Then Tony realized the priest had turned off the garden hose and was walking toward him. He started to get up and leave. In fact, he didn’t even know why he was there. Should he just tell this stranger about Yvonne and the dead homeless man and the fact that tomorrow he might betray his own family? The man in black pants and a smudged T-shirt was probably not much older than he was, except he was slight of build, almost frail. A baseball glove hung from his belt and another one was folded in his hand, a grass-stained ball buried in the pocket.

“Feel like a little pitch-and-catch?” he said.

“I pulled my arm in a fraternity game. I probably won’t be that good at it.”

“Neither am I. See that piece of cardboard where there used to be a stained-glass pane? My forkball got out of control.”

Tony fitted the spare glove on his hand, and he and the priest began flinging the ball back and forth under the oak’s drip line, the sunlight breaking like slivers of glass behind the cathedral’s silhouette. Then the priest skipped one across the grass to him. Tony fielded it backhand, then fired it straight into the priest’s glove, straight and hard, with no trajectory, with an accuracy that surprised even himself.

The priest sent another grounder at him. Tony bobbled it at first, the ball caroming off the heel of his hand. But he pulled it out of midair with his right hand and side-armed it, whap, back into the priest’s waiting glove.

“You’re pretty good,” the priest said.

“Not really,” he said, doing a poor job of hiding his pride.

“Try me now,” the priest said.

Tony threw a high-hopper that the priest caught easily and tossed back without interest. The next two were faster, at an angle, grounders-with-eyes. The priest was good, scooping them up with his body positioned in front of the ball, his return throw fired from behind the ear. The next one Tony threw was a hummer, whizzing across the lawn like a shot. The priest caught it on the run, spearing it after it took a bad hop on a tree root, whirling and side-arming it back in a half turn.

The ball flew by Tony’s outstretched glove and hit a passing car on the street. “Oh, boy,” he heard the priest say.

“I’ll go after it, Father,” Tony said.

“Are you kidding? This is the third time this has happened this week. Time to take cover,” the priest said.

Moments later, the priest hid the two gloves in a flower bed, furtively looking around the corner of the building. His face was bright and sweaty in the shade, his eyes wide with apprehension.

“You’re really a minister?” Tony said.

“Well, I’m sure not Derek Jeter.”

“I think the ball hit the car window.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here and not on the street looking for it. Come on, I have a couple of cold sodas in my cooler.”

He squatted down on the grass and popped off the top of a small ice chest. He lifted out a can of Pepsi, ripped the tab, and handed it up to Tony. “Were you worried about something out there?” he said.

“Me? No, not really.”

“You a Catholic?”

“No.”

“If you want to tell me about something, it won’t go any farther than this garden.”

Had all this been a ruse? Tony wondered. Another do-gooder with an agenda? The priest lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his face with it, staring out at the traffic on the street.

“My girlfriend killed herself. She was stoned out of her head and maybe went to bed with several men before she did it. I might be arrested tomorrow for the death of a homeless man. I think maybe I’m a coward. I may commit a terrible act of betrayal and send one of my parents to prison.”

The priest’s mouth parted silently. His face was still flushed from play, the hair on his arms speckled with dirt from his work in the garden. His eyes glistened. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Sorry about what? Yvonne’s death? Sorry he had nothing to offer? What was he saying?

But the priest’s gaze had drifted toward the street, where Slim Bruxal’s SUV had just pulled behind Tony’s Lexus. The SUV was loaded with kids from the fraternity house. At least two of them were wearing T-shirts imprinted with the faces of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been one of several ways the fraternity signaled its feelings on the question of race.

“I have to go,” Tony said.

“Who are those guys?” the priest said.

“My friends.”

The priest looked again at the kids getting out of Slim’s vehicle. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

“I don’t know who I am, Father. I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Stay,” the priest said.

But Tony had already fitted a crooked smile on his face and directed his steps toward his friends, who waited for him by the curb. The speckled shade under the St. John Oak seemed to slip off his skin like water sliding off stone.

IT WAS HOT AND DRY that evening, and heat lightning flickered against a black sky in the south. Molly and I ate a late dinner of cold cuts and potato salad and iced tea on the picnic table in the backyard with Snuggs and Tripod. The air was thick with birds, the bayou coated with a pall of smoke from meat fires in the park.

“I think it’s going to storm,” Molly said. “You can feel the barometer dropping.”

Just as she spoke, the wind touched the leaves over our heads and I felt a breath of cool air against my cheek, smelled a hint of distant rain. The phone rang in the kitchen. Molly got up to answer it.

“Let the machine take it,” I said.

She sat back down. Then she tapped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“A kid called just before you got home. He wouldn’t leave a number. He said he’d call back later.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tony?”

“Tony Lujan?”

“He just said ‘Tony.’ He sounded like he’d been drinking.”

“He probably was. That’s Bello Lujan’s kid. The D.A. and the Feds are about to chain-drag him down East Main.”

The phone rang again. This time I went inside and answered it. It was Wally, our dispatcher, working the late shift and, I suspected, trying to pass on his discontent about it.

“We got Monarch Little in a holding cell. He t’rew his food t’rew the bars. What do you t’ink we ought to do?”

“Tell him to clean it up. Why you calling me with this, Wally?”

“’Cause he wants to talk to Helen, but she ain’t here.”

“What’s he in for?”

“Illegal firearms possession. Maybe littering, too, ’cause he left his burned car on the street.”

“I’m not in the mood for it, partner.”

“His car caught fire, down at the corner where he sells dope. Soon as the fire truck gets there, shotgun shells start blowing up inside the car. There was a sawed-off double-barrel on the floor. The firemen found what was left of a truck flare on the backseat. Want to come down?”

“No.”

There was a pause. “Dave?”

“What?”

“One of the uniforms called Monarch a bucket of black gorilla shit. Monarch axed him if it was true the uniform’s mother still does it dog-style in Master P’s backyard. The same uniform tole me he was recommending suicide watch for Monarch. I go off shift in t’ree hours. I don’t want no accidents happening here after I’m gone.”

I took the receiver from my ear and pinched the fatigue out of my eyes. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“T’anks. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

I asked Molly to save my dinner and went down to the jail, where Monarch sat in a holding cell, barefoot, beltless, his gold neck chains locked up in a personal possessions envelope. One eye had a deep red blood clot in the corner, the eyebrow ridged, split in the middle.

“Who popped you?” I asked.

“Slipped down getting into the cruiser. Check the arrest report if you t’ink I’m lying. I cain’t get ahold of that FBI woman. I’m suppose to be in Witness Protection, not in no holding cell.”