"You treated Sabelle Crown like shit."
He was silent for what seemed a long time. Then he said, "Yeah, I didn't do right by her . . . I wish I could change it . . . Good-bye, Dave."
He quietly hung up the phone.
Helen and I sat in the cabin of the St. Martin Parish sheriff's boat. The exhaust pipes idled at the waterline while a uniformed deputy smoked a cigarette in the open hatchway and waited for the boat skipper to return from his truck with a can of gasoline.
I could feel Helen's eyes on my face.
"What is it?" I said.
"I don't like the way you look."
"It hasn't been a good day."
"Maybe you shouldn't be in on this one," she said.
"Is that right?"
"Unless he deals it, Mookie Zerrang comes back alive, Streak."
"Well, you never know how things are going to work out," I said.
Her lips were chapped, and she rubbed them with the ball of her finger, her eyes glazed over with hidden thoughts.
We went down the Atchafalaya, with the spray blowing back across the bow, then we entered a side channel and a bay that was surrounded by flooded woods. Under the sealed sky, the water in the bay was an unnatural, luminous yellow, as though it were the only element in its environment that possessed color. Up ahead, in the mist, I could see the shiny silhouette of an abandoned oil platform, then a canal through the woods and inside the tangle of air vines and cypress and willow trees a shack built on wood pilings.
"That's it," I said to the boat pilot.
He cut back on the throttle, stared through the glass at the woods, then reversed the engine so we didn't drift into the shore.
"You want to go head-on in there?" he asked.
"You know another way to do it?" I said.
"Bring in some SWAT guys on a chopper and blow that shack into toothpicks," he replied.
A St. Martin Parish plainclothes homicide investigator who was on the other boat walked out on the bow and used a bullhorn, addressing the shack as though he did not know who its occupants were.
"We want to talk to y'all that's inside. You need to work your way down that ladder with one hand on your head. There won't nobody get hurt," he said.
But there was no sound, except the idling boat engines and the rain that had started falling in large drops on the bay's surface. The plain-clothes wiped his face with his hand and tried again.
"Aaron, we know you in there. We afraid somebody's come out here to hurt you, podna. Ain't it time to give it up?" he said.
Again, there was silence. The plainclothes' coat was dark with rain and his tie was blown back across his shirt. He looked toward our boat, shrugged his shoulders, and went inside the cabin.
"Let's do it, skipper," I said to the pilot.
He pushed the throttle forward and took our boat into the canal. The wake from our boat receded back through the trees, gathering with it sticks and dead hyacinths, washing over logs and finally disappearing into the flooded undergrowth. The second boat eased into the shallows behind us until its hull scraped on the silt.
Helen and I dropped off the bow into the water and immediately sank to our thighs, clouds of gray mud ballooning around us. She carried a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, with the barrel sawed off an inch above the pump. I pulled back the slide on my .45, chambered the top round in the magazine, and set the safety.
A flat-bottom aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied to a piling under the shack. Helen and I waded through the water, ten yards apart, not speaking, our eyes fixed on the shack's shuttered windows and the ladder that extended upward to an open door with a gunny sack curtain blowing in the door frame.
On my left, the St. Martin plainclothes and three uniformed deputies were spread out in a line, breaking their way through a stand of willows.
Helen and I walked under the shack and listened. I cupped my hand on a piling to feel for movement above.