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"Yes, you are. You can't turn loose of the past, Dave. You get hurt, or you see something that's wrong in the world, and all the old ways come back to you."
"I can't help that."
"Maybe not. But you don't live alone anymore." She took my hand and lay down beside me again. "There's me, and now there's Alafair, too."
"I'll tell you what it feels like, and I won't say any more. You remember when I told you about how those North Vietnamese regulars overran us and the captain surrendered to them? They tied our hands around trees with piano wire, then took turns urinating on us. That's what it feels like."
She was quiet a long time. I could hear breathing in the dark. Then she took a deep breath and let it out and put her arm across my chest.
"I have a very bad feeling inside me, Dave," she said.
There was nothing more to say. How could there be? Even the most sympathetic friends and relatives of a battery or assault victim could not understand what that individual experiences. Over the years I had questioned people who had been molested by degenerates, mugged by street punks, shanked and shot by psychopaths, gang-banged and sodomised by outlaw bikers. They all had the same numb expression, the same drowning eyes, the same knowledge that they somehow deserved their fate and that they were absolutely alone in the world. And often we made their grief and humiliation even greater by ascribing the responsibility for their suffering to their own incaution, so that we could remain psychologically invulnerable ourselves.
I wasn't being fair to Annie. She had paid her share of dues, but there are times when you are very alone in the world and your own thoughts flay your skin an inch at a time. This was one of them.
I didn't sleep that night. But then insomnia and I were old companions.
Two days later the swelling between my legs had gone down and I could walk without looking like I was straddling a fence. The sheriff came out to see me at the boat dock and told me he had talked to the Lafayette city police and Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA. Lafayette had sent a couple of detectives to question Eddie Keats at his bar, but he claimed that he had taken two of his dancers sailing on the day I was beaten up, and the two dancers corroborated his story.
"Are they going to accept that?" I said.
"What are they supposed to do?"
"Do some work and find out where those girls were two days ago."
"Do you know how many cases those guys probably have?"
"I'm not sympathetic, Sheriff. People like Keats come into our area because they think they have a free pass. What did Minos P. Dautrieve have to say?"
The sheriff's face colored and the skin at the corner of his mouth tugged slightly in a smile.
"I think he said you'd better get your ass into his office," the sheriff replied.
"Those were his words?"
"I believe so."
"Why's he mad at me?"
"I get the impression he thinks you're messing around in federal business."
"Does he know anything about a Haitian named Toot?"
"No. I went through Baton Rouge and the National Crime Information Center in Washington and couldn't find out anything, either."
"He's probably an illegal. There's no paper on him," I said.
"That's what Dautrieve said."
"He's a smart cop."
I saw a look of faint embarrassment in the sheriff's eyes, and I felt instantly sorry for my remark.
"Well, I promise you I'll give it my best, Dave," he said.
"I appreciate what you've done."
"I'm afraid I haven't done very much."
