He stared at the rain.
'Maybe there's something I ought to tell you, Dave, not that maybe you don't already know it,' he said. 'When people like us, I'm talking about actors and such, come into a community, everybody gets excited and thinks somehow we're going to change their lives. I'm talking about romantic expectations, glamorous relationships with celebrities, that kind of stuff. Then one day we're gone and they're left with some problems they didn't have before. What I'm saying is they become ashamed when they realize how little they always thought of themselves. It's like turning on the lights inside the theater when the matinee is over.'
'Our problems are our own, El. Don't give yourself too much credit.'
'You cut me loose on a DWI and got me sober, Dave. Or at least I got a good running start at it. What'd you get for it? A mess of trouble you didn't deserve.'
'Extend a hand to somebody else. That way you pass on the favor,' I said.
I put my hand on the back of his neck. I could feel the stiff taper of his hair under my palm.
'I think about Kelly most when it rains. It's like she was just washed away, like everything that was her was dissolved right into the earth, like she wasn't ever here,' he said. 'How can a person be a part of your life twenty- four hours a day and then just be gone? I cain't get used to it.'
'Maybe people live on inside of us, El, and then one day we get to see them again.'
He leaned one hand against a wood post and stared at the rain. His face was wet with mist.
'It's coming to an end,' he said. 'Everything we've been doing, all the things that have happened, it's fixing to end,' he said.
'You're not communicating too well, partner.'
'I saw them back yonder in that sugarcane field last night. But this time it was different. They were furling their colors and loading their wagons. They're leaving us.'
'Why now?' I heard my voice say inside myself.
He dropped his arm from the post and looked at me. In the shadows his brown skin was shiny with water.
'Something bad's fixing to happen, Dave,' he said. 'I can feel it like a hand squeezing my heart.'
He tapped the flat of his fist against the wood post as though he were trying to reassure himself of its physical presence.
Late that afternoon the sheriff called me on my extension.
'Dave, could you come down to my office and help me with something?' he said.
When I walked through his door he was leaned back in his swivel chair, watching the treetops flatten in the wind outside the window, pushing against his protruding stomach with stiffened fingers as though he were discovering his weight problem for the first time.
'Oh, there you are,' he said.
'What's up?'
'Sit down.'
'Do we have a problem?'
He brushed at his round, cleft chin with the backs of his fingers.
'I want to get your reaction to what some people might call a developing situation,' he said.
'Developing situation?'
'I went two years to USL, Dave. I'm not the most articulate person in the world. I just try to deal with realities as they are.'
'I get the feeling we're about to sell the ranch.'
'It's not a perfect world.'
'Where's the heat coming from?' I said.
'There're a lot of people who want Balboni out of town.'
'Which people?'
'Business people.'
'They used to get along with him just fine.'
'People loved Mussolini until it came time to hang him upside down in a filling station.'
'Come on, cut to it, sheriff. Who are the other players?'
'The feds. They want Balboni bad. Doucet's lawyer says his client can put Julie so far down under the penal system they'll have to dig him up to bury him.'
'What's Doucet get?'
'He cops to resisting arrest and procuring, one-year max on an honor farm. Then maybe the federal witness protection program, psychological counseling, ongoing supervision, all that jazz.'
'Tell them to go fuck themselves.'
'Why is it I thought you might say that?'
'Call the press in. Tell them what kind of bullshit's going on here. Give them the morgue photos of Cherry LeBlanc.'
'Be serious. They're not going to run pictures like that. Look, we can't indict with what we have. This way we get the guy into custody and permanent supervision.'
'He's going to kill again. It's a matter of time.'
'So what do you suggest?'
'Don't give an inch. Make them sweat ball bearings.'
'With what? I'm surprised his lawyer even wants to accept the procuring charge.'
'They think I've got a photo of Doucet with Balboni and Cherry LeBlanc in Biloxi.'
'Think?'
'Doucet's face is out of focus. The man in the picture looks like bread dough.'
'Great.'
'I still say we should exhume the body and match the utility knife to the slash wounds.'
'All an expert witness can do is testify that the wounds are consistent with those that might have been made with a utility knife. At least that's what the prosecutor's office says. Doucet will walk and so will Balboni. I say we take the bird in hand.'
'It's a mistake.'
'You don't have to answer to people, Dave. I do. They want Julie out of this parish and they don't care how we do it.'
'Maybe you should give some thought about having to answer to the family of Doucet's next victim, sheriff.'
He picked up a chain of paper clips and trailed them around his blotter.
'I don't guess there's much point in continuing this conversation, is there?' he said.
'I'm right about this guy. Don't let him fly.'
'Wake up, Dave. He flew this morning.' He dropped the paper clips into a clean ashtray and walked past me with his coffee cup. 'You'd better take off a little early this afternoon. This hurricane looks to be a real frog stringer.'
It hit late that evening, pushing waves ahead of it that curled over houseboats and stilt cabins at West Cote Blanche Bay and flattened them like a huge fist. In the south the sky was the color of burnt pewter, then rain- streaked, flumed with thunderheads. You could see tornadoes dropping like suspended snakes from the clouds, filling with water and splintered trees from the marshes, and suddenly breaking apart like whips snapping themselves into nothingness.
I heard canvas popping loose on the dock, billowing against the ropes Batist and I had tried to secure it with, then bursting free and flapping end over end among the cattails. The windows swam with water, lightning exploded out of the gray-green haze of swamp, and in the distance, in the roar of wind and thunder that seemed to clamp down on us like an enormous black glass bell, I thought I could hear the terrified moaning of my neighbor's cattle as they fought to find cover in a woods where mature trees were whipped out of the soft ground like seedlings.
By midnight the power was gone, the water off, and half the top of an oak tree had crashed on the roof and
