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"You lying sonofabitch. You tore up my house. Your tow truck scratched up my car. You won't rest till you fuck me up in every way you can."
"You're doing this because your property was damaged?"
"I'll tell you what else I'm going to do if you decide to get clever on me. No, that's not right. It won't be me, because I never hurt a child in my life. You got that?"
He stopped speaking and waited for me. Then he said it again: "You got that, Dave?"
"Yes," I said.
"But there's a guy who used to work in Balboni's movies, a guy who spent eleven years in Parchman for killing a little nigger girl. You want to know how it went down?"
Then he told me. I stared out the screen door at my neighbor's dark green lawn, at his enormous roses that had burst in the rain and were now scattered in the grass like pink tear drops. A dog began barking, and then I heard it cry out sharply as though it had been whipped across the ribs with a chain.
"Doucet—" I broke in. My voice was wet, as though my vocal cords were covered with membrane.
"You don't like my description? You think I'm just trying to scare you? Get a hold of one of his snuff films. You'll agree he's an artist."
"Listen to me carefully. If you hurt my daughter, I'll get to you one way or another, in or out of jail, in the witness protection program, it won't matter, I'll take you down in pieces, Doucet."
"You've said only one thing right today. I'm going to walk, and you're going to help me, unless you've let that affirmative-action bitch fuck most of your brains out. By the way, forget the trace. I'm at a phone booth and you've got shit on your nose."
The line went dead.
I was trembling as I walked up the slope to the house.
Rosie opened the screen door and came out on the gallery with Bootsie behind her. The skin of Bootsie's face was drawn back against the bone, her throat ruddy with color as though she had a windburn.
"He hung up too soon. We couldn't get it," Rosie said.
"Dave, my God. What—" Bootsie said. Her pulse was jumping in her neck.
"Let's go inside," I said, and put my arm around her shoulder. "Rosie, I'll be out in just a minute."
"No, talk to me right here," Bootsie said.
"Murphy Doucet has her. He wants the evidence that he thinks can put him in jail."
"What for?" she said. "You told me yesterday that he'll probably get out of it."
"He doesn't know that. He's not going to believe anybody who tells him that, either."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know, Boots. But we're going to get her back. If the sheriff calls, don't tell him anything. At least not right now."
I felt Rosie's eyes on the side of my face.
"What are you doing, Dave?" Bootsie said.
"I'll call you in a little while," I said. "Stay with Elrod, okay?"
"What if that man calls back?"
"He won't. He'll figure the line's open."
Before she could speak again, I went inside and opened the closet door in the bedroom. From under some folded blankets on the top shelf I took out a box of twelve-gauge shells and the Remington pump shotgun whose barrel I had sawed off in front of the pump handle and whose sportsman's plug I had removed years ago. I shook the shells, a mixture of deer slugs and double-ought buckshot, out on the bed and pressed them one by one into the magazine until I felt the spring come snug against the fifth shell. I dropped the rest of the shells into my raincoat pockets.
"Call the FBI, Dave," Bootsie said behind me.
