'I'm sick. I got to go to a hospital,' he said.

'What's the sword on your arm mean?' I said.

He put his face in his hands. 'I ain't saying no more,' he said. 'I'm sick. I got to have some medication.'

'How many times a day do you fix, Waylon?' I said.

'I got it down to three. Look, get me into a hospital and maybe I can he'p y'all a whole lot better.'

'It doesn't work that way, partner,' I said, and slipped my business card under the flat of his arm. 'Give us a call when your memory clears up.'

A half hour later Lucinda and I took coffee and pastry from a bakery downtown and sat on a stone bench in a small green park by the capitol building. It was a blue-gold day, with a breeze off the Mississippi, and the grass in the park looked pale green in the sunlight.

'Why'd you keep asking him about a sword?' Lucinda said.

'I think it's the name or the logo of a group of neo-Nazis or Aryan supremacists of some kind.'

'The tattoo looked like a bayonet to me.'

'Maybe. But he's a speed addict, too, just like the guy who electrocuted himself in y'all's custody. Buchalter called me once during what sounded like the downside of a drug bender. Maybe like Hippo Bimstine says, we're talking about speed-fried Nazi zomboids.'

'You think Waylon Rhodes will give us anybody?'

'He'll try to, when he starts to come apart. But by that time you won't be able to trust anything he tells you.'

'I believe him about the hit. When they lie, they're not vague.'

I took a bite out of my pastry and drank from my paper cup.

'Why the silence?' she asked.

'No reason. What were you going to tell me about Nate Baxter?'

'I don't think he has designs on me, that's all.'

I nodded.

'A white supervisor trying to get into a black female officer's pants doesn't make his kind of racial remarks,' she said.

'You don't have to tell me anything about Nate Baxter, Lucinda.'

'He said Ben Motley got where he is by spitting watermelon seeds and giving whitey a lot of "yas-suhs." He said I'd never have to do that, because I'm smart and I have a nice ass. How do you like that for charm?'

'Nate's a special kind of guy.'

'I don't think so. Not for a black woman, anyway.'

'Don't underestimate him, Lucinda. He raped and sodomized a hooker in the Quarter. Then he ran her out of town before anybody from Internal Affairs could talk to her.'

She stopped eating and looked across the grass at some children running through the camellia bushes. Then she set the pastry down on a napkin in her lap and brushed the powdered sugar off her fingers.

'I was raised by my aunt,' she said. 'She was a prostitute. A white man tried to rape her behind a bar on Calliope. She shot him to death. What do you think about that?'

'Did she go up the road for it?'

'Yes.'

'So even in death he raped her. Drop the dime on Baxter if he gets near you or makes another off-color remark.'

She stood up and walked cooly to a trash can, dropped her paper cup and unfinished pastry in it, and sat back down on the stone bench. Her flowered blouse puffed with air in the breeze.

'Don't try to stonewall me about this contract stuff,' she said. 'Who is it the greaseballs don't clip?'

'Politicians.'

'Who else?'

'Ordinary people who are on the square. Particularly influential ones.'

'Come on, Robicheaux.'

'Would you not call me by my last name, please? It reminds me of the army.'

'Who else?'

'They don't do made guys without the commission's consent.'

'That's it?'

'Cops,' I said.

She looked me evenly in the eyes, biting down softly on the corner of her lip.

That night I dreamed of a desolate coastline that looked like layered white clay. On it was a solitary tree whose curled, dead leaves were frozen against an electrical blue sky. The ocean should have been teeming with fish, but it, like the land, had been stricken, its chemical green depths empty of all life except the crew of a German submarine, who burst to the surface with emergency air tanks on their backs, their bone-hard, white faces bright with oil. They gathered under the tree on the beach, looking over their new estate, and I realised then that they had the jowls and mucus-clotted snouts of animals.

They waited for their leader, who would come, as they had, from the sea, his visage crackling with salt and light, and, like Proteus, forever changing his form to make himself one of us.

A psychologist would smile at the dream and call it a world destruction fantasy, the apocalyptic fear that a drunk such as myself carries around in his unconscious or that you see on the faces of religious fundamentalists at televised revivals.

But when I woke from the dream I sat in the dark and thought about the preacher's words, about things coming apart at the center, about blood-dimmed tides and mackerel-crowded seas that could wrinkle from continent to continent with the reverberating brass gong of the millennium, and I did not sleep again until the trees outside were black and stiff with the coming of the gray dawn.

Two days later, at five-thirty on Saturday morning, Bootsie heard a car turn into our driveway. She stood at the window in her nightgown and looked through the curtain.

'It's somebody in a pink Cadillac,' she said.

'Maybe he's just turning around,' I said from the bed. There was mist in the trees outside and a cool smell blowing through the window.

'No, they're just sitting there. Two people.'

'Batist probably hasn't opened the shop yet. I'll go down,' I said.

'Dave-'

'It's all right. Bad guys don't park in your drive at sunrise.'

I dressed in a pair of khakis, old loafers, and a denim shirt, and walked out on the gallery. The light was on in the bait shop. The Cadillac was parked in the shadows under the trees, but I could see two figures in the front seat. The air smelled like flowers and damp earth. I walked across the yard toward the car. To my right I could hear Tripod scratching against the screen on his hutch.

Tommy Bobalouba got out on the driver's side, dressed in striped, dark brown slacks, tasseled loafers, and a form-fitting canary-yellow polo shirt. Across the bridge of his nose was a thick, crusted scab where I had pistol-whipped him. He was smiling. He put his finger to his lips and motioned me away from the automobile.

'Charlotte's sleeping,' he whispered. 'She ain't used to being up this early.'

'What are you doing at my house, Tommy?'

'It's the weekend. Sometimes I like a drive in the country. Maybe I can rent a boat, you can take us out.'

He combed his white hair while he gazed approvingly at the surroundings.

'You didn't come here to square a beef, did you, partner?' I said.

'You got a cup of coffee?'

'We can walk down to the bait shop.'

'The bait shop? What is this, the white trash treatment I get?'

'My wife's not dressed yet.'

'I want a favor from you.'

'Tommy, I'm having a hard time with your presence here.'

'What? I'm a germ?'

'I'm the guy who hit you across the face with a forty-five. Now you're at my house.'

'I don't hold a grudge.'

'Good. Then you won't be offended when I recommend that you give me a call during business hours at the office.'

'You made some remarks at my house. About stuff that's maybe on my conscience. So maybe I'm gonna try to set it right. You don't want to help me, then run it up your hole.'

'I'd appreciate it if you'd watch what you say around my house.'

The door on the passenger's side opened, and the ash blond lady named Charlotte got out and stretched sleepily.

'Oh, Mr. Robicheaux, our favorite daytime nightmare,' she said.