He rose and extended his hand.

I didn't take it.

"You're fronting points for a guy who's got no bottom, Mr. Tauzin. No offense meant," I said.

That night I went to bed early, before Bootsie, and was almost asleep when I heard her enter the room and begin undressing. She brushed her teeth and stayed in the bathroom a long time, then clicked off the bathroom light and lay down on her side of the bed with her head turned toward the wall. I placed my palm on her back. Her skin was warm through her nightgown.

She looked up into the darkness.

"You all right?" she said.

"Sure."

"About Jerry Joe, I mean?"

"I was okay today."

"Dave?"

"Yes?"

"No… I'm sorry. I'm too tired to talk about it tonight."

"About what?"

She didn't reply at first, then she said, "That woman… I hate her."

"Come on, Boots. See her for what she is."

"You're playing her game. It's a rush for both of you. I'm not going to say any more…" She sat on the side of the bed and pushed her feet in her slippers. "I can't take this, Dave," she said, and picked up her pillow and a blanket and went into the living room.

The moon was down, the sky dark, when I was awakened at five the next morning by a sound out in the swamp, wood knocking against wood, echoing across the water. I sat on the edge of the bed, my head still full of sleep, and heard it again through the half-opened window, an oar striking a log perhaps, the bow sliding off a cypress stump. Then I saw the light in the mist, deep in the flooded trees, like a small halo of white phosphorous burning against the dampness, moving horizontally four feet above the waterline.

I put on my khakis and loafers and flannel shirt, took a flashlight out of the nightstand and my.45 automatic out of the dresser drawer and walked to the end of the dock.

The light out in the trees was gone. The air was gray with mist, the bayou dimpled by the rolling backs of gars.

"Who are you?" I called.

It was quiet, as though the person in the trees was considering my question, then I heard a paddle or an oar dipping into water, raking alongside a wood gunnel.

"Tell me who you are!" I called. I waited. Nothing. My words sounded like those of a fool trapped by his own fears.

I unlocked the bait shop and turned on the flood lamps, then unchained an outboard by the end of the concrete ramp, set one knee on the seat, and shoved out into the bayou. I cranked the engine and went thirty yards downstream and turned into a cut that led back into a dead bay surrounded by cypress and willows. The air was cold and thick with fog, and when I shut off the engine I heard a bass flop its tail in the shallows. Nutrias perched on every exposed surface, their eyes as red as sapphires in the glow of my flashlight.

Then, at the edge of the bay, I saw the path a boat had cut in the layer of algae floating between two stumps. I shined my light deep into the trees and saw a moving shape, the shadow of a hunched man, a flash of dirty gold water flicked backward as a pirogue disappeared beyond a mudbank that was overgrown with palmettos.

"Aaron?" I asked the darkness.

But no one responded.

I tried to remember the images in my mind's eye-the breadth of the shoulders, a hand pulling aside a limb, a neck that seemed to go from the jaws into the collarbones without taper. But the reality was I had seen nothing clearly except a man seated low in a pirogue and-

A glistening, thin object in the stern. It was metal, I thought. A chain perhaps. The barrel of a rifle.

My flannel shirt was sour with sweat. I could hear my heart beating in the silence of the trees.

I came home for lunch that day. Alafair was at school and Bootsie was gone. There was no note on the corkboard where we left messages for one another. I fixed a ham and onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea and heated a bowl of dirty rice and ate at the kitchen table. Batist called from the bait shop.

"Dave, there's a bunch of black mens here drinking beer and using bad language out on the dock," he said.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"One's got a knife instead of a hook on his hand."

"A what?"

"Come see, 'cause I'm fixing to run 'em down the road."

I walked down the slope through the trees. A new Dodge Caravan was parked by the concrete boat ramp, and five black men stood on the end of the dock, their shirtsleeves rolled in the warm air, drinking can beer while Jimmy Ray Dixon gutted a two-foot yellow catfish he had gill-hung from a nail on a light post.

A curved and fine-pointed knife blade, honed to the blue thinness of a barber's razor, was screwed into a metal and leather cup that fitted over the stump of Jimmy Ray's left wrist. He drew the blade's edge around the catfish's gills, then cut a neat line down both sides of the dorsal fin and stripped the skin back with a pair of pliers in his right hand. He sliced the belly from the apex of the V where the gills met to the anus and let the guts fall out of the cavity like a sack of blue and red jelly.

The tops of his canvas shoes were speckled with blood. He was grinning.

"I bought it from a man caught it in a hoop net at Henderson," he said.

"Y'all want to rent a boat?"

"I hear the fishing here ain't any good."

"It's not good anywhere now. The water's too cool."

"I got a problem with a couple of people bothering me. I think you behind it," he said.

"You want to lose the audience?" I said.

"Y'all give me a minute," he said to the other men. They were dressed in tropical shirts, old slacks, shoes they didn't care about. But they weren't men who fished. Their hands squeezed their own sex, almost with fondness; their eyes followed a black woman walking on the road; they whispered to one another, even though their conversation was devoid of content.

They started to go inside the shop.

"It's closed," I said.

"Hey, Jim, we ain't here to steal your watermelons," Jimmy Ray said.

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't call me a racial name," I said.

"Y'all open the cooler. I'll be along," he said to his friends. He watched them drift in a cluster down the dock toward the van.

"Here's what it is," he said. "That cracker Cramer, yeah, you got it, white dude from Homicide, smells like deodorant, is down at my pool hall, axing if I know why Jerry the Glide was in the neighborhood when somebody broke all his sticks."

Not bad, Cramer, I thought.

"Then your friend, Purcel, hears from this pipehead street chicken Mookie Zerrang's got permission to burn his kite, so he blames me. I ain't got time for this, Jack."

"Why was Jerry Joe in your neighborhood?"

"It ain't my neighborhood, I got a bidness there. I don't go in there at night, either." He brushed the sack of fish guts off the dock with his shoe and watched it float away in the current. "Why you got to put your hand in this shit, man?"

"You know how it is, a guy's got to do something for kicks."

"I hear it's 'cause you was fucking some prime cut married to the wrong dude. That's your choice, man, but I don't like you using my brother to do whatever you doing. Give my fish to the old man in there," he said, and started to walk away.

I walked after him and touched his back with the ball of my finger. I could feel his wingbone through the cloth of his shirt, see the dark grain of his whiskers along the edge of his jaw, smell the faint odor of sweat and talcum in his skin.

"Don't use profanity around my home, please," I said.

"You worried about language round your home? Man put a bullet in mine and killed my brother. That's the difference between us. Don't let it be lost on you, Chuck."

He got in the front passenger's seat of the van, slid a metal sheath over the knife blade attached to his stump, then unscrewed the blade and drank from a bottle of Carta Blanca, his throat working smoothly until the bottle was empty. The bottle made a dull, tinkling sound when it landed in the weeds by the roadside.