“Did I piss you off?” Clete said.

“No,” I said. “I think Bertrand Melancon was at Otis Baylor’s house.”

“He wants to square what he did to Baylor’s daughter?”

“Yeah, but how?”

“He could give them the diamonds. But I don’t think a pus head like Melancon has it in him.”

I was tired and didn’t want to think about it anymore. “I’ll buy you a Dr Pepper up at miller’s market.”

“I can’t wait. Life with you is-”

“What?”

“You’re the best cop I ever knew. But you’re nuts, Dave. You always have been,” he said. “Life with you is like being around a guy who’s got kryptonite for a brain.”

THE CALL CAME in the middle of the night. Outside, the moon was white in the heavens and the wind buffeted the house and whipped leaves down the slope onto the surface of the bayou. I turned on the light in the kitchen and picked up the receiver. The caller ID indicated the caller was using a cell phone. “Mr. Dave?” the voice said.

“Listen, Bertrand-”

“Don’t hang up, man. Somebody shot into my grandmother’s house. I was standing by the window and the bullet come right t’rou the glass. I was packing my things and my grandmother axed me to get her a glass of water. If I ain’t turned around just then, I’d be dead.”

“Who shot at you?”

“I don’t know. This guy Ronald was at my grandmother’s house, pretending he’s some kind of insurance cop, trying to bribe me into telling him where them stones is at. I think he works for Sidney Kovick, except maybe he decided to screw Kovick and put toget’er his own deal. So I called up Kovick and tole him that.”

“You dimed Ronald Bledsoe with Kovick?”

“Yeah, you could put it that way. Hey, man, what worse trouble could I be in? I helped tear Kovick’s house apart. I stole his diamonds and his counterfeit money and his blow and his thirty-eight out of the wall. We even tore the chandeliers out of the ceiling.”

“Kovick had cocaine in his walls?”

“Just one bag. We took it wit’ us. It had already been stepped on. It was his private stash.”

That piece of information didn’t fit, but I didn’t pursue it. “Where are you, Bertrand?”

“Wit’ my grandmother, in a safe place.”

“Where?”

“Look, I tried to make it up to the Baylor family. But they wasn’t interested. I cain’t do no more than what I done. You been straight wit’ me, man, so I t’ought I had to tell you these things. My grandmother didn’t have nothing to do wit’ any of it. She don’t know about no crimes I committed, either, so don’t be hanging an aiding-and-abetting on her.”

“How did you try to make it up, Bertrand?”

“What difference do it make now?”

There was no point in trying to extract any more information from him. Maybe it was finally time to leave Bertrand Melancon to his fate, whatever it was. But I had one more question.

“When Father LeBlanc fell from his church roof and you saw lights under the water, did a Coast Guard helicopter fly by overhead?”

“There wasn’t no helicopter. That’s how come all them people drowned,” he replied. “Who tole you there was a helicopter? I would have heard it. All I heard was them people yelling for help inside that attic. You don’t never forget sounds like that.”

I COULDN’T SLEEP the rest of the night. In the morning I told Molly about the content of Bertrand’s phone call. Alafair had stayed overnight at a girlfriend’s house in Lafayette. It was 8:37 a.m.

“What time did Alafair say she was going to be home?” I said.

“She didn’t. Why?” Molly said.

“Because I think Bledsoe is making a move. He tried to double-cross Kovick or whoever hired him by bribing Melancon, then he tried to clip Melancon to cover it up. I think he plans to blow Dodge, but not before he pays back Alafair for kicking his face in.”

Molly was framed in the back door, Snuggs’s bowl in one hand and a sack of dry food in the other. The sunlight seemed to form a red nimbus around her head. “Maybe Bledsoe won’t do that.”

“A guy like that doesn’t make decisions. His choices are already hardwired into his head. He seeks pleasure for himself or he seeks revenge against his enemies. Often the two are the same.”

“If you’re trying to scare the hell out of me, you’re succeeding.”

I looked through the Rolodex and called the home of Alafair’s friend in Lafayette. No one answered. I tried to think, but I was too tired, too used up to see anything straight.

“Something Melancon mentioned doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He told me he and the other looters took a bag of cocaine, a thirty-eight, some counterfeit money, and the blood diamonds from Kovick’s wall. He said the coke had already been cut, which to Melancon meant it was probably Kovick’s private stash. Except Sidney isn’t a doper and neither is his wife. I think the coke and gun and counterfeit all belonged to the same people Sidney took the diamonds from.”

“I’m not following you,” Molly said.

“Maybe Sidney has no connection to Ronald Bledsoe. Maybe our enemy is Sidney ’s enemy.”

Molly poured dry food into Snuggs’s bowl and set it on the floor, then opened the back screen and let Tripod in. Tripod and Snuggs began eating nose-to-nose out of the same bowl, their tails stretched out behind them. Molly lit a burner on the stove and dragged a big iron skillet on top of it.

“Bledsoe is evil, Dave. I don’t care who he works for. If he comes here with the intention of hurting any member of this family, I’ll kill him. That’s a promise. Now sit down while I fix us some eggs and coffee.”

It must have been coincidence, but both Snuggs and Tripod stopped eating and looked up from their bowl.

I DROVE TO Helen Soileau’s house in an old neighborhood close to the downtown area. Her house had a wide gallery and tall windows with ventilated shutters like my own. Almost every Saturday morning children came to her house ostensibly to help with the yard work, but the morning activities usually ended with homemade ice cream and hot dogs. On this particular morning four or five kids were helping her weed her flower beds. I parked my pickup at the curb and walked up on the lawn. She got up from her knees, brushing grains of dirt from her gloves. She looked at my face.

“You okay, Pops?” she said.

“We need to get Bledsoe into custody.”

“What else is new?”

“He may have taken a shot at Bertrand Melancon last night. If that’s the case, I suspect he’s about to blow town. I think he might try to get even with a few other people before he does.”

“You said ‘if.’”

“Maybe it wasn’t Bledsoe. Sidney Kovick’s gumballs are in New Iberia. Maybe they’d like to take Melancon off at the neck, too. Plus, I think Otis Baylor may have found out Melancon was staying at his grandmother’s in Loreauville.”

“How does one black kid get half the planet on his case?”

“But the one certifiable psychopath in the mix is still Ronald Bledsoe. He also has the greatest motivation. He tried to cut his own deal with Melancon and Melancon dimed him with Kovick.”

The day was cool, the sky a hard blue, the sunlight through the trees like gold coins on her face. She watched two children spraying charcoal lighter on the portable grill in the side yard. “You guys wait for me to do that,” she said.

Then she looked back at me, her thumbs hooked in the sides of her jeans. “We rousted him once. It didn’t work. We can’t tell the guy ‘We don’t like you. Get out of town before sundown.’”

“How would you like him around these kids?”

“You want my job, run for office. In the meantime, don’t lecture me, Streak.”

I got back in my truck without saying good-bye and drove away. In my rearview mirror I saw her toe at the grass, her thumbs still hooked in her jeans, like a teenage girl who had just lost something of value.