Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

Lonnie Felton backed his Lincoln into the road, then drove toward the drawbridge through the mist puffing out of the tree trunks along the bayou's edge.

"There goes your Hollywood career, Streak," Bootsie said.

"Somehow I don't feel the less for it."

"You think Aaron Crown is back?"

"It's too bad if he is. Say, you really shook up Felton's cookie bag."

"You like that hard gal stuff, huh? Too bad for whom?"

"I think Buford's hooked up with some New Orleans wiseguys. Maybe Aaron won't make the jail. . . Come on, forget this stuff. Let's take the boat down the bayou this evening."

"In the rain?"

"Why not?"

"What's bothering you, Dave?"

"I have to baby-sit Buford. His plane comes back in from Monroe at ten."

"I see."

"It'll be over Tuesday."

"No it won't," she said.

"Don't be that way," I said, and put my hands on her shoulders.

"Which way is that?" Then her eyes grew bright and she said it again, "Which way is that, Dave?"

Later that night Helen Soileau and I met Buford's private plane at the Lafayette airport and followed him back to the LaRose plantation in a cruiser. Then we parked by his drive in the dark and waited for the midnight watch to come on. The grounds around the house, the slave quarters now filled with baled hay, the brick, iron-shuttered riding stable, were iridescent in the humidity and glare of the security flood lamps that burned as brightly as phosphorous flares. One by one the lights went off inside the house.

"Can you tell me why an assignment like this makes me feel like a peon with a badge?" Helen said.

"Search me," I said.

"If you were Crown and you wanted to take him out, where would you be?"

"Inside that treeline, with the sun rising behind me in the morning."

"You want to check it out?"

"It's not morning."

"Casual attitude."

"Maybe Buford should have the opportunity to face his sins."

"I'll forget you said that."

The next morning, Saturday, just before sunrise, I dressed in the cold, with Bootsie still asleep, and drove back to the LaRose plantation and walked the treeline from the road back to the bayou. In truth, I expected to find nothing. Aaron had no military background, was impetuous, did not follow patterns, and drew on a hill country frame of reference that was as rational as a man stringing a crowning forest fire around his log house.

However, I had forgotten that Aaron was a lifetime hunter, not for sport or even for personal dominion over the land but

as one who viewed armadillos and deer, possums and ducks, squirrels and robins, even gar that could be shot from a boat, as food for his table, adversaries that he slew in order to live, none any better or worse or more desirable than another, and he went about it as thoroughly and dispassionately as he would butcher chickens and hogs on a block.

On second consideration, I thought the best trained military sniper could probably take a lesson from Aaron Crown.