"Did your father grow up around here?"

The sheriff rubbed the calluses of one palm on the backs of his knuckles.

"Sir?" I said.

"He was one of the drunks who burned them out. We can't blame Mookie Zerrang on the greaseballs in Miami. He's of our own making, Dave."

batist had been released from the hospital that day, and after work I shopped for him at the grocery in town and then drove out to his house.

He was sitting in a soft, stuffed chair on the gallery, wearing a flannel shirt over the bandages that were taped on his shoulders. His daughter, a large, square woman who looked more Indian than black, was in the side yard, hammering the dust out of a quilt with an old tennis racquet.

I told Batist the story about the Zerrang family, the fourteen-year-old boy who was cooked alive in the electric chair, the drunks who burned his home.

Batist's face was impassive while I spoke. His broad hands were motionless on his thighs, the knuckles like carved wood.

"My daddy got killed by lightning working for twenty cents an hour," he said. "The white man owned the farm knowed mules draw lightning, but he sat on his gallery while it was storming all over the sky and tole my daddy to keep his plow turned in the field, not to come out till he'd cut the last row. That's what he done to my daddy. But I ain't growed up to hate other people for it, no."

"You need anything else, partner?"

"That nigger's out yonder in the swamp. Fat Daddy's wife had a dream about him. He was wading through the water, with a big fold-out knife in his hand, the kind you dress deer with."

"Don't believe in that stuff, Batist."

"Nigger like that come out of hell, Dave. Don't say he cain't go in your dreams."

I walked back out to my truck, trying not to think about his words, or the fact that Fat Daddy's wife had somehow seen in her dream the type of wide-bladed, foldout game dressing knife that Mookie Zerrang had used to murder Lonnie Felton and his girlfriend at Henderson Swamp.

Early the next morning I called an old friend of mine named Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Then I called Buford at his house.

"Meet me in City Park," I said.

"Considering our track record, that seems inappropriate, Dave," he said.

"Persephone Green is destroying your life. Is that appropriate?"

A half hour later I was sitting at a picnic table when I saw him get out of his car by the old brick fire station in the park and walk through the oak trees toward me. He wore a windbreaker over a L.S.U. T-shirt and white pleated slacks without a belt. His curly hair was damp and freshly combed and he had shaved so closely that his cheeks glowed with color. He sat down at the plank table and folded his hands. I pushed a Styrofoam cup of coffee toward him and opened the top of a take-out container.

"Sausage and eggs from Victor's," I said.

"No, thanks."

"Suit yourself," I said, and wrapped a piece of French bread around a sausage paddy and dipped it in my coffee. Then I put it back in my plate without eating it. "Persephone Green is the bag lady for the Giacano family and Jimmy Ray Dixon and every other New Orleans lowlife who put money into your campaign. The payback is the chain of state hospitals for drunks and addicts," I said.

"The contracts are all going to legitimate corporations, Dave. I don't know all their stockholders. Why should I?"

"Stockholders? Dock tried to squeeze out Short Boy Jerry. When Jerry Joe wouldn't squeeze, they had him beaten to death. Is that what stockholders do?"

"Is this why you got me out here?"

"No. I couldn't figure why you kept this sixties character, Clay Mason, around. Then I remembered you'd published some papers on psychopharmacology, you know, curing drunks with drugs and all that jazz."

"You belong to A.A. You know only one point of view. It's not your fault. But there're other roads to recovery."

"That's why you're on the spike yourself?"

I saw the hurt in his face, the stricture in his throat.

"I talked to a friend in the DEA this morning," I said. "His people think Mason's got money in your hospital chain. They also think he's involved with some crystal meth labs down in Mexico. That's mean shit, Buford. Bikers dig it for gangbangs, stomping people's ass, stuff like that."

"Do you get a pleasure out of this? Why do you have this obsession with me and my wife? Can't you leave us in peace?"

"Maybe I've been in the same place you are."

"You're going to save me?…" He shook his head, then his eyes grew close together and filmed over. He sat very still for a long time, like a man who imagined himself riding a bicycle along the rim of a precipice. "It's Karyn they own."

His face darkened with anger. He stared at the bayou, as though the reflected sunlight he saw there could transport him out of the moment he had just created for himself.

"How?" I asked. "The cheating back in college? Persephone has been blackmailing her over something that happened twenty years ago?"

"You know how many educational and honor societies she belongs to? She'd be disgraced. The irony is she didn't need to cheat. She was a good student on her own."

But not number one, I thought.

He studied my eyes and seemed to see the thought buried there.

"If you tell anybody this, I'll sue you for libel. Then I'll personally kick your ass," he said.

"I'm not your problem."

His face was puffed, naked, the eyes like brown marbles in a pan of water.

I picked up my coffee and the sausage paddy I'd wrapped in a piece of French bread and walked to my truck. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke through the trees. Buford still sat at the plank table, his forehead on his palm, oblivious to the camellias that were in full bloom along the banks of Bayou Teche.

I didn't tell Buford all the content of my conversation with my friend Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Minos and his colleagues were about to raid the ranch of Clay Mason seven hundred miles below the Texas border, in the state of Jalisco.

And Helen Soileau and I were invited.

We flew into Guadalajara at noon with Minos and two other DEA agents. Minos was a tall, lean, cynical, good-natured man with blond close-cropped hair that was starting to whiten. When he had played forward for L.S.U. years ago, sportswriters had nicknamed him "Dr. Dunkenstein" for the ferocious rim-jarring slam dunks that were his trademark. As we taxied toward the hangar, he pulled back the curtain on the charter plane's window and looked at the hills in the distance, then at a parked van with three wide backseats and, leaning against it, an unshaved man in blue jeans and a maroon football jersey with a holstered pistol and a gold shield clipped onto his belt.

"There's our ride," he said.

Helen stared out the window.

"I don't believe it. It's that's smart-ass, what's-his-name, Heriberto, the one looks like his hair was cut with garden clippers," she said.

"You know that guy?" Minos asked.

"He's a Mexican drug agent. A priest up in the mountains told us he's dirty," I said.

"They all are. One of our guys got sold out here and tortured to death," Minos said. "This guy's fairly harmless."

"Great character reference," Helen said.

We drove out of the city and through the small village of Zapopan. In the center of the village square was a gazebo, surrounded by rain trees, where a band was playing and children were firing out of milk bottles rockets that popped high in the sky. On one side of the square was a grayish pink eighteenth-century cathedral whose stone steps had been worn smooth and cupped down the center by the knees of thousands of penitents who worked themselves painfully up the steps on their birthdays, simultaneously saying a rosary.