"Aaron Crown bothers me."

"You went on television, Dave, with this Hollywood character, what's-his-name, Felton, whatever."

"I was taped here while he interviewed me on the phone, then it was spliced into the show."

"Forget the technical tour. Why don't you resign your job while you're at it? What's your boss have to say?"

"I don't think he's heard about it yet."

"You don't take police business to civilians, big mon. To begin with, they don't care about it. They'll leave you hanging in the breeze, then your own people rat-fuck you as a snitch."

"Maybe that's the way it's supposed to shake out," I said.

He drank from a bottle of Dixie beer, one eye squinting over the bottle at me. "Something else is involved here, mon," he said.

"Don't make it a big deal, Clete."

"It's the broad, isn't it?" he said.

"No."

"You got into the horizontal bop once with her and you're worried you're going to do it again. So you got rid of temptation with a baseball bat. In the meantime maybe you just splashed your career into the bowl… Wait a minute, you didn't pork her again, did you?"

"No… Will you stop talking like that?"

"Dave, rich guys don't marry mud women from New Guinea. She's one hot-ass piece of work. We all got human weaknesses, noble mon. All I got to do is see her on TV and my Johnson starts barking."

"You were a fugitive on a homicide warrant," I said. "The victim was a psychopath, and his death was a mistake, but the point is you killed him. What if you hadn't beat it? What if you were put away for life unjustly?"

He wiped a smear of barbecue sauce off his palm with a napkin, looked out at the sunlight on the street.

"This guy Crown must mean a lot to you… I think I'm going to Red's in Lafayette, take a steam, start the day over again," he said.

An hour later the sheriff buzzed my extension and asked me to walk down to his office. By now I was sure he had heard about my appearance on "Morning Edition," and all the way down the corridor I tried to construct a defense for conduct that, in police work, was traditionally considered indefensible. When I opened the door he was staring at a sheet of lined notebook paper in his hand, rubbing his temple with one finger. His Venetian blinds were closed, and his windowsill was green with plants.

"Why is everything around here hard? Why can't we just take care of the problems in Iberia Parish? Can you explain that to me?" he said.

"If you're talking about my being on 'Morning Edition,' I stand behind what I said, Sheriff. Aaron Crown didn't have motivation. I think Buford LaRose is building a political career on another man's broken back."

"You were on 'Morning Edition'?"

The room was silent. He opened the blinds, and an eye-watering light fell through the window.

"Maybe I should explain," I said.

"I'd appreciate that."

When I finished he picked up the sheet of notebook paper and looked at it again.

"I wish you hadn't done that," he said.

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

"You don't understand. I wanted to believe the Mexican with the machete was simply a deranged man, not an assassin. I wanted to believe he had no connection with the Crown business."

"I'm not with you."

"I don't want to see you at risk, for God's sake. We got two calls from Mexico this morning, one from a priest in some shithole down in the interior, the other from a Mexican drug agent who says he's worked with the DEA in El Paso… The guy with the spiderweb tattoos, the lunatic, some rurales popped holes all over him. He's dying and he says you will too… He says 'for the bugarron.' What's a bugarron?"

"I don't know."

"There's a storm down there. I got cut off before I could make sense out of this drug agent… Get a flight this afternoon. Take Helen with you. Americans with no backup tend to have problems down there."

"We have money for this?"

"Bring me a sombrero."

We flew into El Paso late that night. By dawn of the next day we were on a shuttle flight to a windswept dusty airport set among brown hills five hundred miles into Mexico. The Mexican drug agent who met us wore boots and jeans, a badge on his belt and a pistol and a sports coat over a wash-faded blue golf shirt. His name was Heriberto, and he was unshaved and had been up all night.

"The guy try to kill you, huh?" he said, as he unlocked the doors to the Cherokee in the parking lot.

"That's right," I said.

"I wouldn't want a guy like that after me. Es indio, man, know what I mean? Guy like that will cook your heart over a fire," he said. He looked at Helen. "Gringita, you want to use the rest room? Where we going, there ain't any bushes along the road."

He looked indolently at the flat stare in her face.

"What did you call her?" I asked.

"Maybe you all didn't get no sleep last night," he said. "You can sleep while I drive. I never had a accident on this road. Last night, with no moon, I come down with one headlight."

The sun rose in an orange haze above hills that looked made of slag, with cactus and burnt mesquite and chaparral on the sides. The dirt road twisted through a series of arroyos where the sandstone walls were scorched by grass fires, then we forded a river that splayed like coffee-stained milk over a broken wood dam and overflowed the banks into willows and rain trees and a roofless mud brick train station by tracks that seemed to disappear into a hillside.

"You looking at where those tracks go?" Heriberto said. "The mine company had a tunnel there. The train's still inside."

"Inside?" I said.

"Pancho Villa blew the mountain down on the tunnel. When a train full of Huerta's jackals was coming through. They're still in there, man. They ain't coming out."

I took my notebook out of my shirt pocket and opened it.

"What's bugarron mean?" I asked.

Helen had fallen asleep in back, her head on her chest.

"It's like maricon, except the bugarron considers himself the guy."

"You're talking about homosexuals? I don't get it."

"He's adicto, man. Guy's got meth and lab shit in his head. Those double-ought buckshots in him don't help his thinking too good, either."

"What lab shit?"

He concentrated on the road, ignoring my question, and swerved around an emaciated dog.

"Why'd you bring us down here?" I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

"The priest is my wife's cousin. He says you're in danger. Except what he knows he knows from the confession. That means he can't tell it himself. You want to go back to the airport, man, tell me now."

The sun rose higher in an empty cobalt sky. We crossed a flat plain with sloughs and reeds by the roadside and stone mountains razored against the horizon and Indian families who seemed to have walked enormous distances from no visible site in order to beg by the road. Then the road began to climb and the air grew cooler. We passed an abandoned ironworks dotted with broken windows, and went through villages where the streets were no more than crushed rock and the doors to all the houses were painted either green or blue. The mountains above the villages were gray and bare and the wind swept down the sheer sides and blew dust out of the streets.

"It's all Indians here. They think you paint the door a certain color, evil spirits can't walk inside," Heriberto said.

Helen was awake now and looking out the window.

"This is what hell must look like," she said.

"I grew up here. I tell you something, we don't got guys like Arana here. He's from Jalisco. I tell you something else, they don't even got guys like Arana there. Guys like him got to go to the United States to get like that, you understand what I'm saying?"