'Something you said. Why's Chuck Sitwell stonewalling us?'

'He wants to go out a mainline, stand-up con.'

'No, you said it earlier. He's scared. But if he's scared Buchalter will be back to pull his plug, why doesn't he just give him up?'

Clete looked out into the hot glare of the day from under the brim of his porkpie hat and puffed on his cigarette. His face was pink in the heat.

'You're a good guy, Streak, but you don't always think straight about yourself,' he said.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'You parked four-rounds in the guy.'

I looked at him.

'Come on, Dave, be honest,' he said. 'You only stopped popping caps when you ran out of bullets. You were trying to blow him all over that cane field. You don't think the guy knows that? What if he or Buchalter tell you what they had planned for you and Bootsie, Bootsie in particular, maybe even Alafair if she walked in on it? I'd be scared of you, too, mon.'

He glanced sideways at me, then sucked once on his cigarette and flipped it in a spray of sparks against the side of a red stop sign.

The weekend was hot and dry and uneventful. A guard remained on duty twenty-four hours at the door of Charles Arthur Sitwell's hospital room. Sitwell kept his promise; he refused to answer questions about anything.

I got up Tuesday morning at dawn, helped Batist open the bait shop, then walked up the slope through the trees to have breakfast with Bootsie before going to the office. The house was still cool from the attic and window fans that had run all night, and the grass in the backyard was thick with mockingbirds who were feeding on bread crumbs that Bootsie had thrown out the screen door.

'A deputy will be parked out front again today,' I said.

'How long do you plan to keep one here, Dave?' Bootsie said. She sat across from me, her shoulders straight, her fingers resting on the sides of her coffee cup. She had put aside her piece of toast after having eaten only half of it.

'It gives the guy something to do,' I said.

'We can't live the rest of our lives with a deputy parked out front.'

'We won't have to.'

She had just washed her face, but her eyes looked tired, still not quite separated from the sleep that came to her with certainty only at first light.

'I want to buy a gun,' she said.

'That's never been your way.'

'What kind of pistol is best for a woman? I mean size or whatever you call it.'

'A thirty-two, or maybe a thirty-eight or nine millimeter. It depends on what a person wants it for.'

'I want to do that this evening, Dave.'

'All right.'

'Will you show me how to use it?'

'Sure.' I watched her face. Her eyes were flat with unspoken thoughts. 'We'll take the boat down the bayou and pop some tin cans.'

'I think we ought to teach Alafair how to shoot, too,' she said.

I waited a moment before I spoke. 'You can teach kids how to shoot a pistol, Boots, but you can't teach them when to leave it in a drawer and when to take it out. I vote no on this one.'

She gazed out the back screen at the birds feeding in the grass under the mimosa tree.

Then she said, 'Do you think he's coming back?'

'I don't know.'

Her eyes went deep into mine.

'If I get to him first, he'll never have the chance,' I said.

'I didn't mean that,' she said.

'I did.'

I felt her eyes follow me into the hallway. I changed into a pair of seersucker slacks, loafers, a brown sports shirt, and a white knit tie, then went back into the kitchen, leaned over Bootsie's chair, hugged her across the chest, and kissed her hair.

'Boots, real courage is when you put away all thought about your own welfare and worry about the fate of another,' I said. 'That was my wife the other night. A fuckhead like Buchalter can't touch that kind of courage.'

She stroked the side of my face with her fingers without looking up.

The phone rang on the wall above the drain board.

'I hear you're back on the clock,' a voice with a black New Orleans accent said.

'Motley?'

'Do you mind me calling you at your house?'

'No, not at all. How'd you know I was back on duty?'

'We're coordinating with your department on this guy Sitwell. Did you know he and the space-o speed freak who electrocuted himself were cell mates at Angola?'

'No.'

'They were both in a rock 'n' roll band in the Block. So if they did everything else together, maybe they both muled dope for the AB.'

'I already talked to the warden. Sitwell didn't have any politics; there're no racial beefs in his jacket. He was always a loner, a walk-in bank robber and a smash-and-grab jewel thief.'

'I think you should come to New Orleans this morning.'

'What for?'

'There's a shooting gallery up by Terpsichore and Baronne. The main man there is a bucket of shit who goes by the name of Camel Benoit. You know who I'm talking about?'

'He used to pimp down by Magazine sometimes?'

'That's the guy. We've been trying to shut down that place for six months. We bust it, we nail a couple of sixteen-year-olds with their brains running out their noses, a week later Camel's got Mexican tar all up and down Martin Luther King Drive. Except at about five this morning, when everybody was nodding out, some sonofabitch broke the door out of the jamb and pasted people all over the wall with an E-tool.'

'With an entrenching tool?'

'You heard me. Sharpened on the edges with a file. After he broke a few heads, he went after our man Camel. I would have bought tickets for that one.'

'What happened?'

'I don't know, we're still finding out.'

'Come on, Motley, you're not making sense.'

'There used to be adult education classes in that building. The guy who busted down the door evidently chased Camel through a bunch of rooms upstairs with a flagstaff. At least that's what we think.'

'I don't understand what you're saying. Where's Camel Benoit?'

He made a whistling sound in exasperation.

'I'm trying to tell you, Robicheaux. We don't know for sure. We think he's inside the wall: Anyway, there's blood seeping through the mortar. You know any mice that are big enough to bleed through a brick wall?'

The two-story building had been the home of a Creole slave trader and cotton dealer in the 1850s. But now the twin brick chimneys were partially collapsed, the iron grillwork on the balconies was torn loose from its fastenings, and the ventilated wood shutters hung at odd angles on the windows. An air compressor for a jackhammer was wheezing and pumping in front of the entrance. I held up my badge for a uniformed patrolman to look at as I threaded my way between two police cars and an ambulance into the entrance of the building.

At the back of a dark corridor covered with spray-can graffiti, a workman in gloves and a hard hat was thudding the jackhammer into the wall while Motley and two white plainclothes watched. Motley was eating an ice cream cone. The floor was powdered with mortar and brick dust. I tried to talk above the noise and gave it up. Motley motioned me into a side room and closed the door behind us. The room was strewn with burnt newspaper, beer cans, wine bottles, ten-dollar coke vials, and discarded rubbers.

'We should have already been through the wall, but it looks like somebody poured cement inside it when the foundation settled,' he said. He brushed a smear of ice cream out of his thick mustache.

'What was this about a flagstaff?'

'A couple of noddies say there was an American flag on a staff in the corner with a bunch of trash. The wild man grabbed it and ran Camel Benoit upstairs with it, then stuffed him through a hole in the wall. For all we know, he's still alive in there.' He took a bite of his ice cream and leaned forward so it wouldn't drip on his tie.