I ran hard around the corner to my car, jumped in, pushed it hard through the little alley behind the fish market to Main, then jumped out of the car, climbed onto the hood, and looked both ways to find them. The gold Polara was moving south, just winding a bend in the street maybe three blocks and a dozen cars away. I followed them.

Jimmie Ray might be a turd, but he was my turd.

Chapter 7

T hey were easy to follow. I trailed them south of Ville Platte, staying four to six cars back. LeRoy drove slowly, and a train of cars piled up behind them, unable to pass because of the narrow road. Six miles south of Ville Platte we crossed a little bayou, and the line of traffic slowed as LeRoy turned west. I didn't turn after him because no one else had, and the land was wide and fiat and empty of trees. Sweet potato fields, maybe. I pulled onto the shoulder and waited until the Polara was out of sight, and only then did I turn. If Jimmie Ray was doing the following, he'd be tooling along a couple of car lengths behind, thinking he was invisible because he was playing the radio. Hmm. If I was the world's greatest detective and Jimmie Ray was the world's worst, maybe this was some kind of karmic coming together.

Maybe a mile off the main road another road branched away, this one going through a gate with a big sign that said ROSSIER'S CRAWFISH FARM, MILT ROSSIER, PROP. The farm was hidden from the road by a heavy windbreak of hardwood trees, and I couldn't see beyond the windbreak into the farm. I could see pretty far up the tarmac road, and the gold Polara wasn't visible. No dust trail, either. Hmm, again. I drove a hundred yards past the gate, pulled onto the shoulder, then trotted back into the trees.

The windbreak was maybe a hundred yards deep, with more fields beyond cut through by a regular crosswork of shell roads. The gold Polara was parked on the far side of a large rectangular pond about the size and shape of a football field. There was another pond of identical size and shape beyond it, and another one after that, and a couple of long, low cinder block buildings. The Polara was parked beside a white Cadillac Brougham and an Evangeline Parish Sheriffs department highway car. Jimmie Ray and LeRoy and Ren+! were standing at the edge of the pond with a guy in a tan sheriffs uniform. The sheriff was maybe in his fifties, and everybody seemed to be talking to a heavy guy with baggy trousers and a cheap white short-sleeved shirt and a straw field hat on his head. He looked about the same age as the sheriff, but he might have been older, and he carried himself with the unmistakable bearing of an overseer. He gestured out toward the pond, and everybody looked. He gestured in the opposite direction, and everybody looked there, too. Then he leaned against the Cadillac and crossed his arms. Milt Rossier, no doubt. Proprietor.