Helen glanced through the glass in my door, then opened the door without knocking. “You look sharp, Pops,” she said.

“I hear that a lot,” I replied.

She walked to my window and gazed at the Sunset Limited passing down the railroad tracks. She wore a pair of tight slacks and a white shirt with the short sleeves folded in neat cuffs. A four-by-seven yellow notepad was stuffed in her back pocket. She hooked her thumbs in the sides of her gunbelt. “You rested up?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. “Say it, Helen.”

“I just got off the phone with FEMA and the FBI. The civil service and governmental structure of New Orleans has been destroyed. We’re about to get hit with a shitload of casework we don’t need.”

“Shouldn’t you be telling this to the entire department?”

“This particular case involves one of Clete Purcel’s bail skips. It also involves a guy you know by the name of Otis Baylor.”

“An insurance man?”

“That’s the guy. The Feds believe a number of homicides may have been committed by vigilantes who decided they’d have some fun during the storm. They think Otis Baylor may have popped some looters who had just gutted Sidney Kovick’s house.”

“Home invaders hit Sidney Kovick?”

“Yeah, evidently four of the dumbest shits in New Orleans. One got his head blown off and one will be a quadriplegic the rest of his life. The Feds believe Baylor had a grudge against blacks for raping his daughter and he probably used the opportunity to take a couple of pukes off the board.”

“It doesn’t sound like him.”

“The Feds are taking heat about going after gangbangers and letting white shooters skate. The Baylor investigation will probably be a lawn ornament for them. Anyway, we’re supposed to do what we can. You okay with that, bwana?”

“What’s Clete Purcel’s role in all this?”

She pulled the yellow notepad from her back pocket and looked at it. “The brother of the quadriplegic is named Bertrand Melancon. Clete had him in custody but lost him in the handover at the chain-link jail. Here’s the irony in all this, Dave. Clete told the Feds he thinks the Melancon brothers and a friend of theirs named Andre Rochon might actually be rapists.”

“Based on what?”

“Clete says Rochon’s panel truck contained evidence that might link Rochon and possibly the Melancons to an abduction and rape in the Lower Nine.”

“Yeah, he told me about these guys. They’re the ones who ran over him right before the storm. You want me to see Baylor?”

“You mind?”

I once knew a door gunner in Vietnam who wouldn’t go on R amp; R out-of-country for fear he would desert and not return to duty. So he stayed stoned in the door of his Huey, stoned in the bush, and stoned in Saigon, and finished his tour without ever leaving the fresh-air mental asylum of Indochina. As Helen waited for my answer, my friend’s point of view seemed much more reasonable than I had previously thought.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I checked out a cruiser and drove back to New Orleans. The sky over the wetlands was still filled with birds that seemed to have no destination or home. After four days, members of the 82nd Airborne had arrived in the city and most of the looting and violence had stopped. But eighty percent of the city was still underwater, and tens of thousands of people still had nowhere to go.

I turned off St. Charles and threaded my way through piles of downed trees on several side streets in the general direction of Otis Baylor’s house. Finally I parked my pickup and either waded or walked across people’s lawns the rest of the way.

The front porch of Otis Baylor’s house was rounded, with a half-circle roof on it supported by Doric columns. I raised the brass ring on the door and knocked. The water had receded on his street, exposing the neutral ground. Down the street, on the opposite side, I could see the home of Sidney Kovick. A repair crew was pulling plywood off the picture windows.

Otis Baylor opened the front door. His face was round and empty, like that of a man who had just returned from a funeral. “Yes?” he said.

“I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, Mr. Baylor,” I said. “I’ve been assigned to help in the investigation of a double shooting that took place in front of your house. You might remember me from New Iberia.”

He did not extend his hand. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a little problem here. A high school kid got his brains blown out in front of your house, and a full-time loser with him took a round through his spinal cord. The Feds think vigilantes may have done it. Frankly, I don’t think this investigation is going anywhere, but our department is on lend-lease with the City of New Orleans and we need to do what we can.”

There was a beat, a microsecond pause in which his eyes went away from mine.

“Come in,” he said, holding open the door. “You’re lucky you caught me at home. I’m using the house as my office now, but I’m usually in the field with my adjusters. Would you like some tea? I still have ice in my freezer.”

“No, thanks. I’ll make this as quick as I can, sir.”

He invited me to sit down with him in his den. The books on his shelves were largely referential or encyclopedic in nature, or had been purchased from book clubs that specialize in popular history and biography. His desk was overflowing with paper. Through the side window I could see a bullet-headed man on a ladder trying to free a splintered oak limb from his roof.

“An FBI investigator said you heard a single shot but you don’t know where it came from,” I said.

“I was asleep. The shot woke me up. I looked out the dormer window and saw a kid floating in the water and another guy lying half inside the front of the boat.”

“You own a firearm, Mr. Baylor?”

“It’s Otis. Yes, a 1903-model Springfield bolt-action rifle. You want to see it?”

“Not right now. Thanks for offering. After you saw the kid in the water and the one half inside the boat, did you go outside?”

“By the time I got my clothes on, one guy had loaded the wounded one all the way into the boat and was already down to the corner. Another guy was running.”

“They were all black?”

“As far as I could tell. It was dark.”

“And you saw nobody else on the street or on a porch or in a house window?”

“No, I didn’t.”

I opened the manila folder in my hand and read from the notes given to me over the phone by an FBI agent working out of Baton Rouge. “The Feds and the guys from NOPD believe the shot had to come from this side of the street.”

“Maybe it did. I wouldn’t know.”

“The only occupied houses in immediate proximity to the shooting were yours and your next-door neighbor’s.”

“I have no argument with other people’s conclusions as to what happened here. I’ve told you what I heard and what I saw.” He looked at his watch. “You want to see the Springfield?”

“If you don’t mind.”

He went upstairs and returned with the rifle, handing it to me with the bolt open on an empty magazine. “Am I a suspect in the shooting?”

“Right now, we’re eliminating suspects.”

“Why didn’t your friends take my firearm? That’s what I would have done.”

“Because they didn’t have a place to store evidence. Because they didn’t have a warrant. Because the system is broken.”

But there was another reality at work as well, one I hadn’t shared with him. The round that had struck Eddy Melancon’s throat and emptied Kevin Rochon’s brainpan never slowed down and the metal tracings inside the wounds it inflicted would be of little evidentiary value.

I lifted the rifle to my face and sniffed at the chamber. “You just oiled it?”

“I don’t remember exactly when I cleaned it.”

“Can I see the ammunition that goes with it?”

“I don’t even know if I have any.”