We pulled around to the front of the lounge and parked by the Schlitz sign, and I went in. Six cases of Lone Star were stacked at the end of the bar, and the woman was frowning at a thin Hispanic guy as he lugged them one at a time behind the counter. Eight or nine small square tables were scattered around the place, all with upended chairs on top of them, and a Rockola jukebox was against the back wall beside a door that said RESTROOMS. An industrial wash bucket was by the jukebox, and the back door was open for the breeze. The woman looked over at me and said, "Sorry, sugah. We closed."

"I'm supposed to meet a guy here. What time you open?"

"Bout five, give or take. Who you lookin' by?" She gave me a loose smile. She was maybe forty-five, but looked older, with rubbery skin pulled tight by all the smiling. The Hispanic guy stopped working to look at us.

"Oh, just a friend." Mr. Mysterious.

"You keepin' it a big secret or what, sug? I'm here all the time." When she said it she noticed the Hispanic guy and snapped at him. "Don't just stand there, G.o.ddammit! Put that stuff away! Endelay!"The Hispanic guy spun back to his work with a vengeance. I wasn't sure if he understood what had been said to him, but he understood that she was p.i.s.sed. The Clairol Queen flipped her hand at him, disgusted. "These spics are somethin'. Gimme a good n.i.g.g.e.r any day."

I said, "A guy named LeRoy Bennett said I could find him here."

She went back to the smiling and folded herself against the bar. It was probably a pose that played well with the older guys after a dozen or so beers. "Oh, yeah. LeRoy's here all the time. I can take a message, you want."

"Nah. I'm on my way to Biloxi. I'll catch him on the way back."

I went back to the car and climbed in beside Pike. "They open at five. LeRoy's here all the time."

"Who could blame him?"

We drove up the road for a mile and a half, then turned around and went back. One hundred yards past the bait shop I eased onto the shoulder, and Pike got out with his duffel and moved into the trees. I drove on for maybe another four hundred yards until I found a gravel timber road running across a plank bridge, and pulled off. I locked the car, then trotted back to the bait shop. By the time I got back Pike was inside and set up, watching the bar through a clean spot he'd made on the dusty plate gla.s.s.

The Bayou Lounge might have opened at five, but no one showed up until six, and then it was mostly younger guys with deep tans and ball caps, looking like they had just gotten off work and wanted to have a couple of cold ones before heading home. Someone cranked up the Rockola at nine minutes before seven, and we could hear Doug Kershaw singing in French.

Pike and I made cold sandwiches and drank Diet c.o.ke and watched the people come and go, but none of them were Milt Rossier or LeRoy Bennett or even Ren+! LaBorde. Crime might have been rampant, but if it was, we didn't see it.

The bait shop was an empty cinder-block sh.e.l.l containing the remnants of a counter and a couple of free standing shelves and a cement floor. We sat on the floor, surrounded by the odd-cut piece of plywood and about a million rat pellets. Everything was covered with a thick layer of heretofore undisturbed dust, and everything smelled of mildew. "Just think, Joe, some guys have to wear a tie and punch a time clock."

Pike didn't answer.

At 8:15 that night, seven cars were parked in the oyster sh.e.l.l lot and maybe a dozen people were inside the Bayou Lounge, but Milt Rossier and LeRoy Bennett were not among them. Pike rarely spoke, and there wasn't a great deal to do in our watching, and I found myself thinking of Lucy, wondering where she was and what she was doing, seeing her in her office, seeing her on the couch in her family room, seeing her snuggled with Ben watching Star Trek. After a while I got tired of all the thinking about it and tried to stop, but then I thought that maybe I could walk across to the Bayou and use the pay phone to call her. Of course, if I did, ol' Milt and LeRoy would probably amble in at exactly that time. It's one of those laws of nature. Pike said, "You deserve someone."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ms. Chenier."

I stared at him. Do you think he reads minds? "We enjoy each other's company."

He nodded.

"I like her and she likes me. It's nothing more or less than that."

He nodded again.

By 9:15 we were down to two cars, and by ten the lot was empty except for the blue Ford Ranger. Pike said, "This place is a gold mine."

At twenty minutes before eleven, a beat-up Mercury station wagon b.u.mped into the lot and sat with its engine running. The little Hispanic man and a Hispanic woman I had not seen came out, got in, and the wagon lurched away. The woman was carrying what looked like a brown paper grocery bag. Pike said, "Latin guy driving."

I squinted, but couldn't be sure. "Joe? Do you find it odd that there are so many Latin people down here on the bayou?"

Pike shrugged.

At ten minutes after eleven, the Bayou Lounge went dark, and the woman who ran the place got into her Ford and drove away. Pike and I gathered our things, walked up the road to our car, then returned to the motel. I wanted to phone Lucy, but it was just before midnight, and I thought I might wake her or, if not her, Ben.

The last thing I remember that night was the sound of Lucy's laugh and the smell of her skin, and the deep, hollow feeling of her absence.

Chapter 26.

A t eighteen minutes after five the next morning, Joe Pike slipped into the woods fronting Milt Rossier's crawfish farm. I went back to Ville Platte and parked beneath the oak tree one block down from LeRoy Bennett's house. The sky began to lighten at twenty minutes after six, and by 7:30 the old man who lived next to LeRoy was again working at the beige Chevelle with the Bond-o and the putty knife. A fluffy white cat strolled up to the old man, shoulder b.u.mped against his legs, and the old man scratched at the cat's head. The old man and the cat seemed to be enjoying each other when LeRoy Bennett came out with a little green towel, hawked up a lugey, and let'r fly into the overgrown front lawn. The old man stopped with the cat and scowled at Bennett. Bennett had to see him but pretended he didn't, and neither of them spoke to the other. LeRoy wiped the dew off his front and back windshields, then tossed the wet towel up onto his front steps, climbed into the Polara, and drove away. The old man watched him drive off, then looked at the towel and at LeRoy's crummy yard. The towel looked like h.e.l.l, just thrown there. The old man looked at his own immaculate yard and shook his head. Probably wondering why he should bother with all the yard work if LeRoy was going to let his place look like a s.h.i.t hole, probably thinking that all the stuff you hear on the talk radio was right; America was going to h.e.l.l in a handbasket and he was stuck with living proof of it. The plan had been for me to stay on LeRoy until four, whereupon I would break contact and pick up Pike to return to the Bayou Lounge. We hoped that LeRoy would, in his capacity as Milt Rossier's right-hand man, have a variety of important errands to accomplish through the day, perhaps one or more of said errands providing a clue as to Milt Rossier's criminal operation. When LeRoy Bennett cleared the corner, I pulled a quick U-turn, took it easy going around the corner to make sure he wouldn't see me, then followed him directly to the Ville Platte Dunkin" Donuts. LeRoy stoked up on crullers with sprinkles, then bought four dollars of gas at the Sunoco self-serve and tooled directly to Rossier's place. By 8:36 that morning, LeRoy was sitting in the white lawn chairs outside Rossier's main house, flipping through a magazine, and I was crouching behind the fallen pine tree with Joe Pike. So much for clues. I said, "Some operation."

Pike was watching him through a fine pair of Zeiss binoculars. "He's not reading. He's just looking at the pictures."

I nodded. "Geniuses rarely go into crime."

We sat on plastic poncho liners amid the sumac and the small plants of the forest's floor and let the day unfold. The heat rose, and with the heat the air grew heavy and damp, and a thick gray buildup of rain clouds appeared overhead. The woods were alive with the sounds of bees and lizards and squirrels and swamp martins, and only occasionally did we catch the voices of the people before us, moving through their labors in the ponds and pools of the fish farm. It was ordinary business and none of it appeared illegal or suspicious, but maybe all of it was.

About midmorning Milt Rossier came out of his house, and he and Bennett strolled down past the ponds to the processing sheds. Milt stopped and spoke with each of the foremen, nodding as they spoke and once taking off his hat and mopping his brow, but that was probably not an actionable offense. Ren+! La-Borde came out of the processing shed and lurched his way over to them and followed them around, but no one spoke to him. I hadn't seen him arrive, and Pike hadn't mentioned him, so maybe he had been in the processing shed all along. Maybe he lived there.

The guy who bossed the processing shed came out when Rossier and Bennett got down there, and the three of them spoke. Ren+! stood outside their circle for a time, then walked to the turtle pond and waded in up to his knees. The straw boss saw him first, and everybody got excited as LeRoy ran over to the edge of the pool, yelling, "G.o.ddammit, Ren+!, get outta there! C'mon, 'fore Luther bites you!" Ren+! came back to the sh.o.r.e but stared down at the murky water, his shoes and pants muddy and dripping. He didn't seem to know what he had done or to understand why he'd been made to stop. Pike shook his head. "Man."

After a while, Rossier and LeRoy started back to the main house and everyone went back to work. Ren+! continued staring down at the water, his large body giving the occasional lurch as if his synapses had misfired. Halfway up to the house, Rossier saw that Ren+! wasn't following, slapped at LeRoy, and LeRoy trotted back for Ren+!. Ren+! followed LeRoy back to the main house, and the two of them sat in the white chairs, pa.s.sing the day, the water and mud drying on Ren+!'s pants, LeRoy looking at the pictures in his magazine.

The clouds continued to build, and by three o'clock the sky was dark. Lightning arced somewhere in the trees behind us, producing a deep-throated rumble, and it rained, slowly at first but with increasing intensity. LeRoy and Ren+! went into the main house and, one by one, the people working the ponds sought shelter in the processing sheds. Pike and I pulled on ponchos and made our way out to the car. We were leaving earlier than we had planned, but with everyone hiding from the rain the possibility of crime seemed remote. We stopped at an AM/PM Minimart on the state road to Reddell, and I used a pay phone to call Lucy at her office. She was with a client, and Darlene asked if I wanted to leave a message. I said to tell her that I had called and would call her again when I had the chance. Darlene said that that wasn't much of a message, considering. I said considering what? Darlene laughed and hung up. Do women always tell each other everything?

The sky was the color of sun-bright tarmac, and forks of lightning were dancing along the horizon when Pike and I again moved into the bait shop across from the Bayou Lounge. The rain hammered down in a steady, thunderous a.s.sault, and leaked in tap-water streams through the roof, but it was better than standing in the woods. By seven that night, the only people in the place were a couple of old codgers who'd come in a white Bronco. By eight they were gone, and by nine the same green wagon once more came around for the Hispanic couple. By 9:30 the Bayou Lounge was closed. Maybe the rain had kept people away. Maybe if it rained all year round, the crime rate would be zero.

Pike and I went through it again the next day and the day after, with no great variety of pattern. Every morning I would wait for LeRoy Bennett outside his house, and every morning he would beeline first to the Dunkin' Donuts and then to the crawfish farm where he would sit and wait and page through his magazines. Working off the sugar high, no doubt. Once Milt Rossier came out at midday and said something to LeRoy, and LeRoy hopped into his Polara and brodied away. I ran back through the woods to the car in time to see LeRoy hauling a.s.s up the road toward town. I followed him directly to the Ville Platte MacDonald's where he loaded up on a couple of bags worth of stuff, then hauled a.s.s back to Rossier's. I guess even criminals like Big Macs.

If the days were bad, the nights were worse. We would sit in the dust on the bait shop floor, watching the cars come and go, and noting the people within them, but the people within them were never LeRoy Bennett or Milt Rossier, nor did anything happen to point to or indicate illegal activity. Once, a fat man in a cheap suit and a thin woman with Dolly Parton hair had s.e.x in the backseat of a Buick Regal, and two nights later the same woman had s.e.x with a skinny guy with a straw Stetson in the back of an Isuzu Trooper, but you probably couldn't indict Milt Rossier for that. Another time, three guys staggered out of the bar, laughing and hooting, while a fourth guy in a white ball cap stumbled out into the center of the road, dropped his pants, and took a dump. He lost his balance about midway .through and fell in it, and the other three guys laughed louder and threw a beer can at him. Nothing like a night out with the boys.

Over the next three days I had exactly two opportunities to call Lucy, and missed her both times, once leaving a message on her home answering machine and once again speaking with her a.s.sistant. Darlene said that Lucy very much wanted to speak with me and asked if couldn't we prearrange a time when I might call. I told her that that would be impossible, and Darlene said, "Oh, you poor thing." Maybe Darlene wasn't so bad after all.

We had two dry days and then another day of rain, and all the watching without getting anywhere was making me cranky and depressed. Maybe we were wasting our time. Maybe the only illegal stuff was the stuff behind closed doors, and we could sit in the woods and the bait shop until the bayous froze and we'd never quite make the link. Pike and I took turns exercising.

At 8:22 on the fourth night in the bait shop, the rain was tapping the roof and I was doing yoga when Pike said, "Here we go."

LeRoy Bennett and Ren+! LaBorde pulled in and parked next to the blue Ford. Six cars were already in the lot, four of them regulars and none of them suspicious. LeRoy climbed out of the Polara and swaggered into the bar. Ren+! stayed in the car. Pike said, "I'll get the car."

He slipped out into the rain.

At 8:28, a dark gray Cadillac Eldorado with New Orleans plates pulled in beside the Polara. A Hispanic man in a silver raincoat got out and went into the bar. At 8:31, Pike reappeared beside me, hair wet with sweat and rain. Maybe two minutes later, the Hispanic man came out again with LeRoy Bennett. The Hispanic man got into his Eldo and LeRoy got into his Polara, and then the Polara moved out with the Eldo following.

Pike and I hustled out to our car and then eased onto the road after them. As I drove, Pike unscrewed the bulb in the ceiling lamp. Be prepared.

No one went fast and no one made a big deal out of where they were going, as if they had made the drive before and were comfortable with it, just a couple of guys going about their business. Traffic was nonexistent, and it would have been better if we'd had a car or two between us, but the steady rain made the following easier. We drove without lights, and twice oncoming cars flicked their headlights, trying to warn us, the second time some cowboy going crazy with it and calling us a.s.sholes as he roared by. If the guy in the Eldo was watching the rear he might have seen all the headlight switching and wondered about it, but if he was he gave no sign. Why watch the rear when you own the cops and you know they're not looking for you?

We turned onto the highway leading to Milt Rossier's crawfish farm, and I thought that was where we were going, only we came to the gate and pa.s.sed it, continuing on. I dropped farther back, and Pike leaned forward in his seat, squinting against the rain and the windshield wipers to keep the red lights in sight. Maybe a mile past Rossier's gate, the Eldo's tail-lights flared and Pike said, "They're turning."

The Polara grew bright in the Eldorado's headlights as it turned onto a gravel feeder road forking off into the marsh through a heavy thatch of wild sugarcane and bramble. We waited until their lights disappeared, then closed the distance and turned across a cow bridge. An overgrown cement culvert thrust up from the earth by the cow bridge, ringed by chain link to protect pipes and fittings and what looked in the darkness to be pressure gauges. Abandoned oil company gear. I said, "If this was anymore nowhere, we'd be on the dark side of the melon."

The little road narrowed and followed the top of a berm across the marsh, moving in and out of cane thickets and sawgra.s.s and cattails, occasionally crossing other little gravel roads even more overgrown. We had gone maybe half a mile when a wide waterway appeared on the left, its banks overgrown but precise and straight and clearly manmade. I said, "Looks like an industrial ca.n.a.l."

Pike said, "They turn and head back on us, we've got a problem."

"Yeah." When we came to the next crossing road, we stopped and backed off the main road, far enough under the sawgra.s.s to hide the car, then went on at a jog. Once we were out of the car we could hear the rain slapping the gra.s.s and the water with the steady sound of frying bacon. We followed the little road for maybe another quarter mile and then an enormous, corrugated tin building bathed in light rose up from the swamp like some incredible lost city. It stood on the edge of the ca.n.a.l, a huge metal shed, maybe three stories tall, lit with industrial floodlamps powered by a diesel generator. Rusted pipes ran in and out of the building, and some of the corrugated metal panels were hanging askew. The isolation and the technology lent a creepy air to the place, as if we had stumbled upon an abandoned government installation, once forbidden and now best forgotten.

The Polara and the Cadillac were at the foot of the building, along with a couple of two-and-a-half-ton trucks. Both of the trucks were idling, their exhausts breathing white plumes into the damp air like waiting beasts. Pike and I slipped off the road and into the sawgra.s.s. I said, "Pod people."

Pike looked at me.

"It's like the nursery Kevin McCarthy discovers in Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers. The one where the pod people are growing more pods and loading them onto trucks to be shipped all over the country."

Pike shook his head and turned back to the building. "You're something."

A huge, hangarlike door was set into the side of the building. Three guys in rain parkas climbed out of the trucks, opened it, then climbed back into the trucks, and drove them inside. A couple of minutes later, the steady burping of a diesel grew out of the rain and a towboat came up the ca.n.a.l, running without lights and pushing a small barge. It reduced speed maybe a hundred meters from the mouth of the big shed, and the Hispanic guy walked to the water's edge and waved a red lantern. The towboat revved its engines, then came forward under power and slipped inside the building. LeRoy and Ren+! and the guy from the Cadillac hurried in after it. Pike and I skirted the edge of the lighted area until we could see through the truck door. I had thought that we'd see people loading bales of marijuana onto the barge or maybe forklifting huge bricks of cocaine off the barge, but we didn't. Inside, maybe three dozen people were climbing off the towboat and into the trucks. Many of them looked scruffy, but not all. Many of them were well dressed, but not all. Most of them were Hispanic, but two were black, three were white, and maybe half a dozen were Asian. All of them looked tired and ill and frightened, and all of them were carrying suitcases and duffel bags and things of a personal nature. Pike said, "Sonofab.i.t.c.h. It's people."

When the trucks were full, the guys in the parkas pulled down canvas flaps to hide their cargo, climbed back into the cabs, pulled out of the building, and drove away into the rain. When the trucks were gone, a couple of hard-looking guys came up out of the barge dragging a skinny old man and carrying something that looked like a rag doll. The old man was crying and pulling at the hard guys, but they didn't pay a lot of attention to him. The old guy went over to the guy from the Eldorado with a lot of hand-waving, and then fell to the ground, pulling at the Eldorado's legs. The guy from the Eldorado kicked at the old man, then pulled out a small revolver, put it to the old man's head, and we heard a single, small pop.

My breath caught and I felt Pike tense.

The guy from the Eldo kicked the old man's body away, then said something to LeRoy Bennett, and Bennett nodded. The guys from the towboat climbed back aboard, and LeRoy and the guy with the gun walked out to the Eldo. The shooter opened the Eldo's trunk, took out a small handbag, and gave it to LeRoy. LeRoy brought it to his Polara. The towboat's engines revved, it backed from the shed, spun slowly into the ca.n.a.l, then eased back the way it had come, still without lights, the low gurgle of its engines fading into the mist. The shooter got into his Eldo and followed after the trucks. Now there were only four of us.

Pike said, "Too late for the old man. What do you want to do?"

"Let's see what happens."

LeRoy took a shovel from the Polara, then he and Ren+! dragged the old man and the rag doll along a little trail into the weeds. Pike and I crept after them, moving closer. Ren+! dug a small depression in the wet earth, dumped in the bodies, covered them, then went back to their car. LeRoy turned off the generator, and the swamp was suddenly dark. He and Ren+! got into their car, and then they, too, were gone.

I said, "Okay."

Pike and I moved to the shallow grave and pushed the mud away with our hands and found the old man and a little girl. The girl was maybe five. She was small and thin, and perhaps she might have been ill, but maybe not. Her face was dark with the rich earth, but as the rain kissed her skin the dirt washed away. I stroked her hair and felt my breath slow and the muscles along my neck and back and across my ribs tighten. She might have been the old man's granddaughter, but maybe not. Maybe she was alone, and he had befriended her. Maybe he just cared, and in the caring expressed his outrage at her death, and for his outrage he'd been killed. We went through his pockets hoping for some sort of identification, but there was none. There was only a small photograph, bent and water-stained, of the man and a group of people who may have been his family. The man was smiling. I put the photograph in my pocket. I said, "Let's get them out of here."

Pike touched my arm. "We can't, Elvis."

I looked at him.

"If we move them, Rossier will know. We have to wait. We have to know more before we help them."

I breathed deep in the wet air, and then I nodded. I didn't like it, but there you are.

We sat in the rain with the old man and the little girl, and after a while we left.

Chapter 27.

W e returned to the motel at a little before two the next morning, driving slowly along roads that were gla.s.sy with rain, through a town so still that it seemed as lifeless and empty as the bodies we'd left in the mud and the sawgra.s.s. We were all that moved in Ville Platte, Joe and I, neither of us speaking, lit only by flashing yellow signal lights that whispered caution. We showered and changed, Joe going first, and when we were done and the lights were out, I said, "Joe?"

I heard him move on the floor, but it took him several seconds to answer. "Yes."

"Oh, Jesus, Joe."

Pike might have slept, but I did not. I was in the dry room, yet not. I was with the old man and the girl, yet not. I crouched in the sawgra.s.s beside them, the night air dank and muggy, the rain running out of my hair and down my back, the great fat drops falling on the faces below me, washing circles of perfect clarity on the muddy skin, but a clarity that did not maintain and soon faded, obscured by more drops, as if every new truth clouded an old.

The rain stopped falling a few minutes after four, and at 7:05 we called Lucy at her home and told her what we had seen. She said, "Do you think these people were illegal aliens?"

"We counted thirty-five people climbing onto the trucks, but there could've been more. A few Asians, a few whites and blacks, but the majority were Hispanics." I told her about the old man and the girl.

Lucy said, "Oh, my G.o.d."

"We left them in place. Rossier wasn't at the scene, and I'm not certain we can tie this to him. We'd get Bennett and LaBorde for sure, but maybe not Rossier."

She said, "Did you get the Cadillac's license number?"

I gave it to her.

Lucy said, "Stay where you are. I'll call you as soon as I have something."

"Thanks, Luce."

She said, "I miss you, Studly."

"I miss you, too, Luce."

One hour and thirteen minutes later Lucy called back. "The Eldorado is registered to someone named Donaldo Prima from New Orleans. He's thirty-four years old, originally from Nicaragua, with three felony convictions, two for dealing stolen goods and one fire-arms violation. There's nothing in his record to link him to illegal immigration, but the feds are out of the loop on most of this stuff. I've got a friend here in Baton Rouge you can talk to. She works for an alternative weekly called the Bayou State Sentinel, and she's done some pretty good work covering the immigration scene. She might be willing to help."

"Might."

"You'll see." Lucy gave me directions, hung up, then Pike and I drove to Baton Rouge.

The Sentinel had their offices in a little clapboard house on a street just off the LSU campus that was mostly rental houses for students and people who enjoyed the student lifestyle. Some of the houses had been converted to businesses, but the businesses were all places like used-CD stores and grunge shops and a place that sold joss sticks and papier m+och+! alligators. Alternative. A couple of mountain bikes and a Triumph motorcycle were chained to a bikestand in front of a house with a little sign that said BAYOU STATE SENTINEL - THE LAST BASTION OF TRUTH IN AMERICA. I guess being a bastion of truth didn't prevent people from stealing your bicycles.

Pike and I parked at a meter, and Pike said, "I'll wait in the car." Pike's not big on alternative.

I went up a little cement walk and in through the front door to what had probably been the living room when people were living here instead of working here. Now, five desks were wedged into the place, along with a coffee machine and a water cooler and a lot of posters of Kurt Cobain and Hillary Clinton and framed Sentinel covers. The covers had headlines like LIFE SUX and FIVE REASONS TO KILL YOURSELF NOW. Alternative. A couple of African-American women in their late twenties were working at Macintosh computers farther back in the room, one of them on the phone as she typed, and an athletic white guy with short red hair was at a desk just inside the door. A parrot sat on a perch in the waiting area, copies of the New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune spread on the floor beneath it. The parrot flapped its wings when it saw me, then lifted its tail feathers and squirted a load of parrot s.h.i.t onto the New York Times. I said, "Man, this parrot is something."

The red-haired guy smiled over at me. "That's Bubba, and that's what we think of the mainstream press. What can I do for you?"

I gave him one of my cards. "Elvis Cole to see Sela Henried. Lucille Chenier called her about me."