Edna had no doubt that Ray and Earl had rigged some kind of opening at the end of the tunnel, a way for them to escape into the woods from all those imaginary FBI and ATF boys they were always goin' on about. Even Ray, he wasn't dumb enough to go through all that trouble of diggin' a tunnel without providing for a back door.

There was the smell of expired animal down here. Ray said there was snakes in this tunnel, but she wasn't afraid of no snakes, either. She'd lost count of all the black snakes she'd killed with a hoe, growin' up out this way. Maybe there was rats. But rats weren't nothin' but overgrown mice. Somethin' had cacked down here, that was for certain, maybe one of those barn cats that were always hanging around. She knew that smell.

Anyway, if she lost her bearings or something, crawling around down here, she could use the disposable lighter she had in her pocket. She was glad she had brought it with her. And the drugs.

Edna had an awful headache. It seemed to be getting worse. She found the vial of ice and the lighter and the pipe, and she hit the lighter so that she could fill the pipe. A little pickup would motor her out of this place quick and just right.

She smoked the rocks, coughing furiously on the last hit, and let the flame go out. The buzz started to build. It was a pleasant buzz at first. Then it was violent and it left her shaking. She realized that maybe she had smoked too much. The space felt very close, and for the first time she was frightened, though she wasn't sure of what. She wanted to get out.

Edna put everything but the lighter back in her pockets. Her hands were trembling, and she couldn't do it fast enough. She thumbed the wheel of the lighter, looked ahead, and began to crawl.

She could hear her own breath as she crawled. She started to hum, thinking it would calm her, but it only scared her, and she stopped and crawled on. Her head pounded and it hurt something fierce. She crawled with sudden velocity and found good purchase on the hard earth.

'Shit!' she said, as her head hit a wall of dirt.

I am at the end of the straight shot now, she thought, and she scrabbled, turning right and finding more space. The smell had grown awful, and she gagged, but she crawled on. She was dizzy and she panicked at the thought that she might be running out of air.

She gagged again at the lousy stench, heard a kind of crunching sound, struggled to draw in breath as she kept on and touched something soft, and crawled over another thing that was cold and hard.

Edna raised the lighter in front of her and got flame. Two corpses covered in writhing maggots lay before her.

'Aaah!' screamed Edna. 'Oh, God, Ray, God, Ray, God!'

She turned, the lighter flipping out of her hand.

Edna fell forward onto her belly. She clawed at the cold earth. But she was too dizzy to move, and it seemed as if a hatchet had cleaved her skull. She vomited into the darkness of the tunnel and lowered her head to the ground, feeling the warmth of her own puke on her face. Her eyes were fixed and glassy, and her tongue slid from her open mouth.

28

'They're comin' out,' said Strange looking through the 500 millimeter lens of his AE-1.

'They weren't in there long,' said Quinn.

'Droppin' off the goods, I expect. Now they're goin' to get their money. Couple of Mayberry R.F.D.-lookin' motherfuckers, too.'

'The short one's got high heels on. You see that?'

'Like I told you, it's the little ones got somethin' to prove. Those the ones you got to keep your eye on.'

Strange and Quinn sat in a rented Chevy Lumina two blocks west of the Junkyard. They had been there for several hours, and Strange had filled Quinn in on everything he'd learned the day before.

They watched Ray and Earl Boone leave the garage, cross the street, and head toward the row house where Cherokee Coleman kept his office. Ray and Earl spoke briefly to a couple of unsmiling young men, who led them up the stoop and through a door.

'Gettin' the royal escort,' said Quinn. 'Wonder how many guns we got out here on this street.'

'They ain't nothin' but kids.'

'Just as deadly as anyone else. Anyone can pull the trigger of a gun.'

'They don't have to be out here, though. They think they do, but they don't. They watch television, they see what everyone else has, what they're supposed to have, they want some, too. But how they gonna get it, Terry?'

'Work for it?'

'C'mon, man, you're smarter than that. 'Cause of some accident of birth these kids came into the world in a certain kind of place. Where they were born, and learnin' from the older kids around them – the only examples they got, most of the time – a lot of these kids, their fate was decided a long time ago.'

'I'll give you that. But what would you do about it now?'

'Two things I would do,' said Strange. 'First thing, I'd legalize drugs. Take away what they're all fightin' over, 'cause in itself it's got no meaning anyway. It's like those MacGuffins they're always talkin' about in those Alfred Hitchcock movies – just somethin' to move the drama along. Legalization, it works in some of those European countries, right? You don't see this kind of crime over there. The repeal of prohibition, it stopped a lot of this same kind of thing we got goin' on right here, didn't it?'

'Okay. What's the other thing?'

'Make handguns illegal, nationwide. After a moratorium and a grace period, mandatory sentences for anyone caught in possession of a handgun. A pistol ain't good for nothin' but killing other human beings, man.'

'You're not the first person who's thought of those things. So why isn't anyone talking about it for real?'

"Cause you put all those politicians down on the Hill in one room and you can't find one set of nuts swingin' between the legs of any of 'em. Even the ones who know what's got to be done, they realize that comin' out in favor of drug legalization and handgun illegalization will kill their careers. And the rest of them are in the pockets of the gun lobby. Meantime, nearly half the black men in this city have either been incarcerated or are in jail now.'

'You tellin' me it's a black thing?'

'I'm tellin' you it's a money thing. We got two separate societies in this country, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is gettin' wider every day. And the really frustrating thing is-'

'No one cares,' said Quinn.

'Not exactly. You got mentors, community activists, church groups out here, they're tryin', man, believe me. But it's not enough. More to the point, some people care, but most people care about the wrong things.

'Look, why does a dumb-ass, racist disc jockey make the front page and the leadoff on the TV news for weeks, when the murder of teenage black children gets buried in the back of the Metro section every day? Why do my own people write columns year after year in the Washington Post, complainin' that black actors don't get nominated for any Academy Awards, when they should be writin' every goddamn day about the fucked-up schools in this city, got no supplies, leaking roofs, and fifteen-year-old textbooks. You got kids walkin' to school in this city afraid for their lives, and once they get there they got one security guard lookin' after five hundred children. How many bodyguards you think the mayor's got, huh?'

'I don't know, Derek. You askin' me?'

'I'm makin' a point.'

'You gotta relax,' said Quinn. 'Guy your age, you could stroke out…'

'Aw, fuck you, man.'

A block ahead, a Crown Vic cruiser rounded the corner and headed east, driving slowly by the Junkyard.

'That our friend?'

'I'd bet it,' said Strange, narrowing his eyes. 'Ain't nothin' I hate worse than a sold-out cop.'