"Do I amuse you for some reason?"

"Not you. Just your att.i.tude. I told you once before you had puritan sympathies. At some point in your career, you need to realize that n.o.body cares about these things. Oh, they say they do. But they really don't, and I think you know it."

He dropped his pajama top on the arm of a stuffed chair and sat down. His chest was small and gray, and his stomach pushed up high on his breastbone.

"Turn them up," I said.

He shrugged his shoulders and turned up his forearms so I could see the flat, gray scar tissue along the veins. The scars were so thick they could have been traced there with a barber's razor.

"I heard you were just a two-pop-a-day man. I think you've worked up to the full-tilt boogie," I said.

"Does that somehow make you feel better?" The smile was gone, and I could see the contempt, the cynicism, the glint of evil in his eyes.

"If I allowed myself to have feelings about you, I would have blown you up on the porch."

"And we thought you were a professional."

"I hope you shot up a lot of dope tonight. You're going on a long dry. Figure what it's going to be like after two days in lockdown."

"I'm trembling already. See the cold sweat on my face. Oh Lawsie, what's I going to do?"

At that moment I felt a genuine rush of hatred in my chest.

"If my brother dies and you somehow get back on the street, G.o.d help you," I said.

"Your brother?"

I watched his face carefully.

"He's still alive, and he saw the guy you sent to do it," I said.

"You think we tried to kill your brother?"

I watched the bead of light in his eyes, the curve of his palms on the arm of the chair.

"That's what all this bulls.h.i.t is about? Somebody hit your brother and you think we were behind it?" he said.

He widened his eyes, pursed his lips with his own question. He started to smile but glanced at my face and thought better of it.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, old boy. It wasn't us," he said. "Why would we want to hurt your brother?"

"He looks like my twin."

"Ah yes, I heard something like that. Give us our innings, though. We don't make those kinds of mistakes, at least not as a rule. Actually, we'd marked you off, thought you'd be working on some of your own problems for a while."

"Get back on the floor."

"What are we doing now, Lieutenant?"

"You go well with the rug."

I cut the light cord, tied his wrists behind him, pulled his bare feet up in the air, and wrapped the cord tightly around his ankles. Then I emptied all the drawers on the floor, went through all the clothes in his closets, dumped his suitcases on the bed, looked in his mailbox, went through everything in his wallet, and poured his garbage can out on the kitchen table. There was nothing in the duplex that would indicate that he had any life at all outside of Biloxi, Mississippi. There wasn't a matchbook cover, a canceled check, a credit-card receipt, an unpaid bill that would indicate he had even been out of the duplex. Almost everything in the apartment could have been purchased yesterday at K-Mart. The exception was a box of Trojan rubbers in the drawer of his nightstand, and his works-a very clean syringe, two shining hypodermic needles, a spoon with a bent and tape-wrapped handle, and three packets of high-grade scag, all kept lovingly in a velvet-lined, zippered leather case.

"My, my, we do like to probe after a man's vices, don't we?" he said. He was on his side in the middle of the living room rug. "Gives you a little rush, doesn't it, like watching a dirty movie? Your secret sins aren't so bad after all."

I closed the leather case and tapped my fingers on it a moment.

"What to do, what to do, he thinks," Murphy said. "He can drop the dime with the locals and have the depraved old junkie locked up in a county slam. But then there's the problem of breaking into a man's house with a shotgun, isn't there?

"Or maybe a trip back to New Orleans. But, zounds, that's kidnapping. The worries of our chivalric detective seem endless. It's a great burden, being one of the good guys, isn't it? There are so many lofty standards to uphold. Your little piece of tail from Kansas isn't so discriminating."

"What?"

"We checked her out. She has a file."

"You are CIA, then."

"Are you so dumb you think the government is one group of people? Like the U. S. Forest Service in their Smokey Bear suits? Even your regular punch knows better than that. Ask her. She's had some interesting experiences as a peace groupie back in the land of Oz. Except she was so committed she balled everything in sight and got herself knocked up. So she took a little horseback ride across the prairie and bounced the little fellow right out of there. Almost as messy as a coat hanger. But fortunately for you they have good doctors in Wichita, and they took out the baby carriage and left the playpen intact."

I flipped the leather case through the kitchen door onto the pile of garbage I had poured over the table, then I went into the bedroom and picked up a shirt and a pair of slacks and shoes from the closet floor. Lightning splintered the sky outside, and thunder reverberated through the house. The rain was. .h.i.tting hard against the windowpanes. I dropped the clothes next to him, untied his hands, and picked up the shotgun again.

"Put them on," I said.

"Travel time?" he said, and smiled.

"Get dressed, Murphy."

"I don't think this is going to be a pleasant trip."

"Think of your alternatives. This is Mississippi."

"I suspect I'll be riding in the trunk." He sat on the floor and put on his shirt. "Do you mind if I use the bathroom? I was headed there when you knocked."

"Leave the door open," I said.

He walked flatfooted to the toilet, like an old man, in his pajama bottoms and unb.u.t.toned shirt. He looked back at me while he took out his p.e.n.i.s and urinated loudly in the water. His face was composed, pink in the fluorescent light, as though he had surrendered both to the situation and the release in his kidneys. Out of decency or revulsion, I suppose, I looked away from him. The trees were thrashing against the windows, and through the edge of the shades I could see the lawn flicker whitely as lightning leaped across the sky. I was very tired, my hands thick with fatigue so that they didn't want to curve around the stock and pump of the shotgun.

He might have pulled it off if he hadn't sc.r.a.ped the ceramic top of the toilet tank when he lifted it up to get the Walther 7.65 millimeter that was taped inside. But he had gotten his hand securely around the handle just as I snapped off the safety on the trigger guard, lifted the sawed-off barrel from the hip, and fired at his chest. The angle was bad, and the explosion of buckshot blew the side of the doorjamb away in a shower of white splinters and tore the shirt off his shoulder and streaked a long pattern of blood on the wallpaper, as though it had been slung there by a paintbrush. Later, I would never be able to decide whether the second shot was necessary. But the Walther was in his hand, the black electrician's tape hanging loose from the barrel, the broken ceramic top lying in the toilet bowl. I ejected the spent sh.e.l.l from the magazine, pumped the next round into the chamber, smelled the smoke and cordite in the air, and almost simultaneously pulled the trigger. It was a deer slug, and it caught him just below the heart and blew him backwards, his arms outspread, his face filled with disbelief, through the gla.s.s shower doors into the bathtub.

I picked up the warm sh.e.l.ls off the rug and put them in my pocket. I looked down at Murphy in the tub. The deer slug had flattened inside him and had made an exit hole in his back the size of a half-dollar. His eyes were open and staring, and his face was absolutely white, as though the wound had drained every drop of his blood out of him. One hand still twitched convulsively on his pot belly.

But I took no joy in it.

I hung the shotgun on the hanger under my arm, b.u.t.toned my raincoat, and walked back out in the storm. The air was cool and smelled of wet trees and torn leaves blowing in the wind and the sulfurous odor of lightning that licked across the black sky over the Gulf. The rain sluiced off my hatbrim and blew in my face, and I walked through the dark puddles of water on the sidewalk as though they were not there. In a few more hours it would be dawn, the eastern sky would be pink with the new day, the palm trees and the beach and the fingers of surf sliding up on the sand would light slowly as the sun climbed in the sky, and I would be back in New Orleans with this night in my life somehow arranged in the proper compartment.

But my thought processes of convenience and my attempts at magic were seldom successful. The storm blew all night and well into the next day, and back on my houseboat I didn't feel better about anything.

ELEVEN.

That afternoon I visited Jimmie in the hospital. He was still in intensive care, his condition unchanged, his voice still locked inside his chest. His hands and face looked as though they had been painted with wet ash.

At five-thirty I drove over to Annie's place. The sky had cleared and the air was suddenly blue and gold when the sun broke through the clouds, but the wind was still loud in the oak trees along the lane, and torn leaves were scattered across the lawns. She fixed both of us iced coffee, tuna sandwiches, and deviled eggs, and we took them out on the back porch and ate on the gla.s.s table under the chinaberry tree. She wore white Levi's, a pink pullover blouse, and gold hoop earrings that made her look like a flower child of the sixties. I hadn't told her about Jimmie, or anything about Biloxi, but she had caught my mood when I came through the door, and now as I sat with my food half eaten, her anxiety and incomprehension in having to deal with a representative of a violent and unfathomable world stole back into her face.

"What is it, Dave? Can't you trust me a little? Are we always going to stake out our private areas that we don't let the other one into?"

So I told her about Jimmie.

"I thought it was probably in the newspaper," I said. "He's a well-known guy in the Quarter."

"I don't-" she began.

"You don't read those kinds of stories."

She looked away, her eyes hurt.

"I'm sorry. Jimmie might not make it, and I might not be around to help him, either. I'm in some very big trouble right now."

Her blue eyes looked intently into mine.

"The roses and the pralines in the delicatessen," she said. "That's why you didn't want to see me. You were going somewhere, and you thought I'd try to stop you."

"There's no reason I should bring all my problems into your life. Loving a girl shouldn't include making her miserable."

"Dave, why do you think you're the only person who can bear hardship? A relationship is more than just sleeping with somebody, at least it is with me. I don't want to be your part-time lover. If you really want to do some damage, keep treating me like somebody who can't take it, who has to be protected."

"I'm going to hurt you tonight, and I don't have any way around it."

"I don't understand."

"I had to kill Philip Murphy last night in Biloxi."

Her face jumped, and I saw her throat swallow.

"He didn't give me a choice," I said. "I guess I wanted to do it when I went over there, but wanting to do something and deliberately choosing to do it are two different things. I was going to take him back to New Orleans. I got careless, and he thought he could drop me."

"Was he the one who shot your brother?" Her voice was quiet, the knowledge I had given her an enormous pain behind her eyes.

"I don't think so."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm not quite sure yet. Somebody'll find the body soon. In this weather, even with the air conditioning on-"

I saw her mouth form a tight line and her nostrils dilate slightly.

"The point is, sooner or later I'll be arrested," I said.

"You did it in self-defense."

"I broke into somebody's house with a shotgun, with no legal authority. Then I left the scene of a homicide. It'll take them a while, but they'll run my prints and eventually get a warrant out."

"We have to talk with somebody. It isn't fair," she said. "Everything you do turns back on you. You're an innocent man. It's these other people who should be in jail. Doesn't anybody in that police department see that?"

"I've told you all this for another reason, Annie." I let out my breath. "Murphy said some things I have to ask you about. He was an evil man who tried to make others think the world was as evil as he was. But if any part of what he said is true, he had connections with a government agency or somebody in one."

"What-"

"He said you were a peace groupie back in Kansas. He said you got pregnant and lost the child riding a horse."

I waited. Her face flushed and her eyes filmed with tears.

"They reach far into your life, don't they?" she said.

"Annie-"

"What else did he have to say?"

"Nothing. Don't let a man like that wound you."

"I don't care about him. It's you. Do you think I aborted my own child on a horse?"

"I don't think anything."

"You do. It's in your face. Is she the person I thought she was? Was she an easy piece for those weird people back in Kansas?"

"I don't have a doubt in the world about who or what you are. Annie, you're everything to me."

She put her fork down on her plate and looked into the evening shadows on the yard.

"I don't think I can handle this," she said.

"There's nothing to handle. It's over. I just had to find out if he was wired into the government. The Treasury people told me he wasn't."

But she wasn't hearing me.