I held my badge out at him. He put his foot on the brake, both of his hands on the steering wheel, his chin pointed upward under his purple chauffeur's cap, and scraped the front tire in a long black line against the curb.

"How do you want to play it?" Clete asked before we got out of the car.

"We run up the black flag," I said.

Clete had stopped our own car in front of the Cadillac, and we walked back on opposite sides of it. I tapped on the passenger's window and on Segura's back window for them to roll down the glass. Later I was to go over this scene again and again in my mind, as well as the careless remark I'd made to Clete about the black flag, and wonder at how differently that afternoon might have turned out if I had approached the driver's side of the Cadillac or if I had kept my own counsel.

Clete reached down into the ignition, pulled the keys, and threw them into a hedge. The dwarf was petrified with fear. His little hands gripped the wheel and his jug head swiveled back and forth between Clete and the back seat.

"You don't have a blowgun hidden in your shorts, do you?" Clete said to him, then sniffed the air inside the Cadillac. "My, my, what is that aroma I smell? Colombian coffee? Or maybe we've been toking on a little muta on our way to the golf course?"

The air was heavy with the smell of marijuana. The blond woman's face looked sick. I saw the cigarette lighter from the dash lying on the floor, and I suspected she'd been snorting the roach off the lighter and had eaten it when we'd pulled them over. She had a nice figure and was dressed in white shorts and heels and a low blouse, but her hair was lacquered with so much hair spray that it looked like wire, and her face was layered with cosmetics to cover the deep pockmarks in her complexion.

I opened the door for her. "Walk on back home," I said.

"They lock the gate," she said.

"Then do the best thing you've done in years and keep on walking," I said.

"I don't know what to do, Julio," she said to the backseat.

"Do what I tell you, hon. Your Latino gumball is going to take a big fall today," I said.

Her eyes shifted nervously and she bit her lips, then she picked up her purse, eased past me, and clicked hurriedly down the sidewalk.

I leaned down in Segura's window. He and the gatekeeper whom Clete had hit in the stomach the other day sat behind a fold-out bar with vodka drinks in their hands. Rubber bands held the napkins around the drink glasses. Segura wore yellow golf slacks, polished brown loafers, and a flowered white shirt unbuttoned to his stomach. His peculiar triangular face, with the tiny balls of purple skin in the furrows of his forehead, looked up at me in the slanting sunlight.

"What the fuck you think you're doing now, Robicheaux?" he asked.

"Teaching you what a real bad day can be," I said.

"What do you want? Some kind of action? A piece of something downtown?"

"You're going to give me Philip Murphy, Bobby Joe Starkweather, and the little Israeli."

"I don't know none of these people. You keep coming around my house talking about things I don't know nothing about."

"Ole Streak's in a bad mood today, Julio," Clete said. "Your friends messed it up the other night and did some real bad things. They're not around now, but you are. You and Paco the barfer here." He blew his cigarette smoke into the gatekeeper's face.

"You trying to squeeze me? Okay, I'm a realist. I got business arrangements with policemen," Segura said.

"You don't fly this time, Julio," I said. "All the doors are closed. It's just me and you."

"Call Wineburger," he said to the gatekeeper.

The other man reached for the telephone that was in a mahogany box inset in the back of the front seat.

"You touch that telephone and I'll stuff it crossways down your throat," Clete said.

The man sat back in the deep leather of the seat, his face tight, his hands flat on his knees.

"You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants," Segura said.

"Try this, my friend," I said. "Lovelace Deshotels was a little black girl from the country who had big aspirations for herself and her family. She thought she'd made the big score, but you don't like broads that slop down your booze and throw up in your pool, so you eighty-sixed her back to the geek circuit. Except you had a badass black girl on your hands that wouldn't eighty-six. On top of it, she developed this fixation about elephants." I watched his face. It twitched like a rubber band. "So what does a macho guy like you do when one of his whores gets in his face? He has a couple of his lowlifes take her out on a boat and launch her into the next world with the same stuff she'd already sold her soul for.

"Right now you're wondering how I know all this, aren't you, Julio? It's because the guys that work for you have diarrhea of the mouth. It's information you can get across a lunch table. There are probably only several dozen people we can march by a grand jury right now."

"Then do it, smart guy."

"Let me give you the rest of it, just so you'll be fully informed when Wineburger tries to bond you out this afternoon. I'm going to have your car towed in, vacuumed, and torn apart with crowbars. Possession in Louisiana is fifteen years, and all we need is the carbon ash, either off that cigarette lighter or the upholstery.

"Any way you cut it, your ass is busted."

Then Cletus committed what was probably the stupidest and most senseless act of his career.

"And this little piggy is busted, too," he said, and reached in the window and caught the gatekeeper's nose between his fingers and twisted.

The gatekeeper's eyes filled with tears; his hand slapped at Clete's, then his hairy, tattooed arm dipped into the leather pouch on the side door.

"No lo hagas! No lo hagas!" Segura screamed.

But it was forever too late for all of us. The gatekeeper's hand came up with a nickel-plated automatic and let off one round that hit the window frame and blew glass all over Clete's shirt. It was very fast after that. Just as I pulled the.45 from the back of my trousers, I saw Clete rip his nine-millimeter from his belt holster, crouch, and begin firing. I stepped back a foot, to clear the angle away from Segura, and fired simultaneously with my left hand locked on my wrist to hold the recoil down. I fired five times, as fast as I could pull the trigger, the explosions roaring in my ears, and saw no one thing distinctly inside the car. Instead, it was as though an earthquake had struck the inside of the Cadillac. The air was filled with divots of leather, stuffing from the seats, flying shards of glass and metal, splinters of mahogany, broken liquor bottles, cordite, smoke, and a film of blood and vodka that drained down the back window.

There was no place for Julio Segura to hide. He tried to shrink into an embryonic ball away from Clete's line of fire, but his position was hopeless. Then he suddenly leaped up into the window with his hands pressed out toward me like claws. His eyes were pleading, his mouth open with a silent scream. My finger had already squeezed tight in the trigger guard, and the round caught him in the top of the mouth and blew the back of his head all over the jerking body of the gatekeeper.

I was trembling and breathless when I fell back from the Cadillac and leaned on top of Clete's car, the.45 hanging from my hand. Clete's scarred, poached face was so bloodless and tight you could have struck a kitchen match to it. His clothes were covered with flecks of glass.

"The sonofabitch missed me from two feet," he said. "Did you see that? That fucking window glass saved my life. Go back and look inside. We blew them apart."

Then the dwarf chauffeur climbed down from the driver's seat and ran down the middle of the esplanade on his stubby legs amid a wail of sirens. Clete began to giggle uncontrollably.