“Can you come over?”

“It’s gonna be a couple of hours.”

Quinn looked at his watch. “Christ, it’s late.”

“Too late?”

“No, no. I want to see you.”

“Good. Did you have a productive day?”

“A lot happened,” said Quinn. “I don’t know about productive.”

“What about Linda Welles? Anything?”

“Yeah, plenty,” said Quinn, too quickly. “I’ll give it to you when you get here.”

“You might be sleeping.”

“Wake me up.”

“I’m going to, believe me. Listen, Terry, they’re calling us in. Love you.”

“I love you,” said Quinn.

The line went dead. Quinn stared at the phone.

I’ll give it to you when you get here.

He had a couple of hours to kill before Sue would be by. Enough time to go down there, get it, and have it for her when she arrived.

It wasn’t about finding Linda Welles. It was about doing something, and in the process, getting back a piece of his pride. He knew this, but he pushed the knowledge to the back of his mind.

Quinn went to the kitchen. He had a few bites of the Salisbury steak and some of the accompanying potatoes and mixed vegetables. Just enough to make his hunger headache fade but not enough to make him heavy and slow. He threw the rest of the dinner in the trash. He drank a large glass of water and walked to his bedroom.

Quinn retrieved his Colt, a black.45 with checkered grips, a five-inch barrel, and a seven-shot load, from his chest of drawers. He released the magazine, examined it, and slapped it back into the butt. He racked the slide. Quinn had bought the piece, a model O, after a conversation in a local bar.

It never would have happened, I had my gun.

Quinn holstered the Colt behind the waistband of his jeans and put on his black leather jacket.

Okay, so he’d been punked. He could fix that now.

He thought of Strange. He hadn’t lied to him. He’d gone home like he’d promised.

Quinn grabbed some tapes, a pen, and the Linda Welles file on his way out the door. He walked out into the night air, letting the mist cool his face. He ignitioned the Caprice and put Copperhead Road into the deck and turned it up. As he was going south on Georgia, the traffic lights flashed yellow. Quinn’s long sight was gone and the lights were a blur. He downshifted coming out of the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge leading to the railroad tracks. A freight train neared the station as he passed. Going up the hill, Quinn punched the gas.

IN Far Southeast, Quinn stopped the Chevelle on Southern Avenue near Naylor Road. He withdrew his Colt and flicked its safety off, then refitted it under his jacket. He turned off Southern and drove up Naylor. He passed the well-tended Naylor Gardens complex, the buildings deteriorating in appearance as he moved on. Up past Naylor Plaza he saw the group of young men sitting on the front steps of their unit at the top of a rise of weeds and dirt. He swung the Chevelle around in the street and parked behind a red Toyota Solara with gold-accented alloy wheels and gold trim.

Do your job.

Quinn was out of the car quickly, walking up the hill. The young men had heard his pipes and were watching his approach. He walked through the mist and the hang of smoke in the halogen light. His blood jumped as he walked, watching the faces of the heavyset young man with the blown-out Afro and the skinny kid with the napkin bandanna and the others who had been there earlier in the day. He reached behind him. His hand went up under his jacket. Finding the grip of the gun, he was not afraid. He pulled the Colt, going directly to the heavyset young man. He grabbed the young man’s shirt and bunched it in his left fist, touching the barrel of the Colt under his chin.

“Put your hands flat beside you,” said Quinn. “Your friends don’t want to fuck with me. Believe it.”

The young man did it. No one made a comment or laughed. No one moved.

“I ain’t strapped,” said the young man.

“I don’t care,” said Quinn. “Linda Welles.”

“Who?”

“The girl on the flyer I showed you. You know where she is, who she’s with. Gimme a name.”

The barrel of the gun dented the young man’s skin as Quinn pressed it to his jaw.

“She stayin’ with this boy Jimmy Davis, up on Buena Vista Terrace. Up there off Twenty-eighth.”

“Where on Buena Vista?”

“He’s in this place, got a red door.”

“Say it again.”

The young man repeated the name and address. Quinn released his shirt and stepped back. He held the gun loosely at his side. He looked around at the faces of the boys on the steps. They stared at him with nothing in their eyes. One of the young men raised a brown paper bag and tipped its bottle to his lips.

Quinn backed up a few steps. He holstered the gun. He turned and walked down the rise to his Chevelle. He got under the wheel, started the car, and pulled off the curb.

At the next corner, Quinn stopped and wrote down the name and location the young man had given him on the back of one of the flyers. He ejected the Steve Earle tape and slipped Darkness on the Edge of Town into the deck. “Adam Raised a Cain” came forward, and he turned it up. Quinn rolled down his window and began to laugh. It was easy. Fire with fire. All it took was a gun.

He drove down Naylor and onto 25th, and looked around at the unfamiliar sights. He didn’t know this stretch of road, and anyway, his night vision was for shit. Street lamps and headlights were haloed and blurry. He wasn’t lost. He’d come out on Alabama somewhere and from there he could hit MLK. He wasn’t in a hurry. He was enjoying his Springsteen, his victory, the night.

He pulled up behind a car at a stoplight. Cars were parked along the curb at his right. In his rearview he saw a red import, tricked out in gold. He looked to his left. A white car with tinted windows rolled up had pulled alongside him. He couldn’t see the occupants of the car. He heard Strange’s voice in his head: A classic trap. Gangs hunt in packs.

Quinn’s eyes went back to his rearview. The driver of the red car was heavy and wore his hair in a blown-out natural.

Quinn reached behind him and fumbled under his jacket. He found purchase on the grip of the Colt and began to draw it out. As he did this, he looked out the open window, feeling the presence of someone there.

He saw a skinny boy with a napkin bandanna on his head and a stainless automatic in his hand. The boy’s finger went inside the trigger guard just as Quinn freed his gun and cleared it from his waist, seeing the stainless piece swing up, knowing he was far too late.

Quinn thinking, He ain’t nothin’ but a kid, as the world flashed white.

AUGUST

Chapter 36

GRANVILLE Oliver’s biceps pushed against the fabric of his orange jumpsuit. His manacles and chains scraped the table before him as he lowered his hands.

“Thanks for coming by,” said Oliver.

“Ain’t no thing,” said Strange.

“Sentencing’s today.”

“Ives told me.”

“Whichever way it goes, I figure we won’t be seeing each other again. So I thought we should, you know, say good-bye, eye to eye.”

Strange nodded. The room was quiet except for the muffled voices of attorneys and their clients seated in other cubicles behind Plexiglas dividers. A guard with heavy-lidded eyes sat in a darkened booth, watching the room.

“You did everything you could,” said Oliver.

“I tried.”

“Yeah, you and that white boy was working with you, y’all did a good job.”

Strange leaned forward. “Say his name.”

“Quinn.”

“That’s right.”

“You two did all right, bringing that girl in like you did. For a while, seemed like her testimony was really gonna help my case. Sayin’ that Phil was talkin’ to her about plannin’ to kill my uncle and all that. Course, when they crossed her, the prosecutors tried to make her look like a common ho, what with her havin’ that boy out of wedlock, and the lifestyle she was into when she was kickin’ it with Phil. But she kept her composure up there. She was good.”