Billy shook his head.

'In Rom we call you skummade igenom, which means “white man from town.”'

He grinned, showing rotted tobacco-stained teeth. The dark hole where his nose had been stretched and writhed.

'But it also means how it sounds – ignorant scum.' Now his eyes finally let Billy's eyes go; Lemke seemed to lose all interest. 'Go on now, white man from town. You have no business with us, and we have no business with you. If we had business, it is done. Go back to your town.'

He began to turn away.

For a moment Billy only stood there with his mouth open, dimly realizing that the old man had hypnotized him – he had done it as easily as a farmer makes a chicken go to sleep by tucking its head under its wing.

That's IT? part of him suddenly screamed. All of the driving, all of the walking, all of the questions, all of the bad dreams, all of the days and nights, and that's IT? You're just going to stand here without saying a word? Just let him call you ignorant scum and then go back to bed?

'No, that is not it,' Billy said in a rough, loud voice.

Someone drew in a harsh, surprised breath. Samuel Lemke, who had been helping the old man toward the back of one of the campers, looked around, startled. After a moment Lemke himself turned around. His face was wearily amused, but Billy thought for just a moment, just as the firelight touched his face, he had seen surprise there as well.

Nearby, the young man who had first seen Billy reached under his vest again to where his revolver hung.

'She's very beautiful,' Billy said. 'Gina.'

'Shut up, white man from town,' Samuel Lemke said. 'I don't want to hear my sister's name come oud your mout.'

Billy ignored him. He looked at Lemke instead. 'Is she your granddaughter? Great-granddaughter?'

The old man studied him as if trying to decide whether or not something might be here after all – some sound other than the wind in a hollow ground. Then he began to turn away again.

'Perhaps you'd wait just a minute while I write down my own daughter's address,' Billy said, raising his voice. He did not raise it much; he did not need to in order to bring out its imperative edge, an edge he had honed in a good many courtrooms. 'She's not as lovely as your Gina, but we think she's very pretty. Perhaps they could correspond on the subject of injustice. What do you think, Lemke? Will they'be able to talk about that after I'm as dead as your daughter? Who is able to finally sort out where an injustice really lay? Children? Grandchildren? Just a minute, I'll write down the address. It'll only take a second; I'll put it on the back of a photograph I have of you. If they can't figure this mess out, maybe they can get together someday and shoot each other and then their kids can give it a try. What do you think, old man … does that make any more sense than this shit?'

Samuel put an arm on Lemke's shoulder. Lemke shook it off and walked slowly back to where Billy stood. Now Lemke's eyes were filled with tears of fury. His knotted hands slowly opened and closed. All the others watched, silent and frightened.

'You run my daught' over in the road, white man,' he said. 'You run my daught' over in the road and then you have … you are borjade rulla enough to come here and speak out of your mout to my ear. Hey, I known who done what. I taken care of it. Mostly we turn and we drive out of town. Mostly, yeah, we do dat. But sometimes we get our justice.' The old man raised his gnarled hand in front of Billy's eyes. Suddenly it snapped into a closed fist. A moment later blood began to drip from it. From the others came a mutter not of fear or surprise but approval. 'Rom justice, skummade igenom. The other two I take care of already. The judge, he jump out of a window two nights ago. He is – . .'Taduz Lemke snapped his fingers and then blew on the ball of his thumb as if it were a seedling dandelion.

'Did that bring your daughter back, Mr Lemke Did she come back when Cary Rossington hit the ground out there in Minnesota?'

Lemke's lips twisted. 'I don't need her back. Justice ain't bringing the dead back, white man. Justice is justice. You want to get out of here before I fix you wit something else. I know what you and your woman were up to. You think I doan have the sight? I got the sight. You ask any of them. I got the sight a hundred years.'

There was an assenting murmur from those around the fire.

'I don't care how long you've had the sight,' Billy said. He reached out deliberately and grasped the old man's shoulders. From somewhere there was a growl of rage. Samuel Lemke started forward. Taduz Lemke turned his head and spat a single word in Romany. The younger man stopped, uncertain and confused. There were similar expressions on many of the faces around the campfire, but Billy did not see this; he saw only Lemke. He leaned toward him, closer and closer, until his nose almost touched the wrinkled, spongy mess that was all that remained of Lemke's nose.

'Fuck your justice,' he said. 'You know about as much about justice as I know about jet turbines. Take it off me.'

Lemke's eyes stared up into Billy's – that horrible emptiness just below the intelligence. 'Let go of me or I'll make it worse,' he said calmly. 'So much worse you think I blessed you the first time.'

The grin suddenly broke on Billy's face – the bony grin which looked like a crescent moon that had been pushed over on its back. 'Go ahead,' he said. 'Try. But you know, I don't think you can.'

The old man stared at him wordlessly.

'Because I helped do it to myself,' Billy said. 'They were right about that much, anyway – it's a partnership, isn't it? The cursed and the one who does the cursing. We were all in it with you together. Hopley, Rossington, and me. But I am opting out, old man. My wife was jerking me off in my big old expensive car, right, and your daughter came out between two parked cars in the middle of the block like any ordinary jaywalker, and that's right, too. If she had crossed at the corner she would be alive now. There was fault on both sides, but she's dead and I can never go back to what my life was before. It balances. Not the best balance in the history of the world, maybe, but it balances. They've got a way of saying it in Las Vegas – they call it a push. This is a push, old man. Let it end here.'

A strange and almost alien fear had arisen in Lemke's eyes when Billy began to smile, but now his anger, stony and obdurate, replaced it. 'I never take it off, white man from town,' Taduz Lemke said. 'I die widdit in my mout.'

Billy slowly brought his face down on Lemke's until their foreheads touched and he could smell the old man's odor – it was the smell of cobwebs and tobacco and dim urine. 'Then make it worse. Go ahead. Make it – how did you say? – like you blessed me the first time.'

Lemke looked at him for a moment longer, and now Billy sensed it was Lemke who was the one caught. Then suddenly Lemke turned his head to Samuel.

'Enkelt av lakan och kanske alskade! Just det!'

Samuel Lemke and the young man with the pistol under his vest tore Billy away from Taduz Lemke The old man's shallow chest rose and fell rapidly; his scant hair was disarrayed.

He's not used to being touched – not used to being spoken to in anger.

'It's a push,' Billy said as they pulled him away. 'Do you hear me?'

Lemke's face twisted. Suddenly, horribly, he was three hundred years old, a terrible living revenant.

'No poosh!' he cried at Billy, and shook his fist. 'No poosh, not never! You die thin, town man! You die like this!' He brought his fists together, and Billy felt a sharp stabbing pain in his sides, as if he had been between those fists. For a moment he could not get his breath and it felt as if all his guts were being squeezed together. 'You die thin!'

'It's a push,' Billy said again, struggling not to gasp.