I crouched and swung the.45 around the room, my heart hammering against my ribcage, my eyes wide in the gloom. The wooden floor was littered with beer cans, bread wrappers, Red Man pouches, chicken bones, bottle caps, and the chewed stuffing from a rotted mattress that was piled in the corner. But there was nobody in the room. Then someone slid back the curtain on the doorway to the single bedroom in back. I aimed the.45 right at her face, both of my hands sweating on the grip.

"Wow, who the fuck are you?" she said drowsily. She was maybe twenty and wore cut-off blue jeans and only a bra for a top. Her face looked numb, dead, and she had to keep widening her eyes to focus on me. Her hair was the color of weathered wood.

"Where's Starkweather?" I said.

"I think he went out back with that other dude. Are you the heat or something?"

I pushed open the back screen and dropped into the yard. In the mist I could see an outhouse, an upside-down pirogue beaded with dew, a wooden hog pen, a wheelless and rusted-out car body pocked with silvery bullet holes. The sun was lighting the trees now, and I could see the dead green water in the swamp, the levee covered with buttercups, the Spanish moss that was lifting in the breeze off the Gulf. But there was no one back here. Then I heard the hogs grunting and snuffing again, and I realized they were eating something inside the pen.

They were in a circle, their heads dipped down as though they were eating from a trough; then one of them would rattle its head, grunt, crunch something loudly in its jaws, and dip its snout down again. Their faces and mouths were shiny with gore; then I saw one of them tear a long string of blue entrails out of Bobby Joe Starkweather's stomach and run heavily across the pen with it. Starkweather's face was bloodless, the eyes and mouth open, his shaved scalp flecked with mud. Right above one eyebrow was a black hole the size of a dime.

A bucket of kitchen slops was spilled on the ground. His arms were spread out beside him, and he looked as if he'd been shot from the front side of the pen. I looked carefully over the wet ground, which was dented with boot and dog and chicken prints, until I saw the smooth impression of a street shoe in a ridge of mud, and right in the center of it the stenciled outline of a pistol shell that the shooter must have stepped on and then prized up with his finger.

I went back in the shack. The girl was fumbling in a food cabinet.

"Are you heat?" she said.

"It depends on who you talk to."

"You got any whites?"

"You look like you already did the drugstore."

"If you had to ball him, you'd be doing Thorazines like M amp;M's."

"I hope you got paid up front."

Her eyes closed and opened and refocused on mine.

"Where is he?" she said.

"Feeding the pigs."

She looked at me uncertainly, then started out the back door.

"Let it go. You don't want to look back there," I said.

But she didn't listen. A minute later I heard her make a sound like she had suddenly stepped into an envelope of fouled air. Her face was gray when she came back through the door.

"That's gross," she said. "Shouldn't you take him to a funeral home or something? Yuk."

"Sit down. I'll fix you a cup of coffee."

"I can't hang around here. I've got an aerobics and meditation class at ten o'clock. The guy I work for enrolls us in the class so we won't build up a lot of tensions. He gets mad if I miss. God, how do I get around all these crazy people? You know what he did? He got naked in his army boots and started lifting weights on the front porch. The dog got off the leash and chased a chicken into the privy and he shot the dog with a shotgun. Then he tied it up and gave it a bowl of milk like nothing had happened."

"Who was the dude he went out back with?"

"He looked like he had a pink bicycle patch on his face."

"What?"

"I don't know what he looked like. He was big. I was kind of indisposed, you know what I mean?"

"Say it again about his face."

"His nose and part of his eyebrow were messed up. Like with a scar."

"What did he say?"

Her eyes seemed to reach out into space. Her mouth was slightly parted, her facial muscles collapsed with thought.

"He said, 'They want you to find some new geography. Work on your golf game.' Then what's-his-name said, 'Money talks and bullshit walks, biscuit-eater. I got to feed my pigs.'"

She chewed on a hangnail and her eyes went flat again.

"Look, I got a problem," she said. "He didn't pay me. I got to give the guy I work for twenty bucks when I get back to the bar. Will you get his wallet for me?"

"Sorry. I think the hogs got it, anyway."

"You want some action?"

"I'll drop you where you want to go, kiddo. Then I'm going to call the sheriff's office about Starkweather. But I'll deal you out of it. If you want to tell them something later, that's up to you."

"You are heat, aren't you?"

"Why not?"

"Why you cutting me loose? You got something in mind for later?"

"They might lock you up as a material witness. That guy out there in the hog lot has killed dozens, maybe hundreds of people. But he was a novice and a bumbler compared to the people he worked for."

She sat against the far door of my car, her face thick with a drug hangover, and didn't speak during the long ride through the marsh to the parish road. Her yellowed fingers were wrapped tightly in her lap.

Like many others, I learned a great lesson in Vietnam: Never trust authority. But because I had come to feel that authority should always be treated as suspect and self-serving, I had also learned that it was predictable and vulnerable. So that afternoon I sat under my beach umbrella on my houseboat deck, dressed only in swimming trunks and an open tropical shirt, with a shot of Jim Beam and a beer chaser on the table in front of me, and called Sam Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.

"I ran down Abshire," I said. "I don't know why you held out on me at the hospital. He's not exactly well concealed."

There was a moment's silence on the line.

"Have you got wax in your ears or something?" he said. "How do I get through to you? You stay off federal turf."

"I'm going to kick a board up his ass."

"You're not going to do a goddamn thing, except get a warrant filed on you for obstruction."

"You want in on it or not?" I asked.

"I have a strong feeling you're drunk."

"So what? I'm going to cool him out. You want to be there for the party, or do you want us local boys to write the story for you in the Picayune? It's going to be socko stuff, partner."

"What the hell is the matter with you? You don't seem to have any bottom. One of my best men is burned to death in your car. Your own people dump you like a sack of dog turds. You're evidently working on becoming a full-time drunk again, and now you're talking about taking out a retired two-star general. You think it's possible you're losing your mind?"

"You're a good man, but don't take up poker."

"What?"

"It's a terrible vice. It'll lead you to ruin."

"You bastard, you're not going to get away with this," he said.

I hung up the phone, knocked back the jigger of Jim Beam, and sipped from the glass of beer. The sun looked like a yellow balloon trapped under the lake's surface. The wind was warm, and sweat ran down my bare chest in the hot shade of the umbrella. My eyes burned with the humidity of the afternoon. I dialed Clete down at the First District.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"At home."

"There's a bunch of people asking about you. You sure spit in the soup, Dave."

"I'm not hard to find. Who's curious about me?"

"Who else? Feds. Did you really call up the CIA? Man, that's unbelievable."