"Where'd this person go?" I said.

"I don't know. Back outside, maybe. She was kicking around in these cartons, looking for something. I think she dropped it when I hit her. It was metal-looking. Maybe a knife."

Helen came back through the door.

"Check this. It was out in the lot," she said, and held up a fright wig by one ropy blond strand.

"You did fine," I said to the security guard. "Maybe you saved the governor's life tonight."

"Yeah? I done that?"

"You bet," I said. Then I saw a piece of black electrician's tape and a glint of metal under a flattened carton. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the carton and inserted my ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a revolver whose broken wood grips were taped to the steel frame.

"It looks like a thirty-two," Helen said.

"It sure does."

"What, that means something?" she asked.

"I've seen it before. In a shoebox full of military decorations at Sabelle Crown's bar," I said.

An hour later, a half mile away, somebody reported a grate pried off a storm drain. A Lafayette city cop used his flashlight and crawled down through a huge slime-encrusted pipe that led under the streets to a bluff above the Vermilion River. The bottom of the pipe was trenched with the heavy imprints of a man's brogans or work boots. The prints angled off the end of the pipe through the brush and meandered along the mudbank, below the bluff and an apartment building where people watched the late news behind their sliding glass doors, oblivious to the passage of a man who could have stepped out of a cave at the dawn of time.

He found a powerboat locked with a chain to a dock, tore the chain and the steel bolt out of the post, then discovered a hundred yards downstream he had no gas. He climbed up the bank with a can, flung the dress in the brush, and followed a coulee to a lighted boulevard, climbed through a corrugated pipe, and walked into a filling station, wearing only his trousers and brogans, his hairy, mud-streaked torso glowing with an odor that made the attendant blanch.

Aaron opened his calloused palm on a bone-handle pocketknife.

"How much you give me for this?" he asked.

"I don't need one," the attendant replied, and tried to smile. He was young, his black hair combed straight back; he wore a tie that attached to the collar of his white shirt with a cardboard hook.

"I'll take six dollars for it. You can sell it for ten."

"No, sir, I really don't need no knife."

"I just want five dollars gas and a bag of them pork rinds. That's an honest deal."

The attendant's eyes searched the empty pavilion outside. The rain was slanting across the fluorescent lights above the gas pumps.

"You're trying to make me steal from the man I work for," he said.

"I ain't got a shirt on my back. I ain't got food to eat. I come in out of the rain and ask for hep and you call me a thief. I won't take that shit."

"I'll call my boss and ax him. Maybe you can talk to him."

The attendant lifted the telephone receiver off the hook under the counter. But Aaron's huge hand closed on his and squeezed, then squeezed harder, splaying the fingers, mashing the knuckles like bits of bone against the plastic, his eyes bulging with energy and power an inch from the attendant's face, his grip compressing the attendant's hand into a ball of pain until a cry broke from the attendant's throat and his free hand flipped at the power switch to an unleaded pump.

Aaron left the pocketknife on top of the counter.

"My name's Aaron Crown. I killed two niggers in Angola kept messing with me. You tell anybody I robbed you, I'll be back," he said.

But the party at the Acadiana never slowed down. The very fact that Aaron had failed so miserably in attempting to penetrate the governor-elect's security, like an insect trying to fight its way out of a glass bell, was almost a metaphorical confirmation that a new era had begun, one in which a charismatic southern leader and his beautiful wife danced like college sweethearts to a Dixieland band and shared their own aura with such a generosity of spirit that even the most hard-bitten self-made contractor felt humbled and ennobled to be in their presence.

But I was worn out when I got back from the search for Aaron Crown and didn't care anymore about the fortunes of the LaRose family and just wanted to go to sleep. There was a message from Bootsie at the desk when I picked up my room key: The truck broke down by Spanish Lake and I had to wait for the wrecker. I'm borrowing my sister's car but will be there quite late.

I left a note for Bootsie with the room number on it and started toward the elevator.

"Mr. Robicheaux, you have another message," the clerk said.

I took the piece of paper from his hand and read it.

Streak, I got the gen on our man Mookie. We 're talking about your mainline subhuman here. I'll fill you in later. Let's ROA at the bar. Dangle easy, big mon-Clete.

"I'm a little confused. This is my friend's handwriting. He's here at the hotel?" I said.

The clerk took the slip of paper out of my hand and looked at it.

"Oh yes, he's here. He is certainly here, sir."

"Excuse me?"

"I think there was a problem about his invitation. He didn't seem to have it with him. Someone tried to put his hand on your friend's arm and walk him to the door."

"That must have made an interesting show."

"Oh it was, sir. Definitely." The clerk was laughing to himself now.

I went into the bar and restaurant, looked on the dance floor and in the banquet and meeting rooms. Normally tracking Clete Purcel's progress through a given area was like following the path of a wrecking ball, but I saw no sign of him and I rode the elevator up to the top floor, where I had been given a room at the end of the hall from Buford and Karyn's, unlocked the door, undressed, and lay down on the bed in the dark.

It was storming outside now, and through the wide glass window I could see the flow of traffic across the bridge and the rain falling out of the electric light into the water. At one time this area had been called Vermilionville, and in 1863 Louisiana 's boys in butternut had retreated up the Teche, exhausted, malnourished, their uniforms in rags, often barefoot, and had fought General Banks' federal troops, right here, on the banks of the river, to keep open the flow of supplies from Texas to the rest of the Confederacy.

As I fell onto the edges of sleep I saw sugarcane fields and houses burning and skies that were plum-colored with smoke and heard the popping of small-arms fire and the clatter of muskets and bayonets as a column of infantry ran down the dirt road toward an irrigation ditch, and I had no doubt which direction my sleep was about to take.

This time the sniper was not Victor Charles.

I was trapped in the middle of the dirt road, my feet unable to run. I saw a musket extend itself from a clump of violent green brush, saw the stiffness of its barrel rear in the sunlight, and in my mind, as though I had formed a contract between the condemned and the executioner, the sniper and I became one, joined irrevocably together as co-participants in my death, and just before the.58 caliber round exploded from the barrel I could feel him squeeze the musket in his hands, as though it was really I who cupped its wet hardness in my palms.

In my sleep I heard the door to the hotel room open, then close, heard someone set down a key on the nightstand and close the curtains, felt a woman's weight on the side of the bed and then her hand on my hip, and I knew Bootsie had arrived at the hotel safely.

I lay on my back, with the pillow across my face, and heard her undressing in the dark. She lay beside me, touched my stomach, then moved across my loins, her thighs spread, and put my sex between her legs. Then she leaned close to me, pushed the pillow from my face, and kissed my cheek and put her tongue inside my mouth and placed my sex inside her.