"Si. Yes. The coyote, he tells them that they are buying citizenship, you see? They will be given birth certificates, a driver's license, the social security card, all in their own names and usually with their actual birth dates. This is what they pay for, and they pay a very great deal. With these things they can bring the medical degree, the engineering degree, like that."

"And do they get what they pay for?"

"Almost never." We walked to the edge of the promenade. The river was below us, cutting a great brown swath through the city, flat and wide and somehow alive. The river's edge was p.r.i.c.kly with loading cranes and wharfs and warehouses. He glanced at the Haitian and lowered his voice. "Four months after he came, seven members of his family also bought pa.s.sage through Frank Escobar. They were put in a barge out in the Gulf, fifty-four people put into a little s.p.a.ce ten feet by eight feet, with no food and water, and the barge was set adrift. It was an old barge, and Escobar never intended to bring them ash.o.r.e. He already have his money, you see, paid in full? A tanker reported the abandoned barge, and the Coast Guard investigated. All fifty-four men, women, and children had died. It got very hot in the hold of the barge with no openings for the ventilation and no water to drink. The hatch had been dogged shut, you see?" The Haitian's skin was a deep coal black, greasy with sweat. "His rather was a dentist. He wishes to be a dentist, also, but we see." He let the thought trail away and looked back at me. "That is the way it is with men like Escobar and Prima, you see? They get the money, then fft. Life means nothing. This is why I have so much protection, you see? I try to stop these men. I try to stop their murder."

Neither of us spoke for a time. "So what about Prima?"

"I hear that he has gone into business for himself, undercutting Escobar's price."

I said, "Ah."

Del Reyo nodded.

I said, "If Prima has set up a competing business, Escobar can't like it."

He sucked on the cigarette. "Si. There is trouble between them. There is always trouble between men like this." The smoke drifted up over his eyes, making him squint. "You say you know nothing about the coyotes, yet you ask about Donaldo Prima. You say you know that he is a bad man. How do you know these things?"

"I saw his people bring a dead child off a barge sometime around eleven-thirty last night. There were other people, but only the child was dead. An old man was making a deal about it, and I saw Prima shoot the old man in the head."

Ramon del Reyo did not move. "You saw this thing?"

I nodded.

"You have proof?"

"May I reach into my pocket?"

"Yes."

I showed him the old man's picture. He held it carefully, then took a deep breath, dropped the cigarette, and stepped on it. "May I keep this?"

"The cops might need it for the identification."

He stared at it another moment, then slipped the picture into his pocket. "I will return it to you, Mr. Cole. You have my word."

I didn't say anything.

"I tell you something, and if you are smart you will listen. These men come from places of war where life has no value. They have executed hundreds, perhaps thousands. This man Frank Escobar, he has murdered many and he murders more every day. Prima himself is such a man." He seemed to have to think about how to say it. "There is so much murder in the air it is what we breathe. The taking of life has lost all meaning." He shook his head. "The gun." He shook his head again, as if in saying those two words he had summed up all he was about, or ever could be about.

I said, "What about the feds?"

Ramon del Reyo rubbed his thumb across his fingertips and said nothing.

I said, "If I wanted to take down Donaldo Prima, how could I do it?"

He looked at me with steady, soft brown eyes, then made a little shrug. "I think that by asking these things, you are looking to do good, but you will not find good here, Mr. Cole. This is a G.o.dless place."

"I don't think you are without G.o.d, Mr. Del Reyo."

"I am afraid I will not know that until the afterlife, no?" We reached the little bench by the azaleas. Ramon del Reyo sat, and I sat with him. "We have talked enough, now. I will leave, and you will sit here for exacdy ten minutes. If you leave before then, it will be taken the wrong way and you will be killed. I am sorry to be rude in this way, but there we are."

"Of course." I imagined the man with the rifle. I imagined him watching for the sign, and I wondered what the sign might've been. A yawn, perhaps. Perhaps wiping the brow. The sign, the trigger, history.

Ramon del Reyo said, "If the man who is with you approaches, have him sit beside you and he will not be harmed."

I said, "What man?"

Ramon del Reyo laughed, then patted my leg and moved away, del Reyo and the guy with the Ray-Bans, then the others, and finally the Haitian. The Haitian made a pistol of his right hand, pointed it at me, and dropped the hammer. Then he smiled and disappeared into the crowd. What a way to live.

I sat on the lip of the bench in the damp heat and waited. My shirt was wet and clinging, and my skin felt hot and beginning to burn. Joe Pike came through the crowd and sat beside me. He said, "Look across the square, corner building, third floor, third window in."

I didn't bother looking. "Guy widi a rifle."

"Not now, but was. Did you make him?"

"They told me. They made you, Joe. They knew you were there."

Pike didn't move for a while, but you could tell he didn't like it, or didn't believe it. Finally he made a little shrug. "Did we learn anything?"

"I think."

"Is there a way out for the Boudreauxs?"

I stared off at the river, at the steady brown water flowing toward the Gulf, at the great ships headed north, up into the heart of America. I said, "Yes. Yes, I think there is. They won't like it, but I think there is." I thought about it for a time, and then I looked back at Joe Pike. "These are dangerous people, Joe. These are very dangerous people."

Pike nodded and watched/the river with me. "Yes," he said. "But so are we."

Chapter 29.

A hot wind blew in off Lake Pontchartrain. The last of the clouds had vanished, leaving the sky a great azure dome above us, the afternoon sun a disk of white and undeniable heat. We drove with the windows down, the hot air roaring over and around us, smelling not unlike an aquarium that has been too long un-cleaned. We reached Baton Rouge, but we did not stop; we crested the bridge and continued west toward the Evangeline Parish Sheriff's Substation in Eunice, and Jo-el Boudreaux. He wouldn't be happy to see us, but I wasn't so happy about seeing him, either. It was late afternoon when Pike and I parked in the dappled shade of a black-trunked oak and walked into the substation. A thin African-American woman with very red lips and too much rouge sat at a desk and, behind her, a tall rawboned cop with leathery skin stood at a coffee machine. The cop looked over when we walked in and watched us cross to the receptionist. Staring. I gave the receptionist one of my business cards. "We'd like to see Sheriff Boudreaux, please. He knows what it's about."

She looked at the card. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No, ma'am. But he'll see us."

The rawboned cop came closer, first looking at Pike and then looking at me, as if we had put in a couple of job applications and he was about to turn us down. "The sheriff's a busy man. You got a problem, you can talk to me." His name tag said WILLETS.

"Thanks, but it's business for the sheriff."

Willets didn't let it go. "If you're talkin' crime, it's my business, too." He squinted. "You boys aren't local, are you?"

Pike said, "Does it matter?"

Willets clicked the cop eyes on Pike. "You look familiar. I ever lock you down?"

The receptionist said, "Oh, relax, Tommy," and took the card down a short hall.

Willets stood there with his fists on his hips, staring at us. The receptionist came back with Jo-el Boudreaux and returned to her desk. Boudreaux looked nervous. "I thought you were gone."

"There's something we need to talk about."

Willets said, "They wouldn't talk with me, Jo-el."

Boudreaux said, "I've got it now, Tommy. Thanks."

Willets went back to the coffee machine, but he wasn't happy about it. Boudreaux was holding my business card and bending it back and forth. He looked at Joe. "Who's that?"

"Joe Pike. He works with me."

Boudreaux bent the card some more, then came closer and lowered his voice. "That woman is back and she's been calling my wife. I don't like it."

"Who?"

He mouthed the words. "That woman. Jodi Taylor." He glanced at Willets to make sure he hadn't heard.

"Sheriff, that's just too d.a.m.n bad. You want to talk out here?"

Willets was still staring at us from the coffee machine. He couldn't hear us, but he didn't like all the talking. He called out, "Hey, Jo-el, you want me to take care of that?"

"I've got it, Tommy. Thanks."

Boudreaux took us to his office. Like him, it was simple and functional. Uncluttered desk. Uncluttered cabinet with a little TV. A nice-looking largemouth ba.s.s mounted on the wall. Boudreaux was big and his face was red. A hundred years ago he would have looked like the town blacksmith. Now, he looked awkward in his short-sleeved uniform and Sam Browne. He said, "I want you to know I don't appreciate your coming here like this. I don't like that woman calling my wife. I told you I'd handle my troubles on my own, in my own way, and there's nothing we got to say to each other."

"I want to report a crime. I can report it to you, or to the clown outside."

He rocked back when I said it. He was a large-boned, strong man and he'd probably fronted down his share of oilfield drunks, but now he was scared and wondering what to do. I wasn't supposed to be here. I was supposed to have gone away and stayed away. "What do you mean, 'crime'? What are you talkin' about?"

"I know what Rossier's doing, Sheriff. You're going to have to put a stop to it."

He put his hand on the doork.n.o.b like he was going to show us out. "I said I'll take care of this."

"You've been hiding from it for long enough, and now it's gotten larger than you and your wife and your father-in-law."

He said, "No," waving his hand.

"I'm showing you a courtesy here, Boudreaux. Neither your wife nor Jodi Taylor knows about this, though I will tell them. I'm giving it to you first, so that we can do this in private, where you want to keep your fat-a.s.s troubles, or we can do it in front of your duty cops."

Pike said, "f.u.c.kin' A." Pike really knows how to add to a conversation.

Boudreaux stopped the waving.

I said, "At eleven-thirty last night we saw a man named Donaldo Prima shoot an old man in the head at an abandoned pumping station a mile south of Milt Rossier's crawfish farm. They were bringing in illegal immigrants. Rossier's goons were there when it happened."

Jo-el Boudreaux stopped all the twitching and waving as completely as if he had thrown a switch. His eyes narrowed briefly, and then he put his palms flat on his desk and wet his lips again. When he spoke I could barely hear him. "You're reporting a homicide?"

"It's not the first, Jo-el. It's been going on, and it will keep going on until it's stopped."

"Rossier was there?"

"Prima met LeRoy Bennett at Rossier's bar, the Bayou Lounge. Bennett and LaBorde were at the pumping station, but Rossier's the guy who's in business with Prima."

His fingers kneaded the way a cat will knead its paws, only without satisfaction. "Can you prove that?"

"They buried the old man and a little girl. Let's go see them."

He came around the desk and put on his hat. "G.o.d help you if you're lyin'."

Tommy Willets was gone when we walked out through the substation and climbed into Jo-el's car.

The sheriff drove. I spoke only to give directions, and a little less than twenty minutes later we turned across the cattle bridge and moved into the marsh and the cane fields. The rain had left the road pocked with puddles, but the ruts from the big trucks were still cut and clear. Everything looked different during the day, brighter and somehow magnified. Egrets with blindingly white feathers took dainty steps near thickets of cattails, and BB-eyed black birds perched atop swaying cane tips.

We parked alongside the pumping station. The sun was cooking off the rain, and, when we left the car, it was like stepping into a cloud of live steam. We moved north along the edge of the waterway for maybe eighty yards until we came to the little grave. The rain had washed away some of the soil, and part of the old man's arm was visible. There was a musty smell like sour milk mixed with fish food, but maybe that was just the swamp.

Jo-el Boudreaux said, "Oh, my Lord."

Boudreaux bent down, but did not touch the earth or what was obscured by it. He stood and turned and looked out across the waterway, shaking his head. "Jesus, ain't this a mess."

I said, "It isn't just you and your wife anymore, Boudreaux. Rossier isn't just selling meth to crackers. He's in business with animals, and people are getting hurt. You can't ignore that."

He wiped at his forehead with a handkerchief. "Oh, holy Jesus. I didn't know about any of this. I never knew what he was doing. That was the deal, see? I just stayed away. That's all there was to it. I just let him go about his business. I never knew what he was doing out here."

"This thing is going to end, now, Jo-el. You're going to shut Rossier down."

He looked confused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I can't walk away and let it go on. If you don't stop it, I'll give you up."

He blinked hard and looked from me to Joe Pike, then back to me. His face was bright pink in the sun, and slicked with sweat. "You think I'd let someone get away with this? You think I'd just turn away?"

I pointed at the grave. "That old man and that little girl are dead because you turned away."

The pink face went red, and in that moment he wasn't the scared blacksmith; he was the leather-tough farmer he'd had to be when he was fronting down Sat.u.r.day-night drunks waving broken Budweiser bottles. He said, "I've got a wife to protect. I had to look out for her G.o.dd.a.m.ned daddy."

Pike moved to the side, and I stepped into Jo-el Boudreaux's face and said very softly, "It was almost forty years ago. Edith was a child, forty years ago. You went along because you didn't want anyone to know she'd been with a black man. It's the race thing, isn't it?"

Jo-el Boudreaux threw a fist the size of a canned ham at me with everything he had. It floated down through the thick air and I slapped it past, stepping to the outside. He threw the other hand, this time crossing his body and making a big grunt with the effort. I slapped it past the same way and stepped under. He was big and heavy and out of shape. Two punches and he was breathing hard. Pike shook his head and looked away. Boudreaux lunged forward, trying to wrap me up with the big arms, and I stepped to the side and swept his feet out from under him. He rolled sideways in the air, flaying at nothing, and hit the muddy ground. He stayed there, crying, hurting for himself but maybe hurting for the old man and the little girl, too. I thought Jodi Taylor was right. I thought that he was a good man, just stupid and scared, the way good men sometimes are. Somewhere nearby a fish jumped, and tiny gnats swarmed around us in great rolling clouds. Boudreaux got control of himself and climbed to his feet. He said, "I'm sorry about that."

I nodded. "Forget it."

He looked down at his pants. "Jesus, I look like I wet myself."