"Which way is that?" Then her eyes grew bright and she said it again, "Which way is that, Dave?"

Later that night Helen Soileau and I met Buford's private plane at the Lafayette airport and followed him back to the LaRose plantation in a cruiser. Then we parked by his drive in the dark and waited for the midnight watch to come on. The grounds around the house, the slave quarters now filled with baled hay, the brick, iron-shuttered riding stable, were iridescent in the humidity and glare of the security flood lamps that burned as brightly as phosphorous flares. One by one the lights went off inside the house.

"Can you tell me why an assignment like this makes me feel like a peon with a badge?" Helen said.

"Search me," I said.

"If you were Crown and you wanted to take him out, where would you be?"

"Inside that treeline, with the sun rising behind me in the morning."

"You want to check it out?"

"It's not morning."

"Casual attitude."

"Maybe Buford should have the opportunity to face his sins."

"I'll forget you said that."

The next morning, Saturday, just before sunrise, I dressed in the cold, with Bootsie still asleep, and drove back to the LaRose plantation and walked the treeline from the road back to the bayou. In truth, I expected to find nothing. Aaron had no military background, was impetuous, did not follow patterns, and drew on a hill country frame of reference that was as rational as a man stringing a crowning forest fire around his log house.

However, I had forgotten that Aaron was a lifetime hunter, not for sport or even for personal dominion over the land but as one who viewed armadillos and deer, possums and ducks, squirrels and robins, even gar that could be shot from a boat, as food for his table, adversaries that he slew in order to live, none any better or worse or more desirable than another, and he went about it as thoroughly and dispassionately as he would butcher chickens and hogs on a block.

On second consideration, I thought the best trained military sniper could probably take a lesson from Aaron Crown.

One hundred yards from Buford's backyard, with a clear view of the converted carriage house, the driveway, the parked automobiles, I saw the broken gray leaves, the knee and boot marks in the soft ground behind a persimmon tree, an empty Vienna sausage can, crumbs from saltine crackers, the detritus of field-stripped hand-rolled cigarettes.

Then I thought I heard feet running, a shadow flowing between trees, dipping down into a dry coulee bed, racing past the black marble crypt in the center of the LaRose cemetery. But in the muted pink softness of the morning, in the rain that continued to tumble like crystal needles out of the sunlight, I looked again and saw only red horses turning among the tree trunks, divots of impacted layered leaves exploding from their hooves, their backs aura-ed with vapor from their bodies.

I took a Ziploc bag from my coat pocket and began picking up the torn cigarette papers and the Vienna sausage can with the tip of a ballpoint pen just as Buford came out his back door, dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, charcoal suede jacket, and gray Stetson hat, his face raised toward the dawn and the special portent that it seemed to contain.

I wondered if he had ever envisioned his face locked down inside a telescopic sight, just before a toppling.303 round was about to scissor a keyhole through the middle of it.

Maybe he had. Or maybe my fantasy indicated a level of abiding resentment that I did not want to recognize.

That afternoon Clete parked his Cadillac by the boat ramp and walked down the dock and into the bait shop, where I was stacking the chairs and mopping the floor. He poured a cup of coffee for himself at the counter and drank it.

"You looked like you got rained on today," I said.

"I did."

"You catch anything?"

"Nope. The water's getting too cool. I found Brandy Grissum, though."

I fitted a chair upside down on a table and put down my mop.

"My main meal ticket is still running down bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine," he said. "So I checked in with Nig this afternoon to see if he had anything for me, and out of nowhere he tells me a black broad named Brandy Grissum skipped on a prostitution charge and left Nig and Willie holding the bond. But because most of the lowlifes consider Nig a fairly decent guy for a bondsman, Brandy calls him up from a halfway house in Morgan City and says she's scared shitless to come back to New Orleans, and can Nig square her beef with the court and renew her bond.

"Can you imagine the faith these people put in a bondsman? I used to miss my shield. Now I think I'll get me one of those little cinder block offices with a neon sign down by the City Prison."

"She's in a halfway house?" I said.

"Not for long. She's about to get kicked out. Y'all got a snitch fund?"

"We're lucky to pay the light bill."

"I wouldn't put that on the top of the discussion."

The two-story halfway house was painted canary yellow and decorated with flower boxes on a shell road that paralleled a canal lined with banana trees and wild elephant ears. The leaves of the elephant ears were withered and streaked white from the water splashed out of potholes by passing automobiles. A rotted-out shrimp boat was half submerged on the far side of the canal, and gars were feeding on something dead that streamed off one of the scuppers. The gallery of the halfway house was cluttered with green plants and straight-back wood chairs, on which both black and white people sat, most of them in mismatched clothes, and smoked cigarettes and looked at nothing or at their shoes or watched the passing of an automobile, until it finally turned onto the highway that led back into Morgan City, which seemed painted with an electric glow against the evening sky.

Brandy Grissum sat with us at a picnic table strewn with children's toys under a Chinaberry tree. She wore lip gloss and rouge high on her cheekbones and a hair net with sequins in it, and jeans and purple cloth slippers and a long-sleeve denim shirt with lace sewn on the cuffs. The whites of her eyes were threaded with blood vessels.

"You can get me some money?" she said.

"Depends on what you've got, Brandy," I said.

"They gonna put me out tomorrow. I ain't got nowhere to go. He know where my family's at."

"The shooter?" I said.

"He found me twice. He took me out in the woods… he made me do things in the back of his car." Her eyes flicked away from my face.

"Who's the guy, Brandy?" Clete said.

"He call himself Mookie. He says he's from Miami. But he talks French and he know all about fishing in the bayous up I-10."

"Mookie what?" I said.

"I don't want to even be knowing his first name. I just want to get my li'l boy from my mother's house and go somewheres else."

"Why are they putting you out?"

She kneaded the top of her forearm and looked out at the shell road in the twilight.

"They said my urine was dirty when I come back to the house the other day. I say you can look at my arm, I ain't got no new tracks. The proctor, she says I'm skin popping in my thighs, the other women halfways seen it in the shower. I ain't skin popped, though, that's the troot, and I ain't smoked no rock in thirty-seven days."

"How'd you U.A. dirty, then?" Clete said.

She picked at her earlobe and raised her eyebrows. "Don't ax me," she said.

"Why'd Mookie kill your John?" I asked.

"He said he was doing it to hep out some friends. He said the guy didn't have no bidness messing around with black women, anyway."

"You work for Dock Green, Brandy?" I asked.

"I got a street manager."

"You got a Murphy artist," Clete said.