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"You didn't have the right to do this. You mean well, but you didn't have the right."
"Why don't you show some respect for your wife and stop using her? If you want to get drunk, go do it. If you want to kill somebody, do that. But at least have the courage to do it on your own, without all this remorse bullshit. It's a drag, Dave."
She picked up one of the buckets with both hands to avoid spilling it, and walked out the door past me. Her bare feet left damp imprints on the cypress floor. I continued to stand alone in the room, the dust spinning in the shafts of light through the windows, then I saw her cross the backyard with the bucket and walk toward the duck pond.
"Wait!" I called through the window.
I gathered up the soiled rags from the floor, put them in the other bucket, and followed her outside. I stopped by the aluminum shed where I kept my lawn mower and tools, took out a shovel, and walked down to the small flower garden that Batist's wife had planted next to a shallow coulee that ran through my property. The soil in the garden was loamy and damp from the overflow of the coulee and partly shaded by banana trees so the geraniums and impatiens didn't burn up in the summer; but the outer edge was in full sun and it ran riot with daisies and periwinkles.
They weren't the cornflowers and bluebonnets that a Kansas girl should have, but I knew that she would understand. I pushed the shovel into the damp earth and scooped out a deep hole among the daisy roots, poured the two buckets of soap and water and chemicals into the dirt, put the brush and rags into the hole, then put the buckets on top and crushed them flat with my foot, and covered the hole back up with a wet mound of dirt and a tangle of severed daisy and periwinkle roots. I uncoiled the garden hose from the side of the house and watered the mound until it was as slick and smooth as the ground around it and the chemicals had washed far below the root system of the flower bed.
It was the kind of behavior that you don't care to think about or to explain to yourself later. I cleaned the shovel under the hose, replaced it in the shed, and walked back into the kitchen without speaking to Robin. Then I took a shower and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a denim shirt and read the newspaper at the redwood table under the mimosa tree. I could hear Robin making lunch in the kitchen and Alafair talking to her in a mixture of Spanish and English. Then Robin brought a ham-and-onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea to me on a tray. I didn't look up from the table when she set it on the table. She remained standing next to me, her bare thigh only an inch from my arm, then I felt her hand touch me lightly on the shoulder and finger my damp collar and tease the hair along my neck.
"I'll always be your biggest fan, Robicheaux," she said.
I put my arm around her soft bottom and squeezed her against me, my eyes shut.
Late that afternoon Minos Dautrieve was at my front door, dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and a paint-flecked gold shirt. A fishing rod stuck out the passenger's window of his parked Toyota jeep.
"I hear you know where all the big bass are," he said.
"Sometimes."
"I've got some fried chicken and Dixie beer and soda in the cooler. Let's get it on down the road."
"We were thinking of going to the track tonight."
"I'll have you back early. Get your butt moving, boy."
"You've really got the touch, Minos."
We hitched my trailer and one of my boats to his jeep and drove twenty-five miles to the levee that fronts the southwestern edge of the Atchafalaya swamp. The wind was down, the water quiet, the insects just beginning to rise from the reeds and lily pads in the shadows of the willow islands. I took us across a long bay dotted with dead cypresses and oil platforms, then up a bayou, deep into the swamp, before I cut the engine and let the boat drift quietly up to the entrance of a small bay with a narrow channel at the far end. I still didn't know what Minos was up to.
"On a hot day like this, they get deep in the holes on the shady side of the islands," I said. "Then just before dusk they move up to the edge of the channel and feed where the water curves around the bank."
"No kidding?" he said.
"You have a Rapula?"
"I might have one of those."
He popped open his tackle box, which had three layers of compartments in it, all of them filled with rubber worms, spinners, doll flies, surface plugs, and popping bugs.
"What's it look like?" he said.
"Guess what, Minos? I gave up being a straight man for government agents when I resigned from the New Orleans department."
He clipped a Devil Horse on his swivel and flipped it neatly across the channel into open water with a quick spring of his wrist. Then he retrieved it through the channel back into the bay and cast again. On the third cast I saw the quiet surface of the water balloon under the lily pads, then the dorsal fin of a bigmouth bass roll like a serpent right in front of the lure, the scales hammered with green and gold light, and then the water exploded when he locked down on the lure and Minos socked the treble hook hard into his jaw. The bass went deep and pulled for a hole among the reeds, clouding the water with mud, but Minos kept the tip of the rod up, the drag tight, and turned him back into the middle of the bay. Then the bass broke through the surface into the air, rattling the lure and swivel against his head, and splashed sideways like a wood plank whipped against the surface, before he went deep again and tried for the channel and open water.
"Get him up again," I said.
"He'll tear it out of his mouth."
I started to speak again, but I saw the line stop and quiver against the current, tiny beads of water glistening on the stretched monofilament. When Minos tried to turn the handle of the spinning reel, the rod dipped over the side. I put the hand net, which I had been holding, back under the seat of the boat. Suddenly the rod flipped up straight and lifeless in Minos's palm, the broken line floating in a curlicue on top of the water.
"Sonofabitch," he said.
"I forgot to tell you there are a bunch of cypress stumps under this bay. Don't feel bad, though. That same bass has a whole collection of my lures."
