“You Mr. Robicheaux?” a voice said.

“I am.”

“These motherfuckers in Baton Rouge ain’t gonna do nothing ’bout my brother.”

“Would you watch your language?”

“What, my brother been kidnapped and you bothered ’bout my motherfucking language?”

“I’m going to take a guess. You’re Bertrand Melancon.”

“Look, man, I don’t know if them stones got blood on them or what, I just want my brother back.”

“Stones with blood on them?”

“You got a hearing problem?”

My wiring was frayed, my batteries on zero. The behavior of violent and stupid people never varies. The problem in attitude and frame of reference is yours, not theirs. If you’re a pro, you become laconic and impassive and turn their own energies against them. But I wasn’t up for it. “You listen, you idiot, your brother was shot because he asked for it. I don’t know what ‘stones’ you’re talking about and I’m not your brother’s keeper or yours, either.”

“I tried to tell that fat cracker Purcel, but he wouldn’t listen. I want to wash this city off me, man. I want to take my brother out of here. I want to make up for what we done. I ain’t blowing gas, Jack. You gonna help me or not? If you ain’t, say it now.”

“Where are you?”

“I got to have your word, man.”

“You’re not in my jurisdiction. The warrants on you are in Orleans Parish. That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

I could hear him breathing into the phone’s mouthpiece. “You know your way around Jeanerette? I see a cruiser, I see a uniform, I’m a rocket.”

THE CLUB WAS constructed of cinder block, with a flat tin roof salvaged from a barn, and was located on a back street in Jeanerette not far from a drawbridge over the Teche. The sky was black, but floodlights illuminated the signs advertising the drive-by window where the owner sold frozen daiquiris to the happy-motoring crowd at five bucks a pop. The outside lights also lit the iron framework of the bridge and the bayou’s surface, which was running high up on the pilings and looked like yellow rust. When I got out of my pickup, the night air was throbbing with the sounds of tree frogs, the wind blowing through a sugarcane field out in the darkness. I didn’t want to enter the club. I didn’t want to breathe the cigarette smoke and bathroom disinfectant and refrigerated sweat, and revisit the world in which I had lived a large part of my teenage and adult life. But that’s what I did.

The only light inside came from the neon beer signs over the bar and the partially opened doors to the restrooms. The booths were made of wood and red vinyl and were nicked, split, gouged, and cigarette-burned, and reminded me of a row of darkened caves along the wall. Most of the people drinking in the club were either African-American or blue-collar, hard-core coonasses or people who called themselves Creoles and lived on both sides of the color line. It was a place marked by neither joy nor despair and seldom by violence or as a place of inception for romantic trysts. It was a place people went when they wished to set their lives into abeyance, where clocks didn’t matter, and where Fox News assured them the problems in their lives were of other people’s manufacture.

In a booth at the back of the club I saw a young black man sitting by himself, a beer and a length of microwave white boudin unwrapped from its wax paper in front of him. He was wearing a short-brim fedora, with a tiny red feather in the band, one like John Lee Hooker used to wear. But he had the same haunted, jailhouse look as the kid whose mug shot was in a manila folder in my office file cabinet. His eyes lifted into mine. “You Robicheaux?”

I sat down across from him. “You called me ‘mister’ on the phone. You can call me ‘mister’ now or ‘Detective’ now.”

“Whatever.”

“I’ve got a long night ahead of me. What is it you have that might be of interest to us?”

“Man, you’re reeking of hostility. What’s your fucking problem?”

“You are.”

“Me? What I ever done to you?”

“I have it on fairly good authority you and your brother and your friends are probably rapists.”

“How about lowering your voice, man?”

I could feel a tuning fork start to tremble inside me. I once saw American troops who had been hung in trees and skinned alive. The anger I experienced then was of a kind that destroys our humanity and gives false justification for the evil we in turn perpetrate upon others. I had these same feelings toward Bertrand Melancon now.

I went to the bar and bought a bottle of carbonated water and sat back down. I drank from the bottle and screwed the cap tight. “What did you take out of Sidney Kovick’s house?”

He kept trying to read my face, as though he were watching a dangerous animal through the bars of a cage. “A thirty-eight and some cash and silverware and shit. Lookie here, man, before I say anything else-”

“What are these ‘stones’ you keep talking about?”

“No, man, you got to clear up this rumor I’m hearing. About this guy Kovick. He cut off somebody’s legs with a chain saw?”

“Sidney and his wife used to live in Metairie. They had a little boy who was five years old. He was playing on his three-wheeler in the next-door neighbor’s drive. The neighbor came home drunk and drove over him with his car and killed him. About six months later the neighbor disappeared. No one knows what happened to him. But some people say Sidney put on a raincoat and rubber gloves and went down in a basement in Shreveport and committed an awful deed. I don’t know if I’d put a lot of credence in that or not.”

Bertrand’s face looked stricken and seemed to actually turn gray with fear. He clenched his hands between his thighs and drew air through his teeth. “Man, I don’t want to hear stuff like that.”

“You mess with Sidney, that’s the way it flushes. Tell me about the stones you took from Sidney ’s house.”

“No fence is gonna touch them. The word’s out. The guy holding these rocks is gonna get hung up in a meat locker, a piece at a time. That ain’t a shuck, man. Three different guys tole me that. That’s why they took Eddy. While we’re sitting here, they’re sweating Eddy. I cain’t stand thinking about it.”

His breath was sour with funk, his face coated with an oily sheen. He gripped his stomach and shut his eyes.

“You okay?” I said.

“I got ulcers.”

“And you’re eating boudin and drinking alcohol?”

“Lookie, what if I leave most everything for you in a bag, maybe I just hold back a lI’l, and you give it to Mr. Kovick?”

“Where did the shot come from?”

He swallowed, disconcerted, angry over his powerlessness and the fact that I kept redirecting the conversation. “I ain’t seen it. I just heard it and saw Eddy go down.”

“You know what bothers me here, Bertrand? You make no mention of Kevin Rochon. He was seventeen. He was the only one among y’all without a sheet. He got his brains blown out and all you can talk about is yourself and your brother.”

“We tole Andre not to bring him. It ain’t our fault. Why you keep getting on my case?”

“You boosted a boat in the Lower Nine, didn’t you?”

I saw his fingers splay on his stomach again, his mouth hang open as a rush of pain flared into his bowels and rectum. “I cain’t take this. I wish it had been me instead of Kevin or Eddy. I just want to get my brother back. I just want out.”

He wasn’t acting. I genuinely believed that Bertrand Melancon had taken up residence in a place that does not have geographical boundaries, one that we associate with mythology and outmoded religions.

“If I were you, I’d ship Kovick’s goods to his flower store in Algiers. With luck, he’ll turn your brother loose and he won’t come after you.”

I tried to hold my eyes on his and not blink, but he read the lie in them.