"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 crackling with a sound like crushed cellophane.
When the phone did ring, it was Bootsie, asking me to bring a quart of milk from the cooler up to the house.
Johnny Remeta may have been temporarily out of the way, but Connie Deshotels possible involvement with Axel Jennings was not.
In Vietnam I knew a self-declared Buddhist and quasi-psychotic warrant officer who would fly a Huey into places the devil wouldn't go. He used to say, "The way to keep your house safe from tigers is to return the tiger to its owner's house."
I got Connie Deshotel's address from our local state representative, then drove to Baton Rouge late Sunday afternoon. She lived off Dalrymple, in the lake district north of the LSU campus, in a gabled two-story white house with azaleas and willows and blooming crepe myrtle in the yard. Her Sunday paper still lay on the front porch, wrapped tightly in a plastic rain bag.
I didn't try to call before I arrived. Even if she wasn't home, I felt my business card in her mailbox would indicate, if indeed she was the money behind Axel Jennings, that her intentions were known, and another visit from one of her emissaries would lead right back to her door.
I lifted the brass door knocker and heard chimes deep inside the house. But no one came to the door. I dropped my card through the mail slot and was headed back down the walk when I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash from the rear of the house.
I walked through a side yard under a long trellis that was wrapped with trumpet vine. I opened the gate into the backyard and saw Connie Deshotel in a purple two-piece bathing suit, mounting the tile steps at the shallow end of her swimming pool.
She picked a towel off a sun chair and shook out her hair, then dried her face and neck and blotted the towel on her thighs and the backs of her legs. She placed her feet inside her sandals and poured a Bloody Mary from a pitcher into a red-streaked glass with a stick of celery blossoming out of the ice.
I started to speak, then realized she had seen me out of the corner of her eye.
"Did you bring Bootsie with you this time?" she asked.
"No, it's still all business," I replied.
"Well," she said, touching the towel to her 'forehead, her chin raised, as though taking pause with an unacceptable intrusion rather than allowing herself to be undone by it. "What is it that's of such great concern to us this Sunday afternoon?"