In my mind were images that I didn't want to recognize. I looked out the window and saw a man turning a raw steak on a barbecue fire, saw two kids trying to burn each other out in a pitch-and-catch game, their faces sweaty and narrow, saw a waxed red car parked next to a sand dune under the murderous white sun.

Annie ate lunch every day in a delicatessen by Ca.n.a.l and Exchange, not far from where she worked at the social welfare agency. I sat in a wooden chair across the street and read the Times-Picayune and waited for her. Just after noon I saw her coming down the sidewalk in the lunchtime crowd, wearing sungla.s.ses, her wide straw hat, and a pale yellow dress. She could live in New Orleans the rest of her life, I thought, but she would always be from Kansas. She had the tan of a farm girl, the kind that never seemed to change tone, and even though her legs were beautiful and her hips a genuine pleasure to look at, she walked in high heels as though she were on board a rocking ship.

I watched her sit by herself at a table, her back to me, remove her sungla.s.ses, and give her order to the waiter while she moved both her hands in the air. He looked perplexed, and I could almost hear her ordering something that wasn't on the menu, which was her habit, or telling him about some "weirdness" that she had seen on the street.

Then I heard the metal-rimmed wheels of a huge handcart on the pavement and an elderly black man's voice crying out, "I got melons, I got 'loupes, I got plums, I got sweet red strawberries." His cart was loaded with tiers of fruit and also with boxes of pralines, roses wrapped in green tissue paper, and small bottles of grape juice shoved down in an ice bucket.

"How you doing, Cappie?" I said.

"Good afternoon, Lieutenant," he said, and grinned. His head was bald and brown, and he wore a gray ap.r.o.n. He had grown up in Laplace, next door to Louis Armstrong's family, but he had sold produce in the Quarter for years and was so old that neither he nor anyone else knew his age.

"Is your wife still in the hospital?" I asked.

"No suh, she fit and fine and out do'-popping again."

"I beg your pardon."

"She do'-popping. She pop in dis do', she pop out dat do'.You want your grape drink today?"

"No, I tell you what instead. You see that pretty lady in the yellow dress eating across the street?"

"Yes suh, I think so."

"Give her some of these roses and a box of pralines. Here, you keep the change, Cappie."

"What you want me to tell her?"

"Just tell her it's from a good-looking Cajun fellow," I said, and winked at him.

I looked once more in Annie's direction. Then I turned and walked back to where I had left my rented car parked on Decatur Street.

The beach outside of Biloxi was white and hot-looking in the afternoon sun. The palm trees along the boulevard beat in the wind, and the green surface of the Gulf was streaked with light and filled with dark patches of blue, like floating ink. A squall was blowing up in the south, and waves were already breaking against the ends of the jetties, the foam leaping high into the air before you heard the sound of the wave, and in the groundswell I could see the flicker of bait fish and the dark, triangular outlines of stingrays, almost like oil slicks, that had been pushed in toward sh.o.r.e by the approaching storm.

I found the Gulf Sh.o.r.es restaurant, but the man who ran the valet parking service wasn't there. I walked a short way down the beach, bought a paper plate of fried catfish and hush puppies from a food stand, and sat on a wooden bench under a palm tree and ate it. Then I read a paperback copy of A Pa.s.sage to India, watched some South American teenagers play soccer in the sand, and finally walked out on the jetty and skipped oyster sh.e.l.ls across the water's surface. The wind was stiffer now, with a sandy bite in it, and as the sun seemed to descend into an enormous flame across the western sky, I could see thin white streaks of lightning in the row of black clouds that hovered low on the watery horizon in the south. When the sun's afterglow began to shrink from the sky, and the neon lights of the amus.e.m.e.nt rides and beer joints along the beach began to come on, I walked back to my car and drove to the restaurant.

Two black kids and a white man in his thirties were taking cars from under the porch at the entrance and parking them in back. The white man had crewcut brown hair and small moles all over his face, as though they had been touched there with a paintbrush. I drove up to the entrance, and one of the black kids took my car. I went inside and ate a five-dollar club sandwich that I didn't want. When I came back out, the white man walked up to me for my parking ticket.

"I can get it. Just show me where it is," I said.

He stepped out of the light from the porch and pointed toward the lot.

"The second-to-last row," he said.

"Where?"

He walked farther into the dark and pointed again.

"Almost to the end of the row," he said.

"My girlfriend said you can sell me some sneeze," I said.

"Sell you what?" He looked me up and down for the first time. The neon light from a liquor store next door made his lips look purple.

"A little nose candy for the sinuses."

"You got the wrong guy, buddy."

"Do I look like a cop or something?"

"You want me to get your car, sir?"

"I've got a hundred bucks for you. Meet me someplace else."

"Maybe you should talk to the manager. I run the valet service here. You're looking for somebody else."

"She must have told me about the wrong place. No offense," I said, and I walked to the back of the lot and drove out onto the boulevard. The palm trees on the esplanade were crashing in the wind.

I drove through a residential neighborhood away from the beach, then circled back and parked on a dark street a block inland from the restaurant. I took my World War II j.a.panese field gla.s.ses from the glove compartment and focused them on the lighted porch where the man with the moles was parking cars.

In the next three hours I watched him go twice to the trunk of his own automobile before he delivered a car to a customer out front. At midnight the restaurant closed, and I followed him across town to an unpaved neighborhood of clapboard houses, open drainage ditches, and dirt yards littered with rusted engine parts and washing machines.

Most of the houses on the street were dark, and I left my car a block away and walked to a sandy driveway that led up to the lighted side door of a boxlike wooden house surrounded by unwatered and dying hedges. Through the screen I could see him in his undershirt, with a beer in his hand, changing the channels on his television set. His shoulders were as white as a frog's belly and speckled with the same brown moles that covered his face. He sat back in a stuffed chair, a window fan blowing in his face, salted his beer can, and sipped at it while he watched television. The first raindrops clicked flatly on the roof.

I slipped my hand through the screen-door handle, then jerked it backward and tore the latch loose from the jamb. He sat erect, his eyes wide, the beer can rolling across the floor in a trail of foam.

"Some customers are persistent as h.e.l.l," I said, stepping inside.

But I should have come in holding the .25 Beretta that was in my pocket. He reached behind him on a workbench, grabbed a ball-peen hammer, and flung it into my chest. The steel head hit me just to the right of my breastbone, and I felt a pain, a breathlessness, shoot through my heart cavity as though I had been stunned with a high-voltage wire. Then he charged me, his arms flailing like a kid fighting on a school ground, and he caught me once on the eye and again on the ear before I could get my guard up. But I had been a good boxer at New Iberia High, and I had learned long ago that either in the ring or in a street fight there was nothing to equal setting your feet square, tucking your chin into your shoulder, raising your left to guard your face, and coming across with a right hook aimed somewhere between the mouth and the eyes. I got him right across the bridge of the nose. His eyes snapped straight with shock, the light glazed in them, and I hit him again, this time on the jaw, and knocked him over his chair into the television set. He looked up at me, his face white, his nose bleeding on his upper lip.

"You want to do it some more?" I said.

"Who are you, man?"

"What do you care, as long as you come out of this all right?"

"Come out of what? What you want with me? I never saw you before tonight."

He started to get up. I pushed him down on the floor.

"You come here to rip me off, you're going to deal later with a couple of bad dudes. That's no joke, buddy," he said.

"You see this in my hand? I'm not going to point it at you, because I don't think you're up to it. But we're upping the stakes now."

"You come in my G.o.dd.a.m.n house and attack me and wave a gun around, and I'm in trouble? You're unbelievable, man."

"Get up," I said, and pulled him erect by his arm. I walked him into the bedroom.

"Turn on the light," I said.

He flicked the light switch. The bed was unmade, and dirty clothes were piled on the wood floor. A jigsaw puzzle of Elvis Presley's face was half completed on a card table. I pushed him through the hallway into the tiny kitchen at the back of the house.

"You forget where the light switch is?" I said.

"Look, man, I just work for some people. You got a problem with the action around here, you take it up with them. I'm just a small guy."

I felt the wall with my hand and clicked on the overhead light. The kitchen was the only clean room in the house. The drainboards were washed down, the dishes put away in a drying rack, the linoleum floor waxed and polished. A solitary chair was placed at the large Formica-topped table in the center of the room, and on the table were three black plastic bags closed with masking tape, an ether bottle, and boxes of powdered milk and powdered sugar.

He wiped his nose on his hand. The moles on his face looked like dead bugs. Beyond the drawn window shades I could hear the rain falling in the trees.

"It looks like you've been watering down the stock," I said.

"What do you want? You're looking at everything I got."

"Where's Philip Murphy?"

He looked at me curiously, his brow furrowed.

"I don't know the guy," he said.

"Yes, you do. He's a two-poke-a-day regular."

"That's lots of people. Look, if I could give you the dude and get you out of my life, you'd have him."

"He's in his fifties, wears gla.s.ses, tangled gray hair and eyebrows, talks a little bit like an Englishman sometimes."

"Oh, that f.u.c.ker. He told me his name was Eddy. You out to pop him or something?"

"Where is he?"

"Look, this dude has a lot of money. Around here we piece off the score. Everybody gets along that way."

"Last chance," I said, and moved toward him. His back b.u.mped against the sink and he raised his hands up in front of his chest.

"All right," he said. "The last stucco duplex on Azalea Drive. It's straight north of Jefferson Davis's house. Now get the f.u.c.k out of here, man."

"Do you rent or own this place?"

"I own it. Why?"

"Bad answer," I said, and I unscrewed the cap from the ether bottle and poured it over the black plastic bags on the kitchen table.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Better get moving, partner," I said, and folded back the cover on a book of matches.

"Are you crazy? That stuff's like napalm. Don't do it, man."

He stared at me wild-eyed, frozen, waiting until the last second to see if I was serious. I lighted the whole book, and he broke for the window, put one foot through the shade, balanced for a moment on the sill like a clothespin while he stared back at me incredulously a last time, and then crashed to the ground outside with the torn shade dangling behind him.

I backed out the door and threw the flaming matchbook at the table. The air seemed to snap apart with a yellow-blue flash like lightning arching back on itself. Then the Formica tabletop erupted into a cone of flame that was absolutely white at the center. Within seconds the paint on the ceiling burned outward in a spreading black blister that touched all four walls.

When I walked away from the house, the fire had already cracked through the shingles of the kitchen roof and I could see the rain turning in the red light.

I drove along the beach boulevard next to the sea wall in the dark. The surf was loud, the waves crashing hard on the sand, and the shrimp boats that were moored in their slips were knocking against the pilings. I pa.s.sed Beauvoir, the rambling, one-story home of Jefferson Davis, set back on a dark lawn under spreading oak trees. The wide veranda was lighted, and in the darkness and the sweep of rain through the trees, the building seemed like an inverted telescopic vision into that spring of 1865 when Davis watched his failed medieval romance collapse around him. If the gra.s.s in that same lawn was a darker green than it should have been, perhaps it was because of the two hundred Confederate soldiers who were anonymously buried there. The road to Roncevaux lures the poet and the visionary like a drug, but the soldier pays for the real estate.

I turned north and followed the road to a pink stucco duplex at the end of an unfinished subdivision. There was no moon, the sky was totally black now, and I parked my car down the street under a dripping oak tree. Murphy wasn't going to be easy, and I had to make some decisions. My father used to say that an old armadillo is old because he's smart, and he doesn't leave his hole unless you give him an acceptable reason. I had packed a change of clothes and a raincoat and a rain hat in a small suitcase before I had left New Orleans. I put on the hat and coat, slipped the shotgun out of its sheep-lined cover, and hung it through the trigger guard from under my armpit with a coat hanger. I b.u.t.toned the coat over the shotgun and walked to the duplex, which was set apart from the other houses by a vacant lot filled with construction rubble.

Both sides of the duplex were dark, but the driveway on the far side was empty and newspapers moldered on the lawn. I went behind the apartment closest to me, cut the telephone wire at the box with my Puma knife, and unscrewed the lightbulb on the porch. The rain beat against my hat and coat, and the shotgun knocked against my side and knee like a two-by-four. I pulled my hat low on my eyes, put a pencil between my teeth, then hammered on the door with my fist and stepped back out into the rain.

A light went on in back, and a moment later I saw the curtain move behind the door gla.s.s.

"Who is it?" a voice called.

"Gulf Coast Gas and Electric. We got a busted main. Turn off your pilot."

"What?" the voice asked from behind the door.

"The main's busted. We can't get it shut down at the pump station. If you smell gas, go to the National Guard armory. Don't light no matches, either," I said, and walked into the darkness as though I were headed toward another house.

But instead I cut behind a pile of bulldozed fiberboard in the vacant lot next door, circled through a stand of pines along a coulee, and came out in back of the duplex. I suspected that Murphy had stayed at the window until he gave up trying to locate me in the darkness and rain, then had gone to the telephone. I was right. As I eased under the window I heard him dialing, a pause, then the receiver rattling in the cradle. I stooped and walked quickly along the side wall toward the front porch, trying to keep the barrel of the shotgun out of the mud. At the corner I stopped and listened. He unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door on the chain.

Come on, you've got to prove you have cojones, I thought. Big boys wear them on the outside of their pants. You kicked gook a.s.s with the Legionnaires, crouched in the bottom of an LST at the Bay of Pigs, hung parts of Sandinista farmers in trees like Christmas-tree ornaments. What good is life if you're not willing to risk it?

Then I heard him slide the chain and let it swing back against the door. I raised the shotgun in front of me, my body pressed tightly against the stucco wall. He stepped out into the slanting rain, his pajama top unb.u.t.toned over his white pot belly, a flashlight in one hand and a blue two-inch .38 in the other.

I clicked off the safety and came around the corner and aimed the twelve-gauge's barrel at the side of his head in one motion.

"Throw it away! Don't think about it! Do it!" I said.

He was frozen, the flashlight's glow illuminating his face like a piece of dead wax. But I could see thought working in his eyes.

"I'll cut you in half, Murphy."

"I suspect you would, Lieutenant," he said, and he bent his knees, almost as though he were going to genuflect, and set the revolver on the porch slab.

I pushed him inside, turned on the light switch, and kicked the door closed behind me.

"Facedown on the floor, arms straight out," I said.

"We don't need all this street theater, do we?" He looked again at my face in the light. "All right, I don't argue. But there's n.o.body else here. It looks like you've won the day."

The inside of the duplex looked like a motel room. An air-conditioning unit hummed in one window and dripped water on the s.h.a.g carpet; the wallpaper had been roller-painted a pale green; the furniture was either plastic or made of composite wood; the air smelled of chemical deodorizer. I looked quickly in the bedroom, the bath, the small kitchen and dinette.

"It's a simple place," he said. He had to turn his head sideways on the rug to talk. The pink fat around his hips was striped with gray hair. "No women, no guns, no mysteries. This might be a disappointing bust for you, Lieutenant."

"Take off your shirt and sit in that chair."

"All right," he said, and a smile flickered around the corner of his lips.