"I have to go now," I said.
"Tell Daddy I'm sorry," she said.
"You're the best daughter a father could have, Sabelle."
I thought her eyes wrinkled at the corners. But they didn't. Her eyes were haunted with fear, and my words meant nothing.
I backed out of the passenger window onto the grass. I could smell water in a ditch, the loamy odor of decayed pecan husks in an orchard, taste the fog on my tongue, hear the whirring sound of automobile tires out on the paved road. I walked away just as a team of firemen and uniformed Lafayette cops used the Jaws of Life to wrench open one side of the wrecked car. The sprung metal sounded just like a human scream.
/> Helen and I drove down I-10 toward the Atchafalaya River. It was misting, and the fields and oak and palm trees along the roadside were gray and wet-looking, and up ahead I could see the orange and blue glow of a filling station inside the fog that rolled off the river.
"What are you worrying about?" Helen said.
I touched the brake on the cruiser.
"I've got to do something," I said.
"What?"
"Maybe Zerrang didn't head right for the Basin. Maybe there's another way to pull his plug."
"You don't look too happy about it, whatever it is," she said.
"How would you like to save Buford LaRose's career for him?" I said.
I called his house from the filling station pay phone. Through the glass I could see the willows on the banks of the Atchafalaya, where we were to meet two powerboats from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department.
"Buford?" I said.
"What is it?"
"Sabelle Crown's dead."
"Oh man, don't tell me that."
"She was tortured, then left on a train track in her car by Mookie Zerrang."
I could hear him take the receiver away from his ear, hear it scrape against a hard surface. Then I heard him breathing in the mouthpiece again.
"You were right about Aaron Crown," I said. "He killed Ely Dixon. But it was a mistake. He went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray. He didn't know that Jimmy Ray had moved out and rented it to his brother."
"Why would he want to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon?"
"Jimmy Ray got Sabelle started in the life . . . You're vindicated, Buford. That means you get word to Persephone Green to call Mookie Zerrang off."
"Are you insane? Do you think I control these people? What in God's name is the matter with you?"
"No, they control you."
"Listen, I just had that ghoul beating on my front door. I ran him off my property with a pistol."
"Which ghoul?"
"Who else, Dock Green. His wife dumped him. He accused me and Karyn of being involved in a ménage à trois with her. I guess that's her style."
"It seems late to be righteous," I said.
"What's that mean?"