'Where is she?'
'I don't know, Boots. But we're going to get her back. If the sheriff calls, don't tell him anything. At least not right now.'
I felt Rosie's eyes on the side of my face.
'What are you doing, Dave?' Bootsie said.
'I'll call you in a little while,' I said. 'Stay with Elrod, okay?'
'What if that man calls back?'
'He won't. He'll figure the line's open.'
Before she could speak again, I went inside and opened the closet door in the bedroom. From under some folded blankets on the top shelf I took out a box of twelve-gauge shells and the Remington pump shotgun whose barrel I had sawed off in front of the pump handle and whose sportsman's plug I had removed years ago. I shook the shells, a mixture of deer slugs and double-ought buckshot, out on the bed and pressed them one by one into the magazine until I felt the spring come snug against the fifth shell. I dropped the rest of the shells into my raincoat pockets.
'Call the FBI, Dave,' Bootsie said behind me.
'No,' I said.
'Then I'll do it.'
'Boots, if they screw it up, he'll kill her. We'll never even find the body.'
Her face was white. I set the shotgun down and pulled her against me. She felt small, her back rounded, inside my arms.
'We've got a few hours,' I said. 'If we can't get her back in that time, I'm going to do what he wants and hope that he turns her loose. I'll bring the sheriff and the FBI in on it, too.'
She stepped back from me and looked up into my face.
'Hope that he-' she said.
'Doucet's never left witnesses.'
She wanted to come with us, but I left her on the gallery with Elrod, staring after us with her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.
It was almost dark when we turned off the old two-lane highway onto the dirt road that led to Spanish Lake. The rain was falling in the trees and out on the lake and I could see the lights burning in one trailer under the hanging moss by the water's edge. All the way out to the lake Rosie had barely spoken, her small hands folded on top of her purse, the shadows washing across her face like rivulets of rain.
'I have to be honest with you, Dave. I don't know how far I can go along with this,' she said.
'Call in your people now and I'll stonewall them.'
'Do you think that little of us?'
'Not you I don't. But the people you work for are pencil pushers. They'll cover their butts, they'll do it by the numbers, and I'll end up losing Alafair.'
'What are you going to do if you catch Doucet?'
'That's up to him.'
'Is that straight, Dave?'
I didn't answer.
'I saw you put something in your raincoat pocket when you were coming out of the bedroom,' she said. 'I got the impression you were concealing it from Bootsie. Maybe it was just my imagination.'
'Maybe you're thinking too much about the wrong things, Rosie.'
'I want your word this isn't a vigilante mission.'
'You're worried about procedure.… In dealing with a man like this? What's the matter with you?'
'Maybe you're forgetting who your real friends are, Dave.'
I stopped the truck at the security building, rolled down my window, and held up my badge for the man inside, who was leaned back in his chair in front of a portable television set. He put on his hat, came outside, and dropped the chain for me. I could hear the sounds of a war movie through the open door.
'I'll just leave it down for you,' he said.
'Thanks. Is that Julie Balboni's trailer with the lights on?' I said.
'Yeah, that's it.'
'Who's with him?'
The security guard's eyes went past me to Rosie.
'His reg'lar people, I guess,' he said. 'I don't pay it much mind.'
'Who else?'
'He brings out guests from town.' His eyes looked directly into mine.
I rolled up the window, thumped across the chain, and drove into the oak grove by the lake. Twenty yards from Balboni's lighted trailer was the collapsed and blackened shell of a second trailer, its empty windows blowing with rain, its buckled floor leaking cinders into pools of water, the tree limbs above it scrolled with scorched leaves. To one side of Balboni's trailer a Volkswagon and the purple Cadillac with the tinted black windows were parked between two trees. I saw someone light a cigarette inside the Cadillac.
I stepped out of the truck with the shotgun hanging from my right arm and tapped with one knuckle on the driver's window. He rolled the glass down, and I saw the long pink scar inside his right forearm, the boxed hairline on the back of his neck, the black welt like an angry insect on his bottom lip where I had broken off his tooth in the restaurant on East Main. The man in the passenger's seat had the flattened eyebrows and gray scar tissue around his eyes of a prizefighter; he bent his neck down so he could look upward at my face and see who I was.
'What d'you want?' the driver said.
'Both of you guys are fired. Now get out of here and don't come back.'
'Listen to this guy. You think this is Dodge City?' the driver said.
'Didn't you learn anything the first time around?' I said.
'Yeah, that you're a prick who blindsided me, that I can sue your ass, that Julie's got lawyers who can-'
I lifted the shotgun above the window ledge and screwed the barrel into his cheek.
'Do yourself a favor and visit your family in New Orleans,' I said.
His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he tried to turn his head away from the pressure of the shotgun barrel. I pressed it harder into the hollow of his cheek.
'Fuck it, do what the man says. I told you the job was turning to shit when Julie run off Cholo,' the other man said. 'Hey, you hear me, man, back off. We're neutral about any personal beefs you got, you understand what I'm saying? You ought to do something about that hard-on you got, knock it down with a hammer or something, show a little fucking control.'
I stepped back and pulled the shotgun free of the window. The driver stared at my hand wrapped in the trigger guard.
'You crazy sonofabitch, you had the safety off,' he said.
'Happy motoring,' I said.
I waited until the taillights of the Cadillac had disappeared through the trees, then I walked up onto the trailer's steps, turned the door knob, and flung the door back into the wall.
A girl not over nineteen, dressed only in panties and a pink bra, was wiggling into a pair of jeans by the side of two bunk beds that had been pushed together in the middle of the floor. Her long hair was unevenly peroxided and looked like twisted strands of honey on her freckled shoulders; for some reason the crooked lipstick on her mouth made me think of a small red butterfly. Julie Balboni stood at an aluminum sink, wearing only a black silk jockstrap, his salt-and-pepper curls in his eyes, his body covered with fine black hair, a square bottle of Scotch poised above a glass filled with cracked ice. His eyes dropped to the shotgun that hung from my right hand.
'You finally losing your mind, Dave?' he said.
I picked up the girl's blouse from the bed and handed it to her.
'Are you from New Iberia?' I asked.
'Yes, sir,' she said, her eyes fastened on mine as she pushed her feet into a pair of pumps.
'Stay away from this man,' I said. 'Women who hang around him end up dead.'
Her frightened face looked at Julie, then back at me.
