I hefted the grocery sacks in my arms, opened the back screen with my shoe, and let it slam behind me. The wood planks of the back porch were littered with pet bowls and dry cat food. Through the doorway all the surfaces in the kitchen looked bright and clean, but I could smell okra burning and hear water hissing through a kettle top and scorching in the fire.

'Bootsie?' I said.

Out front, the tin roof on the gallery pinged in the cooling air.

'Bootsie?' I said again, hitching the sacks up against my chest.

I walked into the kitchen and started to set the sacks on the drain board; I saw her sitting at the breakfast table, motionless, her' posture rigid, her eyes straight ahead, one hand resting on top of the other.

'Bootsie, what's wrong?' I said.

Then I saw the film of perspiration on her brow and upper lip, the flutter in her throat, the rise and fall of her breasts. Her mouth opened stiffly, and her eyes broke and fastened on mine; they were charged with a light I had never seen in them before.

'Get out, Dave. Run! Please!' she said, her voice seeming to crack and rise from a great depth at the same time.

But it was too late. The blond man with a neck like a tree stump, with hands that had the power of vise grips, stepped out of the hallway into the light. He wore a Panama hat with a flowered band tilted on his head and a boyish, lopsided smile. His pleated white slacks, tropical shirt printed with green and yellow parrots, and shined, tasseled loafers gave him the appearance of a health enthusiast you might see on a morning television show, perhaps with a beach at his back. In the shadow of his hat brim you could hardly see the spray of blackheads that fanned back from his eyes like cat's whiskers.

'Come on in, Dave. I'm glad you're here. We weren't sure when you'd be back. We're going to work this thing out. Hey, I was listening to your records. I love them,' he said.

Behind him, seated on a chair turned backwards in the hallway, was a small man with defective eyes and a head shaped like a tomato. There was even a furrow in his scalp, with a twist of hair in it, like the indentation and stem of a tomato freshly torn from the vine. In his hands was a military-issue crossbow, the kind sometimes used in special operations, with a steel-flanged arrow mounted on the bowstring. The small man's elbows were propped on the back of the chair, and his eyes, which were crossed, one locking intermittently by the bridge of his nose, were sighted in their peculiar way along the arrow's shaft at the side of Bootsie's face.

They had drawn the blinds on the windows now, and the small man with crossed eyes was drinking from a bottle of milk at the breakfast table and spitting pistachio shells into a paper bag. After he had locked my wrists behind me with the handcuffs he'd found on my dresser he bound Bootsie's forearms to her chair with electrician's tape, then crisscrossed it through her breasts and wrapped it around the back of the chair. The man named Buchalter watched with a small.25 caliber Beretta in the palm of his hand, a torn smile like that of Will Rogers at the corner of his mouth.

'You remember me?' he said.

'No.'

'You saw me in the helicopter. Out on the gulf,' he said.

'This is of no value to you, or your cause, or whatever it is you're after,' I said. 'You've got the wrong people.'

He pulled up a chair and sat between me and Bootsie. He pushed his hat back on his head. A strand of fine blond hair fell in his eyes.

'Are you mad at me? Because of what I did to Mrs. Robicheaux?' he said.

I stared at his face, his unblinking, inquisitive eyes, and didn't answer. I could feel the handcuffs biting into my wrists, cutting off the blood, swelling the veins.

'We don't know why you've come here. You have nothing to gain by being here. Don't you understand that?' Bootsie said.

'I wouldn't say that. There're always possibilities in every situation. That's what I like to believe, anyway,' he said, and reached out, touched my cheek with his hand, and let his glance rove lazily over my face.

I saw tears well in Bootsie's eyes.

'Try to hear this, Buchalter,' I said. 'I'm a police officer. I work with people who'll square this one way or another. No matter what happens here tonight, they'll find you and blow up your shit, I guarantee it.'

He made shushing noises with his lips, and again his hand reached up and touched my face and brushed gingerly around the corners of my mouth. I could feel the grain of his skin against mine and smell an odor on it like hair oil and the inside of a leather glove.

'You take your hands off him, you degenerate, you vile animal-' Bootsie said. Her eyes were hot and receded, her face as gray as cardboard.

Buchalter nodded to the small man with crossed eyes. He spat a pistachio shell into the paper sack, then walked behind Bootsie's chair and wound the electrician's tape across her mouth, wrapping it around and around the thick swirls of her hair at the back of her head, tightening it across her mouth each time he made a revolution. She leaned forward and gagged on her tongue.

I could feel my heart thundering against my rib cage, hear the blood roaring in my ears like wind in a seashell.

'I don't know where the sub is,' I said. 'I'd tell you if I did. I don't even known why you guys want it. Why would I keep the information from you?'

'Because you work for Jews, my friend,' he said. 'Because I think you lie.'

'It's got air trapped in the hull. It floats right above the gulf's floor. It probably drifts in a pattern with the Gulf Stream,' I said. 'Hire some salvage people who understand those things. New Orleans and Miami are full of them.'

'But evidently you've found it twice. That means you know something other people don't.'

'There may be more than one sub down there,' I said. 'The Navy nailed three or four of them during nineteen forty-two. Maybe I saw two different subs.'

He took a nautical chart from his pocket, unfolded it, and spread it flat on the table in front of me. It showed the Louisiana coast, all its bays and soundings, and the northern gradations of the gulf. He stood behind my chair and fitted his huge hands over my shoulders, inserted his thumbs in the back of my neck.

'Our business can end here tonight in a couple of ways,' he said. 'I believe you understand me.'

'After you know where the sub is, you'll just go away?'

'Why not?' he said. His fingers tightened on my shoulder tendons.

'Because you're in over your head.'

He lowered his mouth to my ear. 'It isn't a time to be clever, Dave,' he said. 'You want me to make you trace the drift pattern with your nose?'

I tried to lean forward, away from the steady beat of his breath on my skin. Then he cupped one hand under my chin, the other on the back of my neck, like a man about to do a trick shot with a basketball.

'Would you like me to snap it?' he said. 'I can turn your body into a slug's from the neck down. I'm not exaggerating, Dave. I've done it twice before. Ask Chuck there.'

Think, think, think.

I tried to avoid swallowing, tried to keep my voice empty of fear. I closed and opened my eyes, and blinked the sweat out of them. Bootsie's hair had fallen in her face; the black tape that cut across her mouth was slick with saliva, and her eyes were red and liquid with terror at what she was about to witness.

'There're two things that aren't going to happen here tonight, Buchalter,' I said. 'I'm not going to give you information I don't have, and nobody here is going to kiss your butt. You're a piece of shit. Nothing you can do here will ever change that fact.'

He was quiet a moment. I felt his fingers move, but they were uncertain now, the pressure against my chin and neck temporarily in abeyance.