"He's got a camp south of Bayou Vista," he said. "It's almost to Atchafalaya Bay. The deed ain't in his name, nobody knows about it, it's like where he does all his weird stuff. It's right where the dirt road ends at the salt marsh. I seen it once when we were out on my boat."
"Is my daughter there?" I said quietly.
"I just told you, it's where he goes to be weird. You figure it out."
"We'll be back later, Feet. You can make a lot of noise, if you like, but your gumba
lls are gone and the security guard is watching war movies. If I get my daughter back, I'll have somebody from the department come out and pick you up. You can file charges against me then or do
whatever you want. If you've lied to me, that's another matter."
Then I saw a secret concern working in his eyes, a worry, a fear that had nothing to do with me or the pain and humiliation that I had inflicted upon him. It was the fear that you inevitably see in the eyes of men like Julie and his kind when they realize that through an ironic accident they are now dealing with forces that are as cruel and unchecked by morality as the energies they'd awakened with every morning of their lives.
"Cholo—" he said.
"What about him?" I said.
"He's out there somewhere."
"I doubt it."
"You don't know him. He carries a barber's razor. He's got fixations. He don't forget things. He tied parts of a guy all over a ceiling fan once."
His chest moved up and down with his breathing against the rim of the toilet bowl. His brow was kneaded with lines, his nose a wet red smear against his face, his eyes twitching with a phlegmy light.
I shut off the valve that was spewing water upward into the shattered tank, then found a quilt and a pile of towels in a linen closet and placed the towels under Julie's forearms and the quilt between his knees and the bottom of the stool.
"That's about all I can do for you, Feet. Maybe it's the bottom of the ninth for both of us," I said.
The front wheels of the truck shimmied on the cement as I wound up the transmission on Highway 90 southeast of town. It had stopped raining, the oaks and palm trees by the road's edge were coated with mist, and the moon was rising in the east like a pale white and mottled-blue wafer trailing streamers of cloud torn loose from the Gulf's horizon.
"I think I'm beyond all my parameters now, Dave," Rosie said.
"What would you do differently? I'd like for you to tell me that, Rosie."
"I believe we should have Balboni picked up—suspicion for involvement in a kidnapping."
"And my daughter would be dead as soon as Doucet heard about it. Don't tell me that's not true, either."
"I'm not sure you're in control anymore, Dave. That remark about the bottom of the ninth—"
"What about it?"
"You're thinking about killing Doucet, aren't you?"
"I can put you down at the four-corners up there. Is that what you want?"
"Do you think you're the only person who cares about your daughter? Do you think I want to do anything that would put her in worse jeopardy than she's already in?"
"The army taught me what a free-fire zone is, Rosie. It's a place where the winners make up the rules after the battle's over. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there."
"You're wrong about all this, Dave. What we don't do is let the other side make us be like them."
Ahead I could see the lighted, tree-shadowed white stucco walls of a twenty-four-hour filling station that had been there since the 1930s. I eased my foot off the gas pedal and looked across the seat at Rosie.
"Go on," she said. "I won't say anything else."
We drove through Jeanerette and Franklin into the bottom of the Atchafalaya Basin, where Louisiana's wetlands bled into the Gulf of Mexico, not far from where this story actually began with a racial lynching, in the year 1957. Rosie had fallen asleep against the door. At Bayou Vista I found the dirt road that led south to the sawgrass and Atchafalaya Bay. The fields looked like lakes of pewter under the moon, the sugarcane pressed flat like straw into the water. Wood farmhouses and barns were cracked sideways on their foundations, as though a gigantic thumb had squeezed down on their roofs, and along one stretch of road the telephone poles had been snapped off even with the ground for a half mile and flung like sticks into distant trees.