Then his eyes focused on the cooler, on an amber, sweating bottle of Dixie nestled in the ice.

"All right," he said casually. "Let me borrow your fly rods, Mr. Robicheaux. I'll take good care of them."

"You're not going out on the salt?"

"No, I get seasick anyway."

"You want to leave the beer box with me?"

"It came with the boat. That fellow might get mad if I left it somewhere. Thanks for your thoughtfulness, though."

"Yeah, you bet."

After they were gone, I resolved that Elrod Sykes was on his own with his problems.

"Hey, Dave, that man really a big movie actor?" Batist said.

"He's big stuff out in Hollywood, Batist. Or at least he used to be."

"He rich?"

"Yeah, I guess he is."

"That's his reg'lar woman, too, huh?"

"Yep."

"How come he's so unhappy?"

"I don't know, Batist. Probably because he's a drunk."

"Then why don't he stop gettin' drunk?"

"I don't know, partner."

"You mad 'cause I ax a question?"

"Not in the least, Batist," I said, and headed for the back of the shop and began stacking crates of canned soda pop in the storeroom.

"You got some funny moods, you," I heard him say behind me.

A half hour later the phone rang.

"h.e.l.lo," I said.

"We got a problem down here," a voice said.

There was static on the line and rain was throbbing on the shop's tin roof.

"Elrod?"

"Yeah. We hit some logs or a sandbar or something."

"Where are you?"

"At a pay phone in a little store. I waded ash.o.r.e."

"Where's the boat?"

"I told you, it's messed up."

"Wait until the water rises, then you'll probably float free."

"There's a bunch of junk in the propellor."

"What are you asking me, Elrod?"

"Can you come down here?"

Batist was eating some chicken and dirty rice at the counter. He looked at my face and laughed to himself.

"How far down the bayou is the boat?" I said.

"About three miles. That bend you were talking about."

"The bend I was talking about, huh?"

"Yeah, you were right. There're some dead trees or logs in the water there. We ran right into them."

"We?"

"Yeah."

"I'll come after you, but I'm also going to give you a bill for my time."

"Sure thing, absolutely, Dave. This is really good of you. If lean-"

I put the receiver back on the hook.

"Tell Bootsie I'll be back in about an hour," I said.

Batist had finished his lunch and was peeling the cellophane off a fresh cigar. The humor had gone out of his face.

"Dave, I ain't one to tell you what to do, no," he said. "But there's people that's always gonna be axin' for somet'ing. When you deal with them kind, it don't matter how much you give, it ain't never gonna be enough."

He lit his cigar and fixed his eyes on me as he puffed on the smoke.

I put on my raincoat and hat, hitched a boat and trailer to my truck, and headed down the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees toward the general store where Elrod had made his call. The trailer was bouncing hard in the flooded chuck-holes, and through the rearview mirror I could see the outboard engine on the boat's stern wobbling against the engine mounts. I shifted down to second gear, pulled to a wide spot on the road, and let a car behind me pa.s.s. The driver, a man wearing a shapeless fedora, looked in the opposite direction of me, out toward the bayou, as he pa.s.sed.

Elrod was not at the general store, and I drove a quarter mile farther south to the bend where he had managed to put the cabin cruiser right through the limbs of a submerged tree and simultaneously sc.r.a.pe the bow up on a sandbar. The bayou was running high and yellow now, and gray nests of dead morning-glory vines had stuck to the bow and fanned back and forth in the current.

I backed my trailer into the shallows, then unwinched my boat into the water, started the engine, and opened it up in a shuddering whine against the steady clatter of the rain on the bayou's surface.

I came astern of the cabin cruiser and looped the painter on a cleat atop the gunwale so that my boat swung back in the lee of the cruiser. The current was swirling with mud and I couldn't see the propeller, but obviously it was fouled. From under the keel floated a streamer of torn hyacinth vines and lily pads, baited trotline, a divot ripped out of a conical fish net, and even the Clorox marker bottle that went with it.

Elrod came out of the cabin with a newspaper over his head.

"How does it look?" he said.

"I'll cut some of this trash loose, then we'll try to back her into deeper water. How'd you hit a fish net? Didn't you see the Clorox bottle?"

"Is that how they mark those things?"

I opened my Puma knife, reached as deep below the surface as I could, and began pulling and sawing away the flotsam from the propeller.

"I 'spect the truth is I don't have any business out here," he said.

I flung a handful of twisted hyacinths and tangled fishline toward the bank and looked up into his face. The alcoholic shine had gone out of his eyes. Now they simply looked empty, on the edge of regret.

"You want me to get down in the water and do that?" he asked. Then he glanced away at something on the far bank.

"No, that's all right," I said. I stepped up on the bow of my boat and over the rail of the cabin cruiser. "Let's see what happens. If I can't shake her loose, I'll tie my outboard onto the bow and try to pull her sideways into the current."

We went inside the dryness of the cabin and closed the door. Kelly was sleeping on some cushions, her face nestled into one arm. When she woke, she looked around sleepily, her cheek wrinkled with the imprint of her arm; then she realized that little had changed in her and Elrod's dreary morning and she said, "Oh," almost like a child to whom awakenings are not good moments.

I started the engine, put it in reverse, and gave it the gas. The hull vibrated against the sandbar, and through the backwindows I could see mud and dead vegetation boiling to the bayou's surface behind the stern. But we didn't move off the sandbar. I tried to go forward and rock it loose, then I finally cut the engine.

"It's set pretty hard, but it might come off if you push against the bow, Elrod," I said. "You want to do that?"

"Yeah, sure."

"It's not deep there. Just stay on the sandbar, close to the hull."

"Put on a life jacket, El," Kelly said.

"I swam across the Trinity River once at flood stage when houses were floating down it," he said.

She took a life jacket out of a top compartment, picked up his wrist, and slipped his arm through one of the loops. He grinned at me. Then his eyes looked out the gla.s.s at the far bank.

"What's that guy doing?" he said.

"Which guy?" I said.

"The guy knocking around in the brush out there."

"How about we get your boat loose and worry about other people later?" I said.

"You got it," he said, tied one lace on his jacket, and went out into the rain.

He held on to the rail on the cabin roof and worked his way forward toward the bow. Kelly watched him through the gla.s.s, biting down on the corner of his lip.

"He waded ash.o.r.e before," I said, and smiled at her. "He's not in any danger there."

"El has accidents. Always."

"A psychologist might say there's a reason for that."

She turned away from the gla.s.s, and her green eyes moved over my face.

"You don't know him, Mr. Robicheaux. Not the gentle person who gives himself no credit for anything. You're too hard on him."

"I don't mean to be."

"You are. You judge him."

"I'd like to see him get help. But he won't as long as he's on the juice or using."

"I wish I had those kinds of easy answers."

"They're not easy. Not at all."

Elrod eased himself over the gunwale, sinking to his chest, then felt his way through the silt toward the slope on the sandbar.

"Can you stand in the stern? For the weight," I said to Kelly.

"Where?"

"In the back of the boat."

"Sure."

"Take my raincoat."

"I'm already sopped."

I restarted the engine.

"Just a minute," I said, and put my rain hat on her head. Her wet blond curls were flattened against her brow. "I don't mean to be personal, but I think you're a special lady, Ms. Drummond, a real soldier."

She used both her hands to pull the hat's floppy brim down tightly on her hair. She didn't answer, but for the first time since I had met her, she looked directly into my eyes with no defensiveness or anger or fear and in fact with a measure of respect that I felt in all probability was not easily won.

I waved at Elrod through the front gla.s.s, kicked the engine into reverse, and opened the throttle. The exhaust pipes throbbed and blew spray high into the air at the waterline, the windows shook, the boards under my feet hummed with the vibrations from the engine compartment. I looked over my shoulder through the back gla.s.s and saw Kelly bent across the gunwale, pushing at the bottom of the bayou with a tarpon gaff; then suddenly the hull sc.r.a.ped backward in the sand, sliding out of a trench in a yellow and brown gush of silt and dead reeds, and popped free in the current.

Elrod was standing up on the sandbar, his balled fists raised over his head in victory.

I cut the gas and started out the cabin door to get the anchor.

Just as the rain struck my bare head and stung my eyes, just as I looked across the bayou and saw the man in the shapeless fedora kneeling hard against an oak tree, his shadowed face aimed along the sights of a bolt-action rifle, the leather sling twisted military style around the forearm, I knew that I was caught in one of those moments that will always remain forever too late, knew this even before I could yell, wave my arms, tell him that the person in the rain hat and Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name on the back was not me. Then the rifle's muzzle flashed in the rain, the report echoing across the water and into the willow islands. The bullet cut a hole like a rose petal in the back of Kelly's shirt and left an exit wound in her throat that made me think of wolves with red mouths running through trees.