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I walked back to our car. It was hot inside, and the handcuffed man was sweating heavily. He was trying to blow a mosquito away from his face with his breath.
"My partner wants to bust you," I said.
"So?"
"There's a catch. I don't like you. That means I don't like protecting you."
"What are you talking about, man?"
"I went off duty at five o'clock. I'm going to get me a shrimp sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and let him take you in. Are you starting to see the picture now?"
He shook back his damp hair from his eyes and tried to look indifferent, but he didn't hide fear well.
"I have a feeling that somewhere between here and the jail you're going to remember where you left that gun and stocking," I said. "But anyway it's between you and him now. And I don't take stock in rumors."
"What? What the fuck you talking about rumors, man?"
"That he took a suspect into the woods and put out his eye with a bicycle spoke. I don't believe it."
I saw him swallow. The sweat ran out of his hair.
"Hey, did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" I asked. "There's a great scene in there when this Mexican bandit says to Humphrey Bogart, 'I like your watch. I think you give me your watch.' Maybe you saw it on the late show at Raiford."
"I ain't playing this bullshit, man."
"Come on you, you can do it. You pretend you're Humphrey Bogart. You drive your car back to that convenience store and you give the owner your hundred dollars and that Gucci watch you're wearing. It's going to brighten up your day. I guarantee it."
The mosquito sat on the end of his nose.
"Here comes Cecil now. Let him know what you've decided," I said.
The light was soft through the trees as I drove along the bayou road toward my house that evening. Sometimes during the summer the sky in southern Louisiana actually turns lavender, with strips of pink cloud in the west like flamingo wings painted above the horizon, and this evening the air was sweet with the smell of watermelons and strawberries in somebody's truck patch and the hydrangeas and night-blooming jasmine that completely covered my neighbor's wooden fence. Out on the bayou the bream were dimpling the water like raindrops.
Before I turned into my lane I passed a fire-engine-red MG convertible with a flat tire by the side of the road, then I saw Bubba Rocque's wife sitting on my front step with a silver thermos next to her thigh and a plastic cup in her fingers. She wore straw Mexican sandals, beige shorts, and a low-cut white blouse with blue and brown tropical birds on it, and she had pinned a yellow hibiscus in her dark hair. She smiled at me as I walked toward her with my coat over my shoulder. Once again I noticed that strange red cast in her brown eyes.
"I had a flat tire. Can you give me a ride back to my aunt's on West Main?" she asked.
"Sure. Or I can change it for you."
"There's no air in the spare, either." She drank from the cup. Her mouth was red and wet, and she smiled at me again.
"What are you doing down this way, Mrs. Rocque?"
"It's Claudette, Dave. My cousin lives down at the end of the road. I come over to New Iberia about once a month to see all my relatives."
"I see."
"Am I putting you out?"
"No. I'll be just a minute."
I didn't ask her in. I went inside to check on Alafair and told the baby-sitter to go ahead and serve supper, that I would be back shortly.
"Help a lady up. I'm a little twisted this evening," Claudette Rocque said, and reached her hand out to mine. She felt heavy when I pulled her erect. I could smell gin and cigarettes on her breath.
"I'm sorry about your wife," she said.
"Thank you."
