Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

They said good-bye and resumed their jog, running side by side past the sprinklers spinning among the tree trunks in my front yard. I watched them grow smaller in the distance, all the while feeling that somehow something inappropriate, if not unseemly, had just occurred.

I got in my pickup truck and caught up with them a quarter mile down the road. They never broke stride.

"This bothers me, Buford," I said out the window. "You wrote a book about Aaron Crown. It might make you our next governor

. Now you want to control access to the guy?"

"Bothers you, huh?" he said, his air-cushioned running shoes thudding rhythmically in the dirt.

"It's not an unreasonable attitude," I said.

Karyn leaned her face past him and grinned at me. Her mouth was bright red, her brown eyes happy and charged with energy from her run.

"You'll be bothered a lot worse if you help these right-wing cretins take over Louisiana in November. See you around, buddy," he said, then gave me the thumbs-up sign just before he and his wife poured it on and cut across a shady grove of pecan trees.

She called me that evening, not at the house but at the bait shop. Through the screen I could see the lighted gallery and windows in my house, across the dirt road, up the slope through the darkening trees.

"Are you upset with Buford?" she said.

"No."

"He just doesn't want to see you used, that's all."

"I appreciate his concern."

"Should I have not been there?"

"I'm happy y'all came by."

"Neither of us was married at the time, Dave. Why does seeing me make you uncomfortable?"

"This isn't turning into a good conversation," I said.

"I'm not big on guilt. It's too bad you are," she replied, and quietly hung up.

The price of a velvet black sky bursting with stars and too much champagne, a grassy levee blown with buttercups and a warm breeze off the water, I thought. Celibacy was not an easy virtue to take into the nocturnal hours.

But guilt over an impulsive erotic moment wasn't the problem. Karyn LaRose was a woman you kept out of your thoughts if you were a married man.

Aaron Crown was dressed in wash-faded denims that were too tight for him when he was escorted in leg and waist chains from the lock-down unit into the interview room.

He had to take mincing steps, and because both wrists were cuffed to the chain just below his rib cage he had the bent appearance of an apelike creature trussed with baling wire.

"I don't want to talk to Aaron like this. How about it, Cap?" I said to the gunbull, who had been shepherding Angola convicts under a double-barrel twelve gauge for fifty-five years.

The gunbull's eyes were narrow and valuative, like a man constantly measuring the potential of his adversaries, the corners webbed with wrinkles, his skin wizened and dark as a mulatto's, as if it had been smoked in a fire. He removed his briar pipe from his belt, stuck it in his mouth, clicking it dryly against his molars. He never spoke while he unlocked the net of chains from Aaron Crown's body and let them collapse around his ankles like a useless garment. Instead, he simply pointed one rigid callus-sheathed index finger into Aaron's face, then unlocked the side door to a razor-wire enclosed dirt yard with a solitary weeping willow that had gone yellow with the season.

I sat on a weight lifter's bench while Aaron Crown squatted on his haunches against the fence and rolled a cigarette out of a small leather pouch that contained pipe tobacco. His fingernails were the thickness and mottled color of tortoiseshell. Gray hair grew out of his ears and

nose; his shoulders and upper chest were braided with knots of veins and muscles. When he popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped it in the wind, he inhaled the sulfur and glue and smoke all in one breath.

"I ain't did it," he said.

"You pleaded nolo contendere, partner."

"The shithog got appointed my case done that. He said it was worked out." He drew in on his hand-rolled cigarette, tapped the ashes off into the wind.

When I didn't reply, he said, "They give me forty years. I was sixty-eight yestiday."