A beer and a hard-boiled egg wasn't a bad price for holding on to a bit of your humanity.

Fifteen years ago, during a hurricane, Chatlin was run over by a truck on the highway. The newspaper office was moved; the Southern Pacific depot across from the hotel was demolished and replaced by a post office; and Norma Jean's quasi-brothel became an ordinary hotel with a dark, cheerless bar for late-night drinkers.

Ordinary until Ruben Esteban checked into the hotel, then came down to the bar at midnight, the hard surfaces of his face glowing like corn bread under the neon. Esteban climbed on top of a stool, his Panama hat wobbling on his head. Norma Jean took one look at him and began screaming that Chatlin Ardoin had escaped from the grave.

Early Wednesday morning Helen and I were at the Lafayette Parish Jail. It was raining hard outside and the corridors were streaked with wet footprints. The homicide detective named Daigle took us up in the elevator. His face was scarred indistinctly and had the rounded, puffed quality of a steroid user's, his black hair clipped short across the top of his forehead. His collar was too tight for him and he kept pulling at it with two fingers, as though he had a rash.

"You smoked a guy and you're not on the desk?" he said to Helen.

"The guy already had a hole in him," I said. "He also shot at a police officer. He also happened to put a round through someone's bedroom wall."

"Convenient," Daigle said.

Helen looked at me.

"What's Esteban charged with?" I asked.

"Disturbing the peace, resisting. Somebody accidentally knocked him off the barstool when Norma Jean started yelling about dead people. The dwarf got off the floor and went for the guy's crotch. The uniform would have cut him loose, except he remembered y'all's bulletin. He said getting cuffs on him was like trying to pick up a scorpion," Daigle said. "What's the deal on him, again?"

"He sexually mutilated political prisoners for the Argentine Junta. They were buds with the Gipper," I said.

"The what?" he said.

Ruben Esteban sat on a wood bench by himself in the back of a holding cell, his Panama hat just touching the tops of his jug ears. His face was triangular in shape, dull yellow in hue, the eyes set at an oblique angle to his nose.

"What are you doing around here, podna?" I said.

"I'm a chef. I come here to study the food," he answered. His voice sounded metallic, as though it came out of a resonator in his throat.

"You have three different passports," I said.

"That's for my cousins. We're a-how you call it?-we're a team. We cook all over the world," Esteban said.

"We know who you are. Stay out of Iberia Parish," Helen said.

"Why?" he asked.

"We have an ordinance against people who are short and ugly," she replied.

His face was wooden, impossible to read, the eyes hazing over under the brim of his hat. He touched an incisor tooth and looked at the saliva on the ball of his finger.

"Governments have protected you in the past. That won't happen here. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Esteban?" I said.

"Me cago en la puta de tu madre," he answered, his eyes focused on the backs of his square, thick hands, his mouth curling back in neither a sneer nor a grimace but a disfigurement like the expression in a corpse's face when the lips wrinkle away from the teeth.

"What'd he say?" Daigle asked.

"He probably doesn't have a lot of sentiment about Mother's Day," I said.

"That's not all he don't have. He's got a tube in his pants. No penis," Daigle said, and started giggling.

Outside, it was still raining hard when Helen and I got in our cruiser.

"What'd Daigle do before he was a cop?" Helen asked.

"Bill collector and barroom bouncer, I think."

"I would have never guessed," she said.

Ruben Esteban paid his fine that afternoon and was released.

THAT NIGHT I SAT in the small office that I had fashioned out of a storage room in the back of the bait shop. Spread on my desk were xeroxed copies of the investigator's report on the shooting and death of Alex Guidry, the coroner's report, and the crime scene photos taken in front of the barn. The coroner stated that Guidry had already been hit in the rib cage with a round from a.357 magnum before Helen had ever discharged her weapon. Also, the internal damage was massive and probably would have proved fatal even if Helen had not peppered him with her nine-millimeter.

One photo showed the bloody interior of Guidry's Cadillac and a bullet hole in the stereo system and another in the far door, including a blood splatter on the leather door panel, indicating the original shooter had fired at least twice and the fatal round had hit Guidry while he was seated in the car.

Another photo showed tire tracks in the grass that were not the Cadillac's.

Two rounds had been discharged from Guidry's.38, one at Helen, the other probably at the unknown assailant.

The photo of Guidry, like most crime scene photography, was stark in its black and white contrasts. His back lay propped against the barn wall, his spine curving against the wood and the earth. His hands and lower legs were sheathed in blood, his shattered mouth hanging open, narrowing his face like a tormented figure in a Goya painting.

The flood lamps were on outside the bait shop, and the rain was blowing in sheets on the bayou. The water had overflowed the banks, and the branches of the willows were trailing in the current. The body of a dead possum floated by under the window, its stomach yellow and swollen in the electric glare, the claws of feeding blue-point crabs affixed to its fur. I kept thinking of Guidry's words to me in our last telephone conversation: It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it.

What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field where Guidry was hit with the.357?

Then I saw Megan Flynn's automobile park by the boat ramp and Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her head.

She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair. Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted gallery and living room of my house.

"Wet night to be out," I said.

She sat down at the counter and blotted her face with a paper napkin.

"I got a call from Adrien Glazier. She told me about this guy Ruben Esteban," she said.

Not bad, Adrien, I thought.

"This guy's record is for real, Dave. I heard about him when I covered the Falklands War," she said.

"He was in custody on a misdemeanor in Lafayette this morning. He doesn't blend into the wallpaper easily."

"We should feel better? Why do you think the Triads sent a walking horror show here?"

Megan wasn't one to whom you gave facile assurances.

"We don't know who his partner is. While we're watching Esteban, the other guy's peddling an icecream cart down Main Street," I said.

"Thank you," she said, and dried the back of her neck with another napkin. Her skin seemed paler, her mouth and her hair a darker shade of red under the overhead light. I glanced away from her eyes.

"You and Cisco want a cruiser to park by your house?" I asked.

"I have a bad feeling about Clete. I can't shake it," she said.

"Clete?" I said.

"Geri Holtzner is driving his car all around town. Look, nobody is going to hurt Billy Holtzner. You don't kill the people who owe you money. You hurt the people around them. These guys put bombs in people's automobiles."

"I'll talk to him about it."

"I already have. He doesn't listen. I hate myself for involving him in this," she said.

"I left my Roman collar up at the house, Meg."

"I forgot. Swinging dicks talk in deep voices and never apologize for their mistakes."