Pete Roosevelt and Spuds Ulene met four years prior. August 1, 1994, at Juicy Lucy’s, a grease-sheened twelve-seater burger joint that poured watered-down beer like a spring cloudburst, despite a liquor license that expired the same day that Squeaky Fromme tried to kill President Ford, as Lucy herself like to say. The old broad didn’t sweat it. No ATF hard-ass was gonna tramp this far south into the delta. The joint was damned to keep living, just like Lucy was damned to keep slow-murdering Pointers with the nastiest nasty-sugar around: booze.

Pete ate there a lot. He ate there a lot because he parked there a lot. He might have given his rickety Crown Vicky a nauticalname—the MelbourneQueen—but that didn’t mean it could float. Road vehicles got no farther into the Point than the headland. Even four-wheelers were too wide for the trails. Some folk rode horses or mules. A few had airboats. Many had dinghies or canoes. Mostly folk walked, getting to know the terrain through the grip of their bare toes.

The Melbourne Queen was a tank soldered together in late-seventies Motown. A hundred creaks, groans, and pings. Dozens of dents furred with rust. What was left of its chrome accents pitted from gulf-water salt. Not once in all the years Pete had driven the thing had he gotten bodywork or painting done. He liked the idea of keeping the original crests emblazoned on the doors along with the foot-tall lettering: SHERRIF.

Pete had been allowed to keep the car after Bullock Parish went belly-up. Who else would drive the rattletrap?

He’d sheriffed the hell out of the Point for fifteen years. No one was going to forget that. Including Pete. He still thought of himself as holding the office of sheriff. So did the de facto leaders of the Point known as the Saloon Committee, an inebriated syndicate of elders who got liquored up every Tuesday at the Pelican. Most the Point’s forty-seven families stayed liquored up most nights. Well, forty-four since the Oil Man had started handing out contracts.

With the Saloon Committee’s blessing, Pointers kept Pete going. They chipped in for his groceries and gasoline. If Pete missed a cookout, somebody ferreted him a tinfoil-covered tray of the choicest bits. He could get a free cup of joe anywhere, and a free beer at any of his regularhaunts—Juicy Lucy’s, Plum Peppers, or the Pelican, where he threw down with the best of them: Pink Zoot, Gully Jimson, Rawley Deevers, and GerardPontiac—the patron saint of all local drunkards.

So: Juicy Lucy’s, August 1, 1994. Pete climbed out of the Melbourne Queen, no badge, no .45, pulling on a windbreaker. Eleven years of sheriff weight had made it the only usable remnant of his olduniform—that and the Stetson. He lumbered inside with an inrush of humid air that fluttered several of the tiny, low-grade cotton Jolly Roger flags sold all over the bayou. Pirate’s Pride, the product was called.

Pete shot a hello finger at Lucy behind the bar and took a seat in the darkest booth. Didn’t feel much like socializing. He was having indigestion, and about to fight fire with fire with a