But I remembered another Megan, too: the in-your-face orphan of years ago, who, with her brother, would run away from foster homes in Louisiana and Colorado, until they were old enough to finally disappear into that wandering army of fruit pickers and wheat harvesters whom their father, an unrepentant IWW radical, had spent a lifetime trying to organize.

I stepped off the bow onto the dock and walked toward my truck to back the trailer down the ramp. I didn't mean to be impolite. I admired the Flynns, but you paid a price for their friendship and proximity to the vessel of social anger their lives had become.

"Not glad to see me, Streak?" she said.

"Always glad. How you doin', Megan?"

She looked over my shoulder at Clete Purcel, who had pulled the port side of the boat flush into the rubber tires on my dock and was unloading the cooler and rods out of the stern. Clete's thick arms and fire-hydrant neck were peeling and red with fresh sunburn. When he stooped over with the cooler, his tropical shirt split across his back. He grinned at us and shrugged his shoulders.

"That one had to come out of the Irish Channel," she said.

"You're not a fisher, Meg. You out here on business?"

"You know who Cool Breeze Broussard is?" she asked.

"A house creep and general thief."

"He says your parish lockup is a toilet. He says your jailer is a sadist."

"We lost the old jailer. I've been on leave. I don't know much about the new guy."

"Cool Breeze says inmates are gagged and handcuffed to a detention chair. They have to sit in their own excrement. The U.S. Department of Justice believes him."

"Jails are bad places. Talk to the sheriff, Megan. I'm off the clock."

"Typical New Iberia. Bullshit over humanity."

"See you around," I said, and walked to my truck. Rain was pinging in large, cold drops on the tin roof of the bait shop.