The black man was old, barefoot, shirtless, wearing only the overalls he had pulled on when he had heard Aaron break into his barn.

"What you doin', old man?" he said, and leveled the dogleg twenty gauge at Aaron's chest.

"It's fixing to storm. I come out of it." Aaron held his right wrist, with the manacle dangling from it, behind his back.

The lightning outside shook like candle flame through the cracks in the wall.

"You got a chain on your feet," the black man said.

"Cut it for me."

"Where you got out of?"

"They had me for something I ain't did. Cut the chain. I'll come back and give you some money."

"You the one they looking for, the one that killed that NAACP man, ain't you?"

"It's a goddamn lie they ruint my life over."

"Now, I ain't wanting to harm you… You stand back, I said you-"

Aaron tore the shotgun from the black man's hand and clutched his throat and squeezed until the black man's knees collapsed, then he wrapped him to a post with baling wire, tore the inside of his house apart, and looted his kitchen.

Five minutes later Aaron Crown disappeared into the howling storm in the black man's pickup truck, the shotgun and a cigar box filled with pennies and a bag of groceries on the seat beside him.

"Where you think he's headed?" I said.

"He got rid of the pickup in Baton Rouge late last night. A block away a Honda was stolen out of a filling station. Guess what? Crown's lawyer, the one who pled him guilty, has decided to go to Europe for a few weeks."

"How about the judge who sent him up?"

"The state police are guarding his house." He watched my face. "What's on your mind?"

"If I were Aaron Crown, my anger would be directed at somebody closer to home."

"I guess you picked my brain, Dave."

"I don't like the drift here, Sheriff."

"The next governor is not going to get murdered in our jurisdiction."

"Not me. No, sir."

"If you don't want to be around the LaRoses personally, that's your choice. But you're going to have to coordinate the surveillance on their house… Look, the election's Tuesday. Then the sonofabitch will probably be governor. That's the way we've always gotten rid of people we don't like-we elect them to public office. Go with the flow."

"Wrong man."

"Karyn LaRose doesn't think so. She called last night and asked for you specifically… Could you be a little more detailed on y'all's history?"

"It all seems kind of distant, for some reason."

"I see… " He sucked a tooth. "Okay, one other thing…Lafayette P.D. called a little earlier. Somebody broke into a pawnshop about five this morning. He took only one item – a scoped.303 Enfield rifle with a sling. You ever hear of a perp breaking into a pawnshop and stealing only one item?… I saw British snipers use those in Korea. They could bust a silhouette on a ridge from five hundred yards… Don't treat this as an nuisance assignment, Dave."

Lonnie Felton's purple Lincoln Continental was parked under a dripping oak in my drive when Clete dropped me off from work that evening. I ran through the rain puddles in the yard, onto the gallery, and smelled the cigarette smoke drifting through the screen.

He sat on the divan, tipping his ashes in a glass candy dish. Even relaxed, his body had the muscular definition of a gymnast, and with his cleft chin and Roman profile and brown ponytail that was shot with gray, he could have been either a first-rate charismatic confidence man, second-story man, or the celebrity that he actually was.

"How you do, sir?" I said.

"I feel old enough without the 'sir,'" he said. His teeth were capped and white, and, like most entertainment people I had met, he didn't allow his eyes to blink, so that they gave no indication of either a hidden insecurity or the presence or absence of an agenda.

"I'm trying to get Mr. Felton to stay for dinner," Bootsie said.

I took off my raincoat and hat and put them on the rack in the hall. "Sure, why don't you do that?" I said.

"Thanks, another night. I'll be around town a week or so."

"Oh?"

"I want to use Aaron Crown's old place, you know, that Montgomery Ward brick shack on the coulee, and juxtapose it with the LaRose plantation."

"It seems like you'd have done that early on," I said, and sat down on the stuffed chair at the end of the coffee table.

His eyes looked amused. The Daily Iberian was folded across the middle on top of the table. I flipped it open so he could see the front page. A three-column headline read: "LOCAL MAN ESCAPES ANGOLA."

"The end of your documentary might get written in New Iberia," I said.

"How's that?"

"You tell me," I said.

"I have a hard time following your logic. You think the presence of a news camera caused Jack Ruby to kill Lee Harvey Oswald?"

Bootsie got up quietly and went into the kitchen and began fixing coffee on a tray. His eyes stayed on her as she left the room, dropping for a split second to her hips.

"What do you want from me, sir?" I asked.

"You're an interesting man. You had the courage to speak out on Crown's behalf. I'd like for you to narrate two or three closing scenes. I'd like to be with you during the surveillance of LaRose's house."

"I think you want gunfire on tape, sir."

He put on his glasses and craned his head around so he could see the wall area next to the window behind him.

"Is that where the bullet holes were?" he asked.

"What?"

"I did some deep background on you. This is where your wife killed another woman, isn't it? You didn't have media all over you after she splattered somebody's brains on your wallpaper?"

"My wife saved my life. And you get out of our house, Mr. Felton."

Bootsie stood framed in the kitchen doorway, frozen, the tray motionless between her hands.

Felton put out his cigarette in the candy dish and got to his feet slowly, unruffled, indifferent.

"If I were you, I'd spike Buford LaRose's cannon while I had the chance. I think he's a believer in payback," he said. He turned toward Bootsie. "I'm sorry for any inconvenience, Ms. Robicheaux." "If my husband told you to get out, he meant it, bubba," she said.

A year ago I had stripped the paper from the wall next to the window, put liquid wood filler in the two bullet holes there, then sanded them over and repapered the cypress planks. But sometimes in an idle moment, when my gaze lingered too long on the wall, I remembered the afternoon that an assassin had pointed a.22 caliber Ruger at the side of my face, when I knew that for me all clocks everywhere were about to stop and I could do nothing about it but cross my arms over my eyes, and Bootsie, who had never harmed anyone in her life, had stepped out into the kitchen hallway and fired twice with a nine-millimeter Beretta.

Lonnie Felton backed his Lincoln into the road, then drove toward the drawbridge through the mist puffing out of the tree trunks along the bayou's edge.

"There goes your Hollywood career, Streak," Bootsie said.

"Somehow I don't feel the less for it."

"You think Aaron Crown is back?"

"It's too bad if he is. Say, you really shook up Felton's cookie bag."

"You like that hard gal stuff, huh? Too bad for whom?"

"I think Buford's hooked up with some New Orleans wiseguys. Maybe Aaron won't make the jail… Come on, forget this stuff. Let's take the boat down the bayou this evening."

"In the rain?"

"Why not?"

"What's bothering you, Dave?"

"I have to baby-sit Buford. His plane comes back in from Monroe at ten."

"I see."

"It'll be over Tuesday."

"No it won't," she said.

"Don't be that way," I said, and put my hands on her shoulders.