'You're pissed off because you think I put your daughter at risk.'
'You didn't have anything to do with it.'
I used the pressure nozzle on the hose to blow the dock and railing clean. When I released the handle I could hear the water draining between the boards into the darkness below. Clete stood silently and waited, his booze in each hand, the hurt barely concealed in his face.
'Let me hold that for you,' I said, and eased the pint bottle from his hand.
'What do you think you're doing?' he said.
'I've got a couple of steaks in the cooler. You're going to eat one and I'm going to eat the other,' I said.
'I don't get to vote about my own life?' he asked.
'I'll do it for you.'
I lit the gas stove inside the bait shop, seasoned the T-bone steaks, and lay them on the grill. Clete sat at the counter and drank from his beer and watched me. He kept touching at his forehead, as though an insect were on his skin.
'What's with this kid Remeta?' he asked, forcing his concentration on a subject other than his self-perceived failure.
'You were right the first time. He's nuts.'
'He was putting moves on Alafair?'
'Who knows?'
The phone on the counter rang. I picked it up impatiently, waiting once again to hear the voice of Johnny Remeta. But it was the sheriff.
'I thought this shouldn't wait till tomorrow,' he said. 'Levy and Badeaux tore apart Axel Jennings' station wagon. There was fourteen thousand dollars in new bills hidden in the trunk. He also had a passport and an Iberia Parish map with an inked line from I-10 to just about where your house is.'
'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 Connie Deshotel. The attorney general putting a whack on a cop?
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 fanned out on the pillow. The moon had broken out of the clouds, and I could see the screen hanging ajar and Tripod curled in a ball on Alafair's rump. He raised his nose and sniffed at the air, then yawned and went back to sleep.
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 tennis shoes embossed with the words 'Left' and 'Right' on the appropriate shoe, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill, her Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, a brown, cloth Sodality scapular, the mystery stories she wrote in elementary school, with titles like 'The Case of the Hungry Caterpillar,' 'The Worm That Lost Its Wiggle,' and, most chilling of all, 'The Roller Rink Murders.'
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 Johnny Remeta came back into our lives.
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, Johnny.'
'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, Johnny,' I said, and gently replaced the receiver in the cradle.
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
