Morgan started to laugh, shut himself up.

The old man shook his head. “The whole forest arranged itself around that beer bottle, my whole life. Everything I thought. Like that jar on a hill in Tennessee. Seems dumb, I guess. But I was mad about that bottle for a long time. Not because of littering. I don’t give a shit about that. Because it took away what it felt like to be ten.”

Morgan puffed the cigar. The old man closed his eyes and smelled it.

“Maybe I talk too much,” Jones said.

“No. I know what you mean.”

“What about you?” Jones scooted forward in his chair. “Something’s gnawing on you. I can tell.”

“I’m supposed to get one of my students to do a poetry reading in a week, but I think he’s skipped out on me.”

“Kids.” Jones waved his hands like that covered the whole subject.

“What about you, Mr. Jones? Ever read your poems in front of people?”

Jones said, “You ever drop your britches and wave your pecker at a passing bus?”

twenty-three

Moses Duncan drove his pal Eddie home from the county hospital. They’d told the doctor that the broken window which caused the dozens of cuts on Eddie’s face had been shattered by a hard-thrown baseball. Eddie’s entire face was wrapped in gauze like a mummy’s, only slits for his eyes and nostrils. His lips had been badly lacerated, so he didn’t have a mouth hole.

“Mmmmph. Mmm mmmph,” Eddie said.

“Don’t you sweat it, Eddie.” Duncan gripped the steering wheel tight. He still burned with hatred, the image of Big John’s body sprawled in the dust branded on his mind’s eye. His side stung too from the slight buckshot wound. “We’ll get that coon and his buddies too. We’ll go home and get the shotguns and we’ll find that son of a bitch.”

“Mmmph.”

“You leave that to me,” Duncan said. “Not many black guys around here. Hell, we’ll just cruise up and down every street until we find him if we have to. Don’t worry. We’ll get him.”

“Mmmmph umph mmmmph.”

“Damn straight.” Duncan wondered how he understood Eddie so well. “You know I think I’d of been a good dentist. I could probably understand folks even with my hands in their mouths.”

“Mmmph Ummm Mmmph.”

Duncan frowned. “No need to get nasty, Eddie. Just ain’t called for.”

“Mmph.”

“Okay, then.”

Red Zach sat in the back of his limo. He was pissed. Why couldn’t it just be easy for once?

Spoon sat across from him, one of Zach’s big goons uncomfortably close. Spoon looked drained, broken, and scared. He kept his eyes on the floor of the car.

Okay, Zach had to get in character, so he could play hard-ass with Spoon. Not for the first time, Zach supposed he needed to train some middle-management personnel, a couple of good men to do all this bruiser work. Zach could lounge on the beach in Antigua and hear all about it via cell phone or e-mail. The key to an operation like this was to get it on autopilot as much as possible. Zach wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the dirty work.

But until then, if he wanted shit done right, he’d have to do it himself.

“Your boy Harold killed one of mine in that trailer,” Zach said. “You don’t think I can just let that go, do you?”

Spoon shook his head.

“Where’s he going now?”

“I don’t know, Red. Shit, he don’t tell me nothing.”

“That’s what you said the first time,” Zach said. “Once we helped you remember, you told us about Harold coming to Oklahoma.”

Spoon’s hand went to his split lip. “I don’t know, man. You got to believe me.”

Zach smiled. “Okay, I believe you.” He nodded to the goon.

Moving fast, the goon looped the length of piano wire over Spoon’s neck, yanked. Spoon’s eyes bulged. His tongue popped from his mouth. His whole face bunched tight like the last bit of toothpaste being squeezed from the tube.

Zach flipped open his cell phone and thumbed the speed-dial. “This is Red. I need all the boys down here right now.”

Spoon kicked. The goon hanging tight. Blood from Spoon’s throat.

Zach wasn’t paying attention anymore. “Don’t waste my time asking why. Get the fuck down here and make sure everyone’s packing heat. We going to make an example.”

Spoon went slack, eyes wide. The body slumped to the car floor.

Zach folded the cell phone closed, looked at the body and the goon and the blood. “Goddammit. You got blood on the seat. Shit.”

The goon hung his head, looked sheepish.

Deke Stubbs had found a lot of names and a lot of secrets in Annie Walsh’s journal. Two names stood out. Moses Duncan and Timothy Lancaster. Annie had tried to be subtle in some of her journal entries, but it was obvious that Duncan was her connection. A good possibility.

Duncan wasn’t in the phone book, but Lancaster was. His apartment was close.

The two beers Stubbs had swilled at Friday’s put him in the mood for more. He stopped at a Quickie-Mart and bought a six-pack of Busch and a copy of Hustler. He drank one in the parking lot and flipped through the jack-off magazine. He was getting crazy horny again. Something happened to Stubbs when he saw skin. It made him desperate crazy. Maybe that’s why he was always forking over big bucks to get his rocks off.

He threw the magazine into the backseat before it made him too crazy. He flipped through Annie Walsh’s journal instead.

Apparently, Annie had boinked this Lancaster kid a month back as some sort of experiment. The journal said that Lancaster “intrigued” her.

A place to start. A thread.

Stubbs pulled out of the parking lot, tossed the empty beer can into the backseat. He opened another, slurped, held the can between his legs, and pointed the Dodge toward Lancaster’s apartment.

He was in no particular hurry. He was getting paid by the day.

twenty-four

Jenks scooted close to the little campfire DelPrego had built. They were deep in the strange woods, glowing eyes watching from the shadows. Jenks gritted his teeth against the wind that whistled through the branches.

“We can’t stay out here.” For the first time, DelPrego showed he was aware of the cold. “This fire ain’t enough. I can’t feel my damn fingers.” He blew on them, held them toward the fire. The wind stung his ears.

Jenks didn’t say anything. He was cold too, but didn’t know where to go. He couldn’t go back to his garage apartment, that was for damn sure.

“Let’s get my truck,” DelPrego said. “We could sneak back slow. Check it out. If we can get to the truck, we can go anywhere.”

“Shit on that idea. You don’t know Red Zach. I’d rather freeze than have my own balls fed to me.”

A long silence before DelPrego spoke. “What’s going on?”

Jenks looked at the fire, didn’t say anything.

“Sherman.” DelPrego raised his voice. “Who’s Jenks? He called you Jenks.”

“Never mind.”

“Fuck that. Talk to me. I killed-” DelPrego’s voice caught. He swallowed hard. “I bashed a man’s skull in with a golf club. I thought I was doing it to save a friend.” His voice shook, tight, nerves raw. “Now you goddamn tell me what’s going on right fucking now.”

Jenks opened his mouth, shut it again. He needed to gather himself.

“I’ll tell you, but you got to let me tell it all.”

“Fine.”

“You got to listen,” Jenks said. “You got to let me get it all out, try to understand where I’m coming from.”

“I said fine.”

Jenks let it all spill out, Spoon and the alley and Sherman Ellis. He told him about his crazy idea to steal Ellis’s life, slip into Eastern Oklahoma University, and write poetry. It had been his way out, his way to shed the ghetto and the drug trade and all the gangster bullshit. And he realized he was telling the story for himself too, trying to downplay his part in Ellis’s death. He needed to believe, even more than he needed to convince DelPrego, that what he had done was forgivable. Or at least understandable.