It was warm and muggy outside, and the moon was yellow and veiled inside a rain ring. There were Lafayette city cops in the parking lot and state police with rifles on the roof. I walked all the way around the hotel and talked with a state policeman and a black security guard at the back door, then checked the opposite side of a hedge that bordered the parking lot, and, finally, for want of anything else to do, walked down toward the river.

Where would Aaron Crown be, I asked myself.

Not in a town or city, I thought. Even before he had been a hunted man, Aaron was one of those who sought out woods and bogs not only as a refuge of shadow and invisibility but as a place where no concrete slab would separate the whirrings in his chest from the power that he instinctively knew lay inside rotted logs and layers of moldy leaves and caves that were as dark as a womb.

Maybe in the Atchafalaya Basin, I thought, holed up in a shack on stilts, smearing his skin with mud to protect it from mosquitoes, eating nutria or coon or gar or whatever bird he could knock from a tree with a club, his ankles lesioned with sores from the leg chains he had run in.

If he tried to get Buford tonight, in all probability it would have to be from a distance, I thought. He could come down the Vermilion, hide his boat under a dock, perhaps circle the hotel, and hunch down in the shrubbery behind the parking lot. With luck Buford would appear under a canvas walkway, or between parked automobiles, and Aaron would wind the leather sling as tightly as a tourniquet around his left forearm, sight the scope's crosshairs on the man who had not only sent him to prison but had used and discarded his daughter as a white overseer would a field woman, then grind his back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure while he squeezed off the round and watched the world try to deal with Aaron Crown's handiwork.

But he had to get inside the perimeter to do it.

I used the pay phone in a restaurant on the riverbank to call Bootsie. While I l

istened to my own voice on the answering machine, I gazed out the window at the parking lot and the four-lane flow of headlights on Pinhook. A catering truck turned into the hotel, a rug cleaning van driven by a woman, a white stretch limo filled with revelers, a half dozen taxi cabs.

I hung up the phone and went back outside. It was almost 9 p.m. Where was Bootsie?

I went back inside the hotel and rode the service elevator up to the roof. The wind was warm and smelled of rain, and there were yellow slicks of moonlight, like patches of oil paint, floating on the river's surface.

Down below, at the service entrance, the caterers were carrying in stainless steel containers of food, and a blonde woman in a baggy gray dress was pulling a hamper loaded with rug cleaning equipment from her van. A drunk man in a hat and a raincoat wandered through the parked cars, then decided to work his way into the hedge at the back of the lot, simultaneously unzipping his fly. The state policeman at the service door walked out into the lot and paused under a light, his hands on his hips, then stepped close in to the hedge, raised on his toes, and tried to see the man in the raincoat. The state policeman disappeared into the shadows.

"What is it?" Helen said.

"A state trooper went after a drunk in the hedge. I don't see either one of them now . . . Get on the portable, will you?"

"What y'all got down there?" she said into her radio.

"Ain't got nothing," the voice of a black man said.

"Who is this?"

"The security guard."

"Put an officer on."

"They ain't one."

"What's going on with the guy in the hedge?"

"What guy?"

"The drunk the state trooper went after. Look, find an officer and give him the radio."

"I done tried to tell you, they ain't nothing going on. Except somebody down here don't have no bidness working in a hotel."

"What are you talking about?" Helen said.

"Somebody down here got B.O. could make your nose fall off, that's what I'm talking about. That clear enough?" There was a pause. The security guard was still transmitting but he was speaking to someone else now: "I told you, you got to have some ID . . . You ain't suppose to be inside here . . . Hey, don't you be coming at me like that. . ."

The portable radio struck the floor.

Helen and I ran for the service elevator.

By the time we got down to the first floor a Lafayette city cop and a state policeman were running down the hallway ahead of us toward the service entrance. Through the glass I could see the catering truck and the rug cleaning van in the parking lot.

"There ain't anybody here," the city cop said, looking at the empty hallway, then outside. He wore sideburns and his hat was too large for his head. He sniffed the air and made a face. "Man, what's that smell? It's like somebody rubbed shit on the walls."

The hallway made a left angle toward the kitchen. Halfway down it were two ventilated wood doors that were closed on a loud humming sound inside. A clothes hamper loaded with squeegee mops and a rug-cleaning machine and bottles of chemicals rested at an angle against the wall. I opened one of the doors and saw, next to the boilers, a thin black man, with a mustache, in the uniform of a security guard, sitting against a pile of crumpled cardboard cartons, his knees drawn up before him, his hands gripping his loins, his face dilated with shock.

Tags: James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux Mystery
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