She wanted to talk.

"Talk? Clete's in the bag and you want to talk?" I said.

"I've done something terribly wrong. I'm just down the road. Will it bother you if I come by?"

"Yes, it will."

"Dave?"

"What?"

Then her voice broke.

MEGAN SAT AT A BACK table in the bait shop with a cup of coffee and waited for me while I rang up the bill on two fishermen who had just finished eating at the counter. Her hat rested by her elbow and her hair blew in the wind from the fan, but there was a twisted light in her eyes, as though she could not concentrate on anything outside her skin.

I sat down across from her.

"Y'all had a fight?" I asked.

"It was over the black man who started the fire," she said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"It's Cool Breeze Broussard. It has to be. He was going to set fire to the main house but something scared him off. So he poured gasoline under a trailer on the set."

"Why should you and Clete fight over that?"

"I helped get Cool Breeze out of jail. I knew about all his trouble in St. Mary Parish and his wife's suicide and his problems with the Terrebonne family. I wanted the story. I pushed everything else out of my mind… Maybe I planted some ideas in him about revenge."

"You still haven't told me why y'all fought."

"Clete said people who set fires deserve to be human candles themselves. He started talking about some marines he saw trapped inside a burning tank."

"Breeze has always had his own mind about things. He's not easily influenced, Megan."

"Swede will kill him. He'll kill anybody he thinks is trying to hurt Cisco."

"That's it, huh? You think you're responsible for getting a black man into it with a psychopath?"

"Yes. And he's not a psychopath. You've got this guy all wrong."

"How about getting Clete into the middle of it? You think that might be a problem, too?"

"I feel very attached-"

"Cut it out, Megan."

"I have a deep-"

"He was available and you made him your point man. Except he doesn't have any idea of what's going on."

Her eyes drifted onto mine, then they began to film. I heard Batist come inside the shop, then go back out.

"Why'd you want to put him on that movie set?" I said.

"My brother. He's mixed up with bad people in the Orient. I think the Terrebonnes are in it, too."

"What do you know about the Terrebonnes?"

"My father hated them."

A customer came in and picked a package of Red Man off the wire rack and left the money on the register. Megan straightened her back and touched at one eye with her finger.

"I called the St. Mary Sheriffs Department. Clete will be arraigned at ten," I said.

"You don't hold me in very high regard, do you?"

"You just made a mistake. Now you've owned up to it. I think you're a good person, Meg."

"What do I do about Clete?"

"My father used to say never treat a brave man as less."

"I wish Cisco and I had never come back here."

But you always do, I thought. Because of a body arched into wood planks, its blood pooling in the dust, its crusted wounds picked by chickens.

"What did you say?" she asked.

"Nothing. I didn't say anything."

"I'm going. I'll be at Cisco's house for a spell."

She put a half dollar on the counter for the coffee and walked out the screen door. Then, just before she reached her automobile, she turned and looked back at me. She held her straw hat in her fingers, by her thigh, and with her other hand she brushed her hair back on her head, her face lifted into the sunlight.

Batist flung a bucket full of water across one of the spool tables.

"When they make cow eyes at you, it ain't 'cause they want to go to church, no," he said.

"What?"

"Her daddy got killed when she was li'l. She always coming round to talk to a man older than herself. Like they ain't no other man in New Iberia. You got to go to collitch to figure it out?" he said.

TWO HOURS LATER HELEN and I drove over to Mout' Broussard's house on the west side of town. A black four-door sedan with tinted windows and a phone antenna was parked in the dirt driveway, the back door open. Inside, we could see a man in a dark suit, wearing aviator glasses, unlocking the handcuffs on Cool Breeze Broussard.

Helen and I walked toward the car as Adrien Glazier and two male FBI agents got out with Cool Breeze.

"What's happenin', Breeze?" I said.

"They give me a ride to my daddy's," he replied.

"Your business here needs to wait, Mr. Robicheaux," Adrien Glazier said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the male agents touch Cool Breeze on the arm with one finger and point for him to wait on the gallery.

"What are you going to do with him?" I asked Adrien Glazier.

"Nothing."

"Breeze is operating out of his depth. You know that. Why are you leaving the guy out there?" I said.

"Has he complained to you? Who appointed you his special oversight person?" she replied.

"You ever hear of a guy named Harpo Scruggs?" I asked.

"No."

"I think he's got the contract on Breeze. Except he's supposed to be dead."

"Then you've got something to work on. In the meantime, we'll handle things here. Thanks for dropping by," the man who had uncuffed Cool Breeze said.

He was olive-skinned, his dark blond hair cut short, his opaque demeanor one that allowed him to be arrogant without ever being accountable.

Helen stepped toward him, her feet slightly spread.

"Reality check, you pompous fuck, this is our jurisdiction. We go where we want. You try to run us off an investigation, you're going to be picking up the soap in our jail tonight," she said.

"She's the one busted up Boxleiter," the other male agent said, his elbow hooked over the top of the driver's door, a smile at the edge of his mouth.

"Yes?" she said.

"Impressive… Mean shit," he said.

"We're gone," Adrien Glazier said.

"Run this guy Scruggs. He was a gun bull at Angola. Maybe he's hooked up with the Dixie Mafia," I said.

"A dead man? Right," she said, then got in her car with her two colleagues and drove away.

Helen stared after them, her hands on her hips.

"Broussard's the bait tied down under the tree stand, isn't he?" she said.

"That's the way I'd read it," I said.

Cool Breeze watched us from the swing on the gallery. His brogans were caked with mud and he spun a cloth cap on the tip of his index finger.

I sat down on the wood steps and looked out at the street.

"Where's Mout'?" I asked.

"Staying at his sister's."

"You're playing other people's game," I said.

"They gonna know when I'm in town."

"Bad way to think, podna."

I heard the swing creak behind me, then his brogans scuffing the boards under him as the swing moved back and forth. A young woman carrying a bag of groceries walked past the house and the sound of the swing stopped.

"My dead wife Ida, I hear her in my sleep sometimes. Talking to me from under the water, wit' that icy chain wrapped round her. I want to lift her up, out of the silt, pick the ice out of her mout' and eyes. But the chain just too heavy, I pull and pull and my arms is like lead, and all the time they ain't no air getting down to her. You ever have a dream like that?" he said.

I turned and looked at him, my ears ringing, my face suddenly cold.

"I t'ought so. You blame me for what I do?" he said.

THAT AFTERNOON I MADE telephone calls to Juarez, Mexico, and to the sheriffs departments in three counties along the Tex-Mex border. No one had any information about Harpo Scruggs or his death. Then an FBI agent in El Paso referred me to a retired Texas Ranger by the name of Lester Cobb. His accent was deep down in his breathing passages, like heated air breaking through the top of oatmeal.