to arrest one of their own, and their world had become a comfortable place again. They told me they were glad my "IA. beef" had not jammed me up.

" 'Cause that was a righteous shoot, huh? That old dude tried to cap you and you smoked his sausage. You done what you had to do, wasn't no choice about it?" one of them said. His eyes searched mine as he waited for my answer.

That evening the sky was full of birds, the oaks deep in shade, and out on the bayou white ducks were wimpling the water among the reeds. I could smell meat fires in City Park and hear kids playing Softball. I thought I was through with Valentine Chalons for the day. But I should have known you don't publicly challenge a man whose ego is as tender as an infected gland and simply walk away from it. When the phone rang, I picked it up without glancing at the caller ID. Val began speaking as soon as he heard my voice. "You scum-sucking cretin, if it wasn't for your age, I'd break your jaw."

"Really?" I said.

"Honoria told me about your tryst and the handcuffs and a few other sickening details about your behavior. You don't seem to have any boundaries, do you?"

"Run that by me again?"

"You screwed my sister, you sorry sack of shit. She's an impaired person."

"You listen -"

"You're white trash, Robicheaux, the village fraud constantly presenting himself as suffering victim. You latch on to causes that give your life a legitimacy it doesn't rightfully possess. Now you're trying to drag my family through the mud. People like you should be bars of soap."

My hand was clenched tightly on the telephone receiver, my temples throbbing with a level of anger I was not ready for. I tried to disconnect from his words and speak in a dispassionate tone, but at the moment my only impulse was to hang up the phone and find Valentine Chalons.

"Ida Durbin and Lou Kale," I said.

"Good try, asshole," he said. The line went dead.

The rest of the evening I tried to free myself from my anger. I had already missed the 7:00 p.m. AA meeting at the Episcopalian cottage across from old New Iberia High, and now, left to my own resources, I could not sort through my own thoughts or get Valentine Chalons's words out of my head.

Was there a degree of truth in them? Was that why I was so bothered? The unarguable fact was I had blood on my hands and during most of my adult life I had placed myself in situations that allowed me to do enormous physical injury to others, even taking their lives, without being held legally accountable for my deeds.

It's no accident that both cops and recidivists have mutual understandings about the netherworld they share. The heart-pounding rush, the lack of complexity or societal restraint, the easy access to women who love a gladiator, it all waits for the participant like a glittering avenue in Las Vegas or a free-fire zone inside a green country that has been deemed expendable.

A therapist once told me that the id for some people is a quiet furnace that simply needs a jigger of whiskey as an accelerant.

He also told me I was one of those people.

I went to Clete's cottage, but he was not home. Jimmie was back in town, staying in my spare bedroom, now determined to rebuild the house we had been raised in. He had gone to Lake Charles to contract a builder who specialized in salvaged hardwoods from torn-down barns and farmhouses and what in South Louisiana is called recovered cypress – huge trees that were sunk in swamps or rivers over one hundred years ago, restored into beautiful, soft wood that seems to shine with an interior glow.

I think Jimmie believed he could correct the past and refashion it with nails and ancient wood, somehow cleansing it of bad memories and leaving only the events that should have defined our childhood. I would have given anything that evening if he had been home so I could talk with him. But he was not there, and Val Chalons's words still burned in my ears.

I drove to the graveyard in St. Martinville and under the rising moon said a rosary by Bootsie's tomb. Lightning crawled through the clouds overhead, and across the Teche I could hear music coming from a nightclub and see the neon beer signs in second-floor windows where a party was taking place. I sat for a long time beside Bootsie's tomb, then drove back to New Iberia and went to bed after midnight.

By Friday I was wired to the eyes, trying to find professional reasons which would allow me to confront Valentine for his insults. I told myself I was allowing pride to do the work of my enemies, but my best self-analysis was of no help to me. I didn't care if someone called me white trash or not, but that insult, when it is used in the South, is collective in nature, and Val Chalons had aimed his words at my origins, my mother and father, their illiteracy and poverty and hardship, and I wanted to back him into a corner and break him apart – bone, teeth, and joint.

At noon, I drove out to Molly Boyle's office on the bayou. She was behind her desk, the air-conditioning unit in the window blowing on the side of her face.

"Go to lunch with me," I said.

"Dave -"

"We'll take someone with us."

"You're suggesting we're doing something illicit," she said.

"It's what we did before. Don't shine me on."

She pressed her fingers against her temples. "You roll in here like a hurricane, then accuse me of being disingenuous. It's a bit hard to take."

"So drink a Dr Pepper with me."

"No!"

I was standing in the middle of the room, drowning in my own ineptitude and heavy-handedness.

She put on a pair of reading glasses, then took them off again. "Is this about the man you had to shoot?"

I felt my right hand open and close at my side, a drop of sweat form and run from my armpit. "He wasn't the first," I said.

"Pardon?"

"I've killed others."

"Have you talked to somebody about this?"

"What do you think?"

"I can't have lunch with you," she said.

"Why not?"

She looked straight ahead, out the window, her skin flushed, her eyes filming. Then she propped her forehead on the ends of her fingers so I could not see her face. "I can't be of any help to you. I wish I could. I'm sorry," she said. When she looked at me again, there were tiny red threads in the whites of her eyes.

That evening, after work, I went shopping at the Winn-Dixie. I filled the basket with items I didn't need, and told myself that perhaps I should invite friends over, maybe barbecue in the backyard or cook a huge gumbo for the people Jimmie and I had grown up with. I dropped frozen packs of veined shrimp and crawfish in the basket, along with gourmet cheese and a smoked ham, a chocolate cake, a gallon of ice cream, crackers and cans of smoked oysters, ginger ale, diet drinks, big jars of fruit juice, a case of Corona, a fat green bottle of Burgundy, and a quart of Jim Beam and one of Black Jack Daniel's.