water from under the cabin.
The rear windows were boarded with slats from packing boxes and I couldn't see inside or hear any movement. At the back of the cabin I paused, held the shotgun flat against my chest, and looked around the comer. Murphy Doucet was almost to the door of the outhouse, a pair of untied hunting boots flopping on his feet, a silvery object glinting in his right hand. Beyond the outhouse, by the marsh's edge, a blue-tick dog was tied to a post surrounded by a ring of feces.
I stepped out from the lee of the cabin, threw the stock of the shotgun to my shoulder, sighted between Doucet's neck and shoulder blades, and felt the words already rising in my throat, like bubbles out of a boiling pot, Surprise time, motherfucker! Throw it away! Do it now! when he heard Rosie trip across a fishline that was tied to a cow bell on the gallery.
He looked once over his shoulder in her direction, then leaped behind the outhouse and ran toward the marsh on a long green strip of dry ground covered with buttercups. But five yards before he would have splashed into the willows and dead cypress and perhaps out of our field of fire, his untied boots sank into a pile of rotting medical waste that was matted with the scales of morning-glory vines. A wooden crutch that looked hand-hewn, with a single shaft that fitted into the armrest, sprang from under his boot and hung between his legs like a stick in bicycle spokes.
He turned around helplessly toward Rosie, falling backward off balance now, his blue eyes jittering frantically, his right arm extended toward her, as though it were not too late for her to recognize that his hand held a can of dog food rather than a weapon, just as she let off the first round of her.357 and caught him right in the sternum.
But it didn't stop there. She continued to fire with both hands gripped on the pistol, each soft-nosed slug knocking him backward with the force of a jackhammer, his shirt exploding with scarlet flowers on his bony chest, until the last round in the cylinder hit him in the rib cage and virtually eviscerated him on the water's edge. Then he simply sat down on top of his crumpled legs as though all the bone in his body had been surgically removed.
When she lowered the weapon toward the ground, her cheeks looked like they contained tiny red coals, and her eyes were frozen wide, as though she were staring into a howling storm, one that was filled with invisible forces and grinding winds only she could hear.
But I didn't have time to worry about the line that Rosie had crossed and the grief and knowledge that dark moment would bring with it.
Behind me I heard wood slats breaking loose from the back of the cabin, then I saw metal chair legs crash through the window, and Alafair climbing over the windowsill, her rump hanging in midair, her pink tennis shoes swinging above the damp earth.
I ran to her, grabbed her around the waist, and held her tightly against me. She buried her head under my chin and clamped her legs on my side like a frog, and I could feel the hard resilience of her muscles, the heat in her hands, the spastic breathing in her throat as though she had just burst from deep water into warm currents of salt air and a sunlit day loud with the sound of seabirds.
'Did he hurt you, Squanto?' I said, my heart dropping with my own question.
'I told him he'd better not. I told him what you'd do. I told him you'd rip his nuts out. I told him-'
'Where'd you get this language, Alf?'
A shudder went through her body, as though she had just removed her hand from a hot object, then her eyes squeezed shut and she began to cry.
'It's all right, Baby Squanto. We're going back home now,' I said.
I carried her on my hip back toward the truck, her arms around my neck, her face wet against my shirt.
I heard Rosie walking in the leaves behind me. She dumped the spent brass from the cylinder of her.357 into her palm, looked at them woodenly, then threw them tinkling into the trees.
'Get out of it, Rosie. That guy dealt the play a long time ago.'
'I couldn't stop. Why didn't I stop shooting? It was over and I kept shooting.'
'Because your mind shuts down in moments like that.'
'No, he paid for something that happened to me a long time ago, didn't he?'
'Let the Freudians play with that stuff. They seldom spend time on the firing line. It'll pass. Believe me, it always does.'
'Not hitting a man four times after he was going down. A man armed with a can of dog food.'
I looked at the spreading glow out on the bay and the gulls streaking over the tide's edge.
'He had a piece on him, Rosie. You just don't remember it right now,' I said, and handed Alafair to her.
I went back into the trees, found my raincoat, and carried it over my arm to the place where Murphy Doucet sat slumped among the buttercups, his torn side draining into the water. I took Lou Girard's.32 revolver from my raincoat pocket, wiped the worn bluing and the taped wooden grips on my handkerchief, fitted it into Doucet's hand, and closed his stiffened fingers around the trigger guard.
On his forearm was a set of teethmarks that looked like they had been put there by a child.
Next time out don't mess with Alafair Robicheaux or the Confederate army, Murph, I thought.
Then I picked up the crutch that had caught between his legs. The wood was old, weathered gray, the shaft shaved and beveled by a knife, the armrest tied with strips of rotted flannel.
The sun broke through the clouds overhead, and under the marsh's green canopy I could see hammered gold leaf hanging in the columns of spinning light, and gray shapes like those of long-dead sentinels, and like a man who has finally learned not to think reasonably in an unreasonable world, I offered the crutch at the air, at the shapes in the trees and at the sound of creatures moving through the water, saying, 'Don't you want to take this with you, sir?' But if he answered, I did not hear it.
Epilogue
I'd like to tell you that the department and the local prosecutor's office finally made their case against Julie Balboni, that we cleaned our own house and sent him up the road to Angola in waist and leg chains for a twenty- or thirty-year jolt. But that's not what happened. How could it? In many ways Julie was us, just as his father had been when he provided the town its gambling machines and its rows of cribs on Railroad and Hopkins avenues. After Julie had left town on his own to become a major figure in the New Orleans mob, we had welcomed him back, winking our eyes at his presence and pretending he was not what or who he was.
I believe Julie and his father possessed a knowledge about us that we did not possess about ourselves. They knew we were for sale.
Julie finally went down, but in a way that no one expected-in a beef with the IRS. No, that's not quite right, either. That ubiquitous federal agency, the bane of the mob, was only a minor footnote in Julie's denouement. The seed of Julie's undoing was Julie. And I guess Julie in his grandiosity would not have had it any other way.
He should have done easy time, a three-year waltz on a federal honor farm in Florida, with no fences or gunbulls, with two-man rooms rather than cells, tennis courts, and weekend furloughs. But while in federal custody in New Orleans he spit in a bailiff's face, tore the lavatory out of his cell wall, and told an informant planted in his cell that he was putting a hit out on Cholo Manelli, who he believed had turned over his books to the IRS (which I heard later was true).
So they shipped Baby Feet up to a maximum-security unit at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a place that in the wintertime makes you believe that the earth has been poisoned with Agent Orange and the subzero winds blow from four directions simultaneously.
Most people are not aware of who comprises the population of a maximum-security lockup. They are usually not men like Baby Feet, who was intelligent and fairly sane for a sociopath. Instead, they are usually psychotic meltdowns, although they are not classified as such, otherwise they would be sent to mental institutions from which they would probably be released in a relatively short time. Perhaps they have the intelligence levels of battery-charged cabbages, housed in six-and-one-half-foot bodies that glow with rut. Often they're momma's boys who wear horn-rimmed glasses and comb their hair out on their frail shoulders like girls, murder whole families, and can never offer more in the way of explanation than a bemused and youthful smile.
