“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie.”

“What?”

“Don’t be disingenuous, either.”

“I don’t know what that word means.”

“You’ll either talk to me now, or you’ll see me or Bobby Lee later.”

“Who’s Bobby Lee?”

“That’s Bobby Lee there,” Preacher said, indicating the driver. “He may be a descendant of the general. You told Hugo you wanted to meet me. Don’t demean yourself by pretending you didn’t.”

Nick could hear a brass band marching through his head. “So now I’ve met you. I’m satisfied. I’m going home now.”

“I’m afraid not,” Preacher said.

Nick felt as though a garrote were tightening around his chest, squeezing the blood from his heart. Face it now, when Esther and the kids aren’t with you, a voice inside him said.

“You say something?” Preacher asked.

“Yeah, I have friends. Some of them are cops. They come here sometimes. They eat free at my restaurant.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Nick didn’t have an answer. In fact, he couldn’t keep track of anything he had said. “I’m not a criminal. I don’t belong in this.”

“Maybe we can be friends. But you have to talk to me first,” Preacher said.

Nick set his jaw and stepped inside the SUV, then heard the door slam behind him. The kid in the top hat floored the SUV onto the service road. The surge of power in the engine caused Nick to sway against the seat and lose control of the safety strap he was trying to snap into place. Preacher continued to look at him, his hazel eyes curious, like someone studying a gerbil in a wire cage. Nick’s hand brushed the stiff outline of the.25 auto in his side pocket.

Preacher knocked on his cast with his knuckles. “I got careless,” he said.

“Yeah?” Nick said. “Careless about what?”

“I underestimated a young woman. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she taught me a lesson in humility,” Preacher said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”

“Y’all are trying to take over my businesses.”

“I look like a restaurateur or the operator of a strip joint?”

“There’s worse things.”

Preacher watched the countryside sweeping by. He closed his eyes as though temporarily resting them. A moment later, he reopened them and leaned forward, perhaps studying a landmark. He scratched his cheek with one finger and studied Nick again. Then he seemed to make a decision about something and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “The road on the left,” he said. “Go through the cattle guard and follow the dirt track. You’ll see a barn and a pond and a clapboard house. The house will be empty. If you see a car or any lights on, turn around.”

“You got it, Jack,” the driver said.

“What’s going on?” Nick said.

“You wanted a sit-down, you got your sit-down,” Hugo said from the front passenger seat.

“Take the pistol out of your pocket with two fingers and put it on the seat,” Preacher said. Half of his right hand remained inside the fold of the newspaper on his lap. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes unblinking, his nose tilted down.

“I don’t have a gun. But if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

“You’re not a listener?” Preacher said.

“Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“You were planning to shoot both me and Hugo if you could catch us unawares. You treated me with disrespect. You treated me as though I’m an ignorant man.”

“I never saw you before. How could I disrespect you?” Nick replied, avoiding Preacher’s initial premise.

Preacher sucked on a tooth. “You attached to your family, Mr. Dolan?”

“What do you think?”

“Answer my question.”

“I have a good family. I work hard to provide for them. That’s why I don’t need this kind of shit.”

“You true to your vows?”

“This is nuts.”

“I believe you’re a family man. I believe you planned to take out me and Hugo even if you had to eat a bullet. You’d eat a bullet for your family, wouldn’t you?”

Nick felt he was being led into a trap, but he didn’t know how. Preacher saw the confusion in his face.

“That makes you a dangerous man,” Preacher said. “You’ve put me in a bad spot. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have patronized me, either.”

Nick, with his heart sinking, saw the driver’s eyes look at him in the rearview mirror. The tips of his fingers inched away from the outline of the.25 to the edge of his pocket. He glanced at Preacher’s right hand, partially inserted inside the folded newspaper. The paper was turned at an angle, pointed directly at Nick’s rib cage.

The SUV turned off the service road and passed through a break in a row of slash pines and thumped across a cattle guard onto farmland spiked with weeds and cedar fence posts that had no wire on them. Nick could see moonlight glowing on a pond, and beyond the pond, a darkened house with cattle standing in the yard. He folded his arms on his chest, burying his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. The driver, Bobby Lee, looked at Nick in the mirror again, a dent in each of his cheeks, as though he were sucking the saliva out of his mouth.

“I knew it’d come to this,” Nick said.

“I don’t follow you,” Preacher said.

“I knew one of you bastards would eventually blindside me. You’re all the same-black pukes from the Desire, Italian punks from Uptown. Now it’s an Irish psychopath who’s a hump for Hugo Cistranos. None of y’all got talent or brains of your own. Every one of you is a pack animal, always figuring out a way to steal what another man has worked for.”

“Do you believe this guy?” the driver said to Hugo.

“I don’t steal, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said. “But you do. You steal and market the innocence of young women. You create a venue that makes money off the lust of depraved men. You’re a festering sore in the eyes of God, did you know that, Mr. Dolan? For that matter, you’re an abomination in the eyes of your own race.”

“Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. That’s what I’m talking about. All of you are ignorant. That’s your common denominator.”

Bobby Lee had already cut the headlights and was slowing to a stop by the pond. The open end of the newspaper in Preacher’s lap was still pointed at Nick’s side. Nick thought he was going to be sick. Hugo pulled open the back door and ran his hand along Nick’s legs. His face was so close that Nick could feel Hugo’s breath on his skin. Hugo slipped the.25 auto from Nick’s pocket and aimed it at the pond.

“This is a nice piece,” he said. He released the magazine and worked the slide. “Afraid to carry one in the chamber, Nicholas?”

“It wouldn’t have done me any good,” Nick said.

“Want to show him?” Hugo said to Preacher.

“Show me what?” Nick said.

Preacher tossed the newspaper to the floor and got out on the other side of the vehicle, pulling his crutches after him. The newspaper had fallen open on the floor. There was nothing inside it.

“Tough luck, Nicholas,” Hugo said. “How’s it feel to lose to a guy holding a handful of nothing?”

“Bobby Lee, open up the back. Hugo, give me his piece,” Preacher said.

“I can take care of this,” Hugo said.

“Like you did behind that church?”

“Take it easy, Jack,” Hugo said.

“I said give me the piece.”

Nick could feel a wave of nausea permeate the entirety of his metabolism, as though he had been systemically poisoned and all his blood had settled in his stomach and every muscle in him had turned flaccid and pliant. For just a moment he saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors-a small, pitiful fat man whose skin had become as gray as cardboard and whose hair glowed with sweat, a little man whose corpulence gave off the vinegary stink of fear.

“Walk with me,” Preacher said.

“No,” Nick said.

“Yes,” Bobby Lee said, pressing a.45 hard between Nick’s shoulder blades, screwing it into the softness of his muscles.

The cows in the yard of the farmhouse had strung shiny green lines of feces around the pond. In the moonlight Nick could see the cows watching him, their eyes luminous, their heads haloed with gnats. An unmilked cow, its swollen udder straining like a veined balloon, bawled with its discomfort.