you didn't have no right to hurt me like that.'
'You should have said that on the bayou. Maybe it would have gone down different.'
'You wasn't looking for the troot. You was looking to get even,' Baby Huey said.
Joe scratched at his cheek with the balls of his fingers.
'You keep the wrong company, you pay dues. They ain't always fair,' he said. He took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and creased it lengthwise and placed it on the bar like a miniature tent.
Baby Huey pushed it away and dried a glass. 'I ain't axed you for nothing. In case you ain't noticed, you in the wrong part of town,' he said.
'Yeah, I got that impression when I walked in. You want to earn that hunnerd bucks and another hunnerd like it, or keep blaming me 'cause you decided to be a pimp and sell crack?'
Baby Huey filled a bowl with gumbo and put a spoon in it and set it on a napkin in front of Joe.
'It's on me. I made it this afternoon,' Baby Huey said. 'You want a beer wit' it?'
'I don't mind,' Joe said.
'You got bidness wit' the man people call Legion, huh?' Baby Huey said.
'What do you mean the man they 'call' Legion?'
'He ain't got a first name. He ain't got a last name. Just 'Legion.' That's all black people ever call him.'
'He's hard on women?' Joe said.
'If they the right color,' Baby Huey said, and put the one-hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.
They drove in Joe Zeroski's car up on a levee that looked out on a wide bay fringed with flooded cypresses. A storm was kicking up out on the Gulf, and the wind was blowing hard from the south, wrinkling the bay, puffing leaves out of the adjacent woods. Joe turned off on a dirt track, dropping down into persimmon and pecan trees, palmettos, and landlocked pools that had the greasy shine of an oil slick. Baby Huey pointed to a shack in a clearing, a lantern burning whitely on a table inside. In back were a privy and a collapsed smokehouse and Legion Guidry's truck, parked next to an oak that was nailed with the scraped hides of raccoons.
One of the truck's rear tires was flat on the rim. Joe cut the engine. Through the trees they could hear Tee Bobby's band belting out Clifton Chenier's 'Hey, Tite Fille.' They stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the darkness, the mosquitoes that boiled out of the trees, the wind that smelled of humus and beached fish.
'You stay where you are,' Joe said, and pitched a cell phone to Baby Huey. 'It goes south in there, you push the redial button and say 'Joe needs a hose crew.' Then you tell them where we're at and you take my car down the road and wait for whoever comes.'
'That's Legion in there, Mr. Joe,' Baby Huey said.
'I think you're a nice kid. I think you were sincere what you said about my daughter. But take the collard greens out of your mouth and tell me what you're trying to say. That's why you people are always gonna be cleaning toilets. You can't say what's on your mind.'
Baby Huey shook his head. 'Legion ain't no ordinary white man. He ain't no ordinary man of any kind.'
Joe Zeroski opened the screen door of the shack and walked inside without knocking. While he and Baby Huey had talked outside, the tall, black-haired man in khaki clothes who sat at the table with a six-pack of beer and a bottle of bourbon in front of him had shown no curiosity about the headlights or the presence of others in his yard.
He knocked back a jigger of whiskey, took a sip of beer from a salted can, and picked up a burning cigarette from an inverted jar top. He drew in the smoke, the cigarette paper crackling in the silence.
'You busted up two of my men. But I'm letting that slide for now, 'cause maybe they were rude or maybe you didn't know who they were. But somebody beat my daughter to death and I'm gonna rip his ass. I hear you got a bad record with women,' Joe said.
'Robicheaux send you?' Legion asked.
'Robicheaux?'
'You one of them dagos been staying in town, ain't you? Working for Dave Robicheaux.'
'Are you nuts?' Joe said.
Then Joe heard a sound in a side room, behind a blanket that was hung with sliding hooks on a doorway. Joe pulled back the blanket and looked down at a black girl, probably not over eighteen, sitting on the side of a bed in shorts and a T-shirt razored off below her breasts, snorting a line off a broken mirror through a rolled five-dollar bill.
Joe took her by the arm and walked her barefoot and stoned to the front door.
'Go home. Or back to the nightclub. Or wherever you come from. But stay away from this man. Where's your father, anyway?' he said, and closed the door behind her. Then he turned around, his back feeling momentarily exposed, vulnerable.
Legion's face wore no expression, the skin white as a fish's belly, creased with vertical lines. He inhaled off his cigarette, the ash glowing red, crackling against the dry-ness of the paper.
'You just made a mistake,' he said.
'Oh, yeah, how's that?' Joe asked.
'I paid forty dollars for her dope. So now you owe the debt.'
'You're an ignorant and stupid man, but I'm gonna try to explain something to you as simply as I can. My daughter was Linda Zeroski. A degenerate piece of shit tied her to a chair not far from here and smashed every bone in her face with his fists.'
Joe removed a.38 revolver with a two-inch barrel from the back of his belt. He flipped out the cylinder and dumped all six shells from the chambers into his palm.
'I'm gonna put two rounds back in the chambers and spin them around, then we're gonna-' he began.
That's when Legion Guidry slid a cut-down, double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun from a scabbard nailed under the table and raised it so the barrels were suddenly pointed into Joe Zeroski's face.
'Who's stupid now?' Legion said. 'You got nothing smart to say, you? Just gonna stand there wit' your li'l gun wit'out no bullets in it? Time you got down on your knees, dago.'
'I look Italian? Zeroski is Polish, you moron. Poles ain't Italians,' Joe said.
Legion rose from the table and walked to the screen door, where Baby Huey stood frozen, his eyes wide at the scene taking place in front of him.
'Come inside,' Legion said.
Baby Huey opened the screen and stepped out of the darkness into the white radiance of the lantern on the table. The muscles in his back jumped when the screen swung back into the jamb behind him.
'On your knees, nigger,' Legion said.
'My uncle owns the nightclub. He knows where we're at,' Baby Huey said.
'That's good. He come here, I'll shoot me two niggers 'stead of one,' Legion said.
Baby Huey bent slowly to the floor, his knees popping, sweat breaking on his brow now, his gaze sliding down the length of Legion's body.
Legion screwed the barrels of the shotgun into Baby Huey's neck and looked at Joe.
'T'row your li'l gun down and get on your knees, or I'm gonna blow the nigger's head off. Look into my eyes and tell me you don't t'ink I'll do it, no,' he said.
Joe Zeroski let the.38 shells spill from his hand onto the floor, then tossed the revolver to one side and got to his knees.
Legion Guidry stood above him, his stomach and loins flat, his khaki shirt tucked tightly inside his western belt. He reached behind him and removed his straw hat from the back of a chair and fitted it on his head so that his face was now in shadow. He drank from his whiskey bottle and spread his feet slightly and cleared his throat.
'What you t'ink about to happen? Bet you didn't t'ink a day like this would ever come in your life, no,' he said.
Then he unzipped his fly.
'How far you willing to go to keep a nigger alive?' he asked, pressing the shotgun harder into Baby Huey's neck, his eyes riveted on Joe's.
Joe felt himself swallow, his hands balling at his sides.
Legion's finger was wrapped tightly inside the trigger guard on the shotgun. The back of his hand was spotted
