"It's Tourette's syndrome."

"Sure, that's why half of his broads are registered at the VD clinic."

I climbed through the barbed wire fence next to the cattleguard. Dock Green was motionless, the bale of the bucket hooked across his palm as if it had been hung from stone. His thin brown hair was cut short and was wet and freshly combed. I saw the recognition come into his eyes, a tic jump in his face.

But the problem in dealing with Dock Green was not his tormented and neurotic personality. It was his intuitive and uncannily accurate sense about other people's underlying motivations, perhaps even their thoughts.

"Who told you I was here?" he said.

"You've got a lot of respect around here, Dock. The St. Landry sheriff's office likes to know when you're in town."

"Who's in the shit machine?"

"Clete Purcel."

He put down the bucket, cupped one hand to his mouth, the other to his genitalia, and shouted, "Hey, Purcel, I got your corndog hanging!"

"Dock, I'm looking for a black hooker by the name of Brandy Grissum."

"An addict, the one saw the screenwriter get capped?"

"That's right."

"I don't know anything about her. Why's he parked out there?"

"You just said-"

"NOPD already talked to me. That's how I know." The skin under his eye puckered, like paint wrinkling in a bucket. "Short Boy Jerry put you here?"

"Why would he do that?" I smiled and tried to keep my eyes flat.

"Y'all went to school together. Now he's moving back to New Iberia. Now you're standing on my property. It don't take a big brain to figure it out."

"Give me the girl, Dock. I'll owe you one."

"You looking for a black whore or a black hit man, you should be talking to Jimmy Ray Dixon."

"I'm firing in the well, huh?" I said. The wind puffed the willow trees that grew on the far side of the levee. "You've got a nice place here."

"Don't give me that laid-back act, Robicheaux. I'll tell you what this is about. Short Boy Jerry thought he could throw up some pickets on my jobs and run me under. It didn't work. So now he's using you to put some boards in my head. I think he dimed me with NOPD, too."

"You're pretty fast, Dock."

His eyes focused on the front gate.

"I can't believe it. Purcel's taking a leak in my cattleguard. I got neighbors here," Dock said.

"You and the Giacanos aren't backing Buford LaRose, are you?" I asked.

For the first time he smiled, thin-lipped, his eyes slitted inside the hard cast of his face.

"I never bet on anything human," he said. "Come inside. I got to get a Pepto or something. Purcel's making me sick."

The pine walls of his front room were hung with the stuffed heads of antelope and deer. A marlin was mounted above the fireplace, its lacquered skin synthetic-looking and filmed with dust. On a long bookshelf was a line of jars filled with the pickled, yellowed bodies of rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins, a hairless possum, box turtles, baby alligators, a nutria with its paddlelike feet webbed against the glass.

Dock went into the kitchen and came back with a beer in his hand. He offered me nothing. Behind him I saw his wife, one of the Giacano women, staring at me, hollow-eyed, her raven hair pulled back in a knot, her skin as white as bread flour.

"Purcel gets under my skin," Dock said.

"Why?"

"Same reason you do."

"Excuse me?"

"You make a guy for crazy, you think you can drop some coins in his slot, turn him into a monkey on a wire. The truth is, I've been down in a place where your eye sockets and your ears and your mouth are stuffed with mud, where there ain't any sound except the voices of dead people inside your head… You learn secrets down there you don't ever forget."

"I was over there, too, Dock. You don't have a franchise on the experience."

"Not like I was. Not even in your nightmares." He drank from his beer can, wiped his mouth on the inside of his wrist. His eyes seemed to lose interest in me, then his face flexed with an idle thought, as though a troublesome moth had swum into his vision.

"Why don't you leave me alone and go after that Klansman before he gets the boons stoked up again. At least if he ain't drowned. We got enough race trouble in New Orleans as it is," he said.

"Who are you talking about?"

He looked at me for a long moment, his face a bemused psychodrama, like a metamorphic jigsaw puzzle forming and reforming itself.

"That guy Crown, the one you were defending on TV, he jumped into the Mississippi this morning," he said. "Your shit machine don't have a radio?"

He drank from his beer can and looked at me blankly over the top of it.

IT WAS RAINING AND DARK THE NEXT MORNING when Clete let me off in front of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department, then made an illegal U-turn into the barbecue stand across the street. Lightning had hit the department's building earlier, knocking out all the electricity except the emergency lights. When I went into the sheriff's office, he was standing at his window, in the gloom, with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking across the street.

"Why's Purcel in town?" he asked.

"A couple of days' fishing."

"So he drives you to work?"

"My truck's in the shop."

"He's a rogue cop, Dave."

"Too harsh, skipper."

"He has a way of writing his name with a baseball bat. That's not going to happen here, my friend."

"You made your point, sir," I said.

"Good."

Then he told me about yesterday's events at Angola and later at a sweet potato farm north of Morganza.

Aaron Crown had vomited in his cell, gone into spasms on the floor, like an epileptic during a seizure or a man trying to pass gallstones. He was put in handcuffs and leg chains and placed in the front seat of a van, rather than in the back, a plastic sick bag in his lap, and sent on his way to the infirmary, with a young white guard driving.

The guard paid little attention, perhaps even averted his eyes, when Aaron doubled over with another coughing spasm, never seeing the bobby pin that Aaron had hidden in his mouth and that he used to pick one manacle loose from his left wrist, never even thinking of Aaron as an escape risk within the rural immensity of the farm, nor as an inmate whose hostility and violence would ever become directed at a white man.

Not until they rounded a curve by the river and Aaron's left arm wrapped around the guard's neck and Aaron's right fist, the loose handcuff whipping from the wrist, smashed into the guard's face and splintered his jawbone.

Then he was hobbling through gum trees and a soybean field, over the levee, down into the willows along the mudflat, where he waded out through the backwater and the reeds and cattails and plunged into the current, his ankles raw and bleeding and still chained together.

By all odds he should have drowned, but later a group of West Feliciana sheriff's deputies with dogs would find a beached tangle of uprooted trees downstream, with a piece of denim speared on a root, and conclude that Aaron had not only grabbed onto the floating island of river trash but had wedged himself inside its branches like a muskrat and ridden the heart of the river seven miles without being seen before the half-submerged trees bumped gently onto a sandspit on the far side and let Aaron disembark into the free people's world as though he had been delivered by a specially chartered ferry.

Then he was back into the piney woods, hard-shell fundamentalist country in which he had been raised, that he took for granted would never change, where a white man's guarantees were understood, so much so that when he entered the barn of a black fanner that night and began clattering through the row of picks and mattocks and scythes and axes and malls hung on the wall to find a tool sharp and heavy enough to cut the chain on his ankles, he never expected to be challenged, much less threatened at gunpoint.