Purple Cane Road

"I thought this shouldn't wait till tomorrow," he said. "Levy and Badeaux tore apart Axel Je

"My house?" I said.

"Your picture and an article about the shoot-out on the Atchafalaya were in a newspaper on the floor. He'd drawn a circle around your head. Purcel wasn't the target."

I could feel the heat and moisture trapped between my palm and the phone receiver. A drop of sweat ran from my armpit down my side.

Clete lowered his beer can from his mouth and looked curiously at my expression.

Later I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, the window fan blowing across us, and tried to put together the events of the day. A rogue cop doing a hit for hire on another police officer? It happened sometimes, but usually the victim was dirty and shared a corrupt enterprise with the shooter. Who would be behind it, anyway? Jim Gable was obnoxious and, in my view, a sexual degenerate, but why would he want me killed?

The contract could have been put out by a perpetrator with a grudge, but most perpetrators thought of cops, prosecutors, and judges as functionaries of the system who were not personally to blame for their grief; their real anger was usually directed at fall partners who sold them out and defense attorneys who pled them into double-digit sentences.

The only other person with whom I was currently having trouble was Co

But all the syllogisms I ran through my head were only a means of avoiding a nightmarish image that I couldn't shake from my mind. I saw Alafair seated next to me at the plank table, petting a cat in the glow of the candle Clete had just lighted. Then, in my imagination, I saw a muzzle flash across the bayou, a brief tongue of yellow flame against the bamboo, and an instant later I heard the sound a soft-nosed round makes when it strikes bone and I knew I had just entered a landscape of remorse and sorrow from which there is no exit.

I picked up my pillow and went into Alafair's room. She wore a cotton nightgown and was sleeping on her stomach, her face turned toward the wall, her black hair fa

I lay down on the floor, on top of Alafair's Navaho rug, and put my pillow under my head. Her shelves were lined with books, stuffed animals, and framed photographs and certificates of membership in Madrigals and Girls State and the school honor society. Inside a trunk I had made from restored cypress wood were all her possessions we had saved over the years: a Baby Orca T-shirt, red te

Outside, the wind lifted the moss in the trees and I drifted off to sleep.

It was around 3 A.M. when I heard her stir in bed. I opened my eyes and looked up into her face, which hung over the side of the mattress.

"Why are you sleeping down there?" she whispered.

"I felt like it."

"You thought something was going to happen to me?"

"Of course not."

She made a solitary clicking sound with her tongue, then got out of bed and went out to the hall closet and came back and popped a sheet open and spread it across me.

"You are so crazy sometimes," she said, and got back in bed, folding Tripod in the crook of her arm. She leaned over the side of the bed again and said, "Dave?"

"Yes?"

"I love you."

I placed my arm across my eyes so she wouldn't see the water welling up in them.

The next morning was Sunday and Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass together. After we returned home I went down to the dock and helped Batist in the bait shop. It was unusually cool, a fine day for going after bream and goggle-eye perch with popping bugs, and we had rented most of our boats. It showered just after lunch, and a number of fishermen came in and drank beer and ate links and chicken at our spool tables under the awning. But regardless of the balmy weather and the cheerful mood out on the dock, I knew it wouldn't be long before Joh

The call came at mid-afternoon.

"I figure we're square," he said.

"You got it," I said.

He was silent a moment. I picked up an empty Coke can and looked at the label on it, trying to slow my thoughts and avoid the anger that was always my undoing.

"When you came after me in the library? How far were you willing to go?" he said.

"That would have been up to you, Joh

"Gives me a bad feeling, Mr. Robicheaux."

"That's the way it is, I guess."

Again he was silent. Then he said. "Those things you said to me on the phone that night? My father talked to me like that."

"I can't give you the help you need, partner. But no matter how you cut it, you have to stay away from us. I'm saying this with all respect."

"It's over when I get the people who shot at me."

"That's between you and others. We're not involved."

"You thought maybe I had an improper attitude toward Alafair?"

Hearing him use her name made my breath come hard in my throat.

"I'm off the clock. I'm also off the phone. Have a good life, Joh

I stared at the phone like it was a live snake, waiting for him to call back. I rang up a sale, served a customer an order of boudin on a paper plate, and scrubbed down the counter with a wet rag, the tension in my ears crackling with a sound like crushed cellophane.

When the phone did ring, it was Bootsie, asking me to bring a quart of milk from the cooler up to the house.

Joh

In Vietnam I knew a self-declared Buddhist and quasi-psychotic warrant officer who would fly a Huey into places the devil wouldn't go. He used to say, "The way to keep your house safe from tigers is to return the tiger to its owner's house."

I got Co

I didn't try to call before I arrived. Even if she wasn't home, I felt my business card in her mailbox would indicate, if indeed she was the money behind Axel Je

I lifted the brass door knocker and heard chimes deep inside the house. But no one came to the door. I dropped my card through the mail slot and was headed back down the walk when I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash from the rear of the house.

I walked through a side yard under a long trellis that was wrapped with trumpet vine. I opened the gate into the backyard and saw Co