But I could still hear part of it.

"You're shorting me. Your old man wouldn't do this, Buford."

"You'll get your due."

"Three of the jobs you promised are already let to Dock Green."

"I gave you my word. You stop trying to cadge favors because you knew my family."

"Persephone let you put your head up her dress?"

Jerry Joe's back was to me. His shoulders looked stiff, rectangular, his triceps swollen with tubes of muscle, like a prizefighter's while he waits for the referee to finish giving instructions before the bell.

But Buford turned away from the insult and lit a cigar, cupping and puffing it in the gloom as though Jerry Joe was not there.

Jerry Joe's leather-soled oxblood loafers were loud on the gallery when he came out the double doors.

"What's the haps, Jerry?" I said.

He balanced on his soles, his face still glowing.

"He asks me the haps? Here's a lesson. You take up with piranha fish, don't expect them to go on a diet."

"Buford stiffed you?"

"That guy don't have the lead in his Eversharp to stiff anybody. Hey, keep your hammer in your pants or get you a full-body condom," he said, and got into his Buick and started the engine.

I got out of my truck and put my hand on his door window. He rolled it down with the electric motor.

"Spell it out," I said.

"You're in the way. She knows how to combine business and pleasure. Don't pretend you're a dumb shit." He pushed the window button again and scorched two lines in the shell parking lot out to the state highway.

I picked a handful of pecans out of one of the barrels by the door and went inside the store.

"You again. Like bubble gum under the shoe," Buford said.

The store was dark, the cypress floor worn as smooth as wood inside a feed bin, the half-filled shelves filmed with cobwebs. I put a half dollar for the pecans next to the brass cash register on the counter and cracked two of them together in my palm.

"Why are you telling lies about me to the sheriff?" I said.

"You propositioned Karyn at the Acadiana. What do you expect?"

"Who told you this?"

"Karyn, of course."

"Bad source. Your wife's a pathological liar."

"Your job's finished here. Go back to doing whatever you do, Dave. Just stay off my property."

"Wrong. As long as Aaron Crown is running loose, I'll come here anytime I want, Buford."

He combed his thick, curly hair back with his fingernails, a dark knowledge forming in his face.

"You want to bring me down, don't you?" he said.

"You're a fraud."

"What did I ever do to you? Can you answer that simple question for me?"

"You and your wife use each other to injure other people… You know what a bugarron is?"

The skin trembled along the lower rim of his right eye.

"Are you calling me a-" he began.

"You serve a perversity of some kind. I just don't know what it is."

"The next time you come here, I'll break your jaw. That's a promise."

He turned and walked down the length of the counter, past the display shelves that were covered with dust, and out the back screen door into the light. The screen slammed behind him like the crack of a rifle.

I took the rest of the day off and raked piles of wet leaves and pecan husks out of the lawn. The wind was still warm out of the south and the tops of the trees in the swamp were a soft green against the sky, and the only sound louder than my own thoughts was Tripod, Alafair's three-legged coon, running up and down on his chain in the side yard. I burned the leaves in the coulee, then I showered, took a nap, and didn't wake until after sunset. While I was dressing, the phone rang in the kitchen. Bootsie answered it and walked to the bedroom door.

"It's Batist," she said.

"What's he want?"

"He didn't say." She went into the living room, then out on the gallery and sat on the swing.

"That movie fella get a hold of you?" Batist asked.

"No. What's up?"

"He was down here wit' a truck and some people wit' cameras. I tole him he ought to talk to you about what he was doing. I seen him talking on one of them cordless phones. He ain't called you?"

"This man's not a friend, Batist. Is he there now?"

"No. He ain't the reason I called you. It's that big black man. He ain't up to no good."

"Which black man?"

"The biggest one I ever seen around here."

"I'll be down in a minute."

I went out on the gallery. Bootsie still sat in the swing, pushing it back and forth with one foot.

"I need to go down to the dock for a few minutes," I said.

"Right."

"Boots, you've got to cut me some slack."

"You don't see it."

"What?"

"You hate the LaRoses and what they stand for. That's the power they have over you."

"I'm a police officer. They're corrupt."

"You say they are. Nobody else does." She went inside. The swing twisted emptily on its chains under the bug light.

I walked down the slope through the trees to the dock. The string of lights was turned on over the dock, and you could see bream night feeding off the insects that fell into the water. Batist was cleaning out the coffee urn inside the bait shop.

"Tell me about the black guy," I said.

Batist looked up from his work and studied my face. His head was titled, one eyebrow arched.

"What you mad about?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"I can see that, all right… That movie fella rented a boat and took pictures up and down the bayou. That's when I first seen this black man up the road in a pickup truck, watching the bayou out the window. Later he come on in and axed if a movie's getting made here.

"I say that's what it looks like. He axed me if it's a movie about this white man broke out of Angola, the one killed that black civil rights man in Baton Rouge a long time ago. When I tole him I don't know, he said he's got a story he can give this movie fella, if he gets any money for it, he's gonna give me some, but he's got to find out where the movie man's staying at first.

"I said, 'What you want here?'

"He had on this straw hat, with a colored band around it. He took it off and the side of his head was shaved down to the scalp. He goes, 'I'm so strong I got muscles in my shit, old man. I'd watch what I say.' All the time smiling with gold all over his teet'.

"I go, 'I'm fixing to clean up. You want to buy somet'ing?'

"Dave, this man's arms was big as my thigh. His shoulders touched both sides of that do' when he come in. He goes, 'You sure that movie fella ain't tole you where he stay at?'

"I go, 'It ain't my bidness. Ain't nobody else's here, either.'

"He kept looking at me, grinning, messing with the salt shaker on top of the counter, like he was fixing to do somet'ing.

"So I said, 'Nigger, don't prove your mama raised a fool.'

"He laughed and picked up a ham sandwich and crumpled up a five-dollar bill and t'rew it on the counter and walked out. Just like that. Man didn't no more care if I insulted him than a mosquito was flying round his head."

"Call me if you see him again. Don't mess with him."

"Who he is, Dave?"

"He sounds like a guy named Mookie Zerrang. He's a killer, Batist."

He started to wipe down the counter, then flipped his rag into the bucket.

"They ain't nothing for it, is they?" he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"They out there, they in here. Don't nobody listen to me," he said, and waved his arm toward the screened windows, the floodlighted bayou, the black wall of shadows on the far bank. "It ain't never gonna be like it use to. What for we brought all this here, Dave?"

He turned his back to me and began dropping the board shutters on the windows and latching them from the inside.