Her tongue tasted like candy, like cherries that had been soaked in bourbon. She raised herself on her arms, the tops of her swollen breasts half-mooned with tan.

I stared upward into the face of Karyn LaRose, who smiled lazily and said, "Tell me you don't like it, Dave. Tell me. See if you can tell me that… Tell me… tell me… tell me…"

I found Clete Purcel at the bar. He was drinking a shot of tequila, with a Corona and a saucer of salted limes on the side, his porkpie hat cocked over one eye. The band was putting away its instruments and the bar was almost empty.

"Where you been, noble mon? You look a couple of quarts down," he said.

"A long day." I sat next to him and rubbed my face. My skin felt cold, dead to the touch.

"I thought I saw Boots go out the lobby."

"You did."

"What's going on?"

"Don't worry about it. What'd you find out about this guy Mookie?"

His eyes seemed to go inside mine, then he tipped back the shot and drank from the bottle of Corona.

"The black broad, Brandy Grissum, came into Nig's office hysterical today. Dig this, she used the two yards you gave her to score a shitload of rock and get wiped out. So while she was on the nod at her mother's house in St. John the Baptist, our man Mookie tools on up for some more R amp;R. Guess what? Mookie decided he wasn't interested in a stoned-out twenty-buck street whore. So he sodomized her little sister."

He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and fiddled with his Zippo, as though he were trying to remove an image from his mind, then dropped the Zippo on the bar without lighting the cigarette.

"His last name is Zerrang," he said. "He used to be a leg breaker for a couple of shylocks on the Mississippi coast, then he made the big score as a hit man for the greaseballs in Miami. He must be pretty slick, though. I had a friend at NOPD punch on the computer. He's never been down."

"Who's he working for now?"

"Brandy doesn't know. This time I think she's telling the truth… You don't look good, Streak. What's troubling you, mon?"

I told him. We were the only people at the bar now. Clete listened, his face empty of expression. He rubbed his thumb against his cheekbone, and I could see white lines inside the crow's feet at the corner of his eye.

He made a coughing sound in his throat.

"That's quite a story," he said.

I picked up one of the salted limes from his saucer, then set it down again.

"Bootsie walked in on it?" he asked.

"When Karyn was dressing."

"How did the LaRose broad get in?"

"She got a pass key from the maid."

"Dave, you were throwing her out. Bootsie doesn't know that?"

"I didn't have a chance to tell her. I'll call her when she's back home."

"Man." He breathed through his nose, his lips crimped together.

"You told Karyn LaRose to peddle her bread somewhere else, though?"

"Something like that." A scrolled green and red Dixie beer sign was lit over the row of whiskey bottles behind the bar. I felt tired all over and my palms were stiff and dry when I closed and opened them.

"You didn't do anything wrong. You just got to make Boots see that. Right? This isn't a big deal," he said. He watched me rub the salt in the saucer with the tip of my finger. "Let's find a late-night joint and get a steak."

"I'm going to take a shower and go to bed," I said.

"I'm going up with you."

"The hell you are."

"I know you, Streak. You're going to get inside your own head and build a case against yourself. The slop chute is closing. For you it's closed permanently. You got that, big mon?"

"There's no problem here, Clete."

"Yeah, I bet. That broad couldn't buy you, so she decided to fuck your head." He stood up from the barstool, then grimaced slightly. "I feel like an upended bottle. Come on, let's get out of here. Remind me in the future to drink in low-class dumps that aren't full of the right people."

"You're the best, Cletus."

He put his arm on my shoulder, and we walked together toward the elevator like two impaired Siamese twins trying to get in sync with each other.

The next morning I was part of the caravan that escorted Karyn and Buford back to their home on the Teche. It was balmy and gray after the rain, and you could smell the wet earth in the fields and hear the clanging of the sugarcane refinery down the bayou. It was a fine, late-fall morning, disjointed from the events of last night, as though I had experienced them only in a drunken dream.

From my car I watched Karyn and her husband enter their front door, their faces opaque, perhaps still numb from the alcohol of the night before, or perhaps masking the secrets they waited to share or the buried anger they would vent on each other once inside.

Bootsie was in the backyard, at the redwood picnic table, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette when I parked in the drive. She wore sandals and a terrycloth red shirt and a pair of khakis high on her hips.

"Hi," I said.

Her legs were crossed, and she tipped her ashes in an inverted preserve jar cap and looked at the ducks skittering across our pond.

"You don't smoke," I said.

"I'm starting."

I sat down across from her. Her eyes moved up to meet mine.

"I told you the truth last night," I said.

"For some reason that doesn't make it any easier."

"Why?"

"How'd she come to have this obsession with you? What's your end of it?"

"I didn't want to go out to their house when we were first invited there. I tried to avoid her."

"Who are you putting on?"

I felt my throat close. My eyes burned, as though I were looking into a watery glare.

She threw her cigarette in a flower bed full of dead leaves by the back wall of the house. Her cheeks were hot and streaked with color. Before I went into the house, I removed the burning cigarette from the leaves and mashed it out in the jar cap in front of her, my gesture as foolish as my words were self-serving.

The wall phone was ringing in the kitchen. I picked it up, my eyes fixed on Bootsie's back through the window. Her hair was thick and woven with gold in the gray light.

"Aaron Crown dumped the boat down by Maurice," the sheriff said.

"Did anybody see him?"

"No, just the boat."

"He'll be back."

"You say that almost with admiration."

"Like an old gunbull said, Aaron's a traveling shit storm."

"Anyway, you got your wish. You're off it."

When I didn't reply, he said, "You're not going to ask me why?"

"Go ahead, Sheriff."

"Buford called and said you're resentful about the assignment. He said you don't need to come around his house again."

"He did, did he?"

"That's not all. He said you made a pass at his wife last night."

"He's a liar."

"I believe you. But why did he decide to make up a story about you now?"

"Ask him."

"I will… Dave, you still there?"

"I'll talk to you later, Sheriff. I have to go somewhere."

"I always knew this job would bring me humility… Say, you're not going out to get in Buford LaRose's face, are you?"

I drove Bootsie's Toyota to the mechanic's garage, exchanged it for my truck, and asked the mechanic to drive the Toyota back to my house, then I headed out to the LaRose plantation.

But I was not the only person who had a grievance with Buford that day. Jerry Joe Plumb's blue Buick was pulled at an angle to the old LaRose company store, and Jerry Joe stood on the gallery between the two wooden pecan barrels that framed the double front doors, his hands on his hips, speaking heatedly into Buford's face.

I crunched across the shell parking lot and cut my engine. They both looked at me, then stepped inside the double doors with the oxidized and cracked windows and continued their argument, Jerry Joe jabbing his finger in the air, his cheeks pooling with color.