"Cool Breeze said you were stand-up. He's in lockdown now because he dimed the jailer. I'll tell him you were off the clock," she said.

"This town didn't kill your father."

"No, they just put me and my brother in an orphanage where we polished floors with our knees. Tell your Irish friend he's beautiful. Come out to the house and visit us, Streak," she said, and walked across the dirt road to where she had parked her car under the trees in my drive.

Up on the dock, Clete poured the crushed ice and canned drinks and speckled trout out of the cooler. The trout looked stiff and cold on the board planks.

"You ever hear anything about prisoners being gagged and cuffed to chairs in the Iberia Parish Prison?" I asked.

"That's what that was about? Maybe she ought to check out what those guys did to get in there."

"She said you were beautiful."

"She did?" He looked down the road where her car was disappearing under the canopy of oaks that grew along the bayou. Then he cracked a Budweiser and flipped me a can of diet Dr Pepper. The scar over his left eyebrow flattened against his skull when he grinned.

THE TURNKEY HAD BEEN a brig chaser in the Marine Corps and still wore his hair buzzed into the scalp and shaved in a razor-neat line on the back of his neck. His body was lean and braided with muscle, his walk as measured and erect as if he were on a parade ground. He unlocked the cell at the far end of the corridor, hooked up Willie Cool Breeze Broussard in waist and leg manacles, and escorted him with one hand to the door of the interview room, where I waited.

"Think he's going to run on you, Top?" I said.

"He runs at the mouth, that's what he does."

The turnkey closed the door behind us. Cool Breeze looked like two hundred pounds of soft black chocolate poured inside jailhouse denims. His head was bald, lacquered with wax, shiny as horn, his eyes drooping at the corners like a prizefighter's. It was hard to believe he was a second-story man and four-time loser.