Kathryn nodded. “She was mean to Chingy.”

“That goddamn rat shit on her Oriental rug.”

“It was an ugly rug.”

A few truck drivers walked in through the glass door, a bell jingling above their heads. More bacon frying. More loose talk. Cigarettes and coffee. Hash and eggs. Kathryn picked up the Star again and read back over the front page about the Urschel story.

“Does it bother you that your name isn’t here?”

“Are you crazy? That’s pretty much the point, sweetheart.”

“It bothers me,” she said. “I read a story last week about Jean Harlow coming to Kansas City to visit her family. They had her picture on the front of the paper just because she came to town. Now, that’s something.”

“She’s a damn movie star with big tits.”

“I’m prettier.”

“Maybe,” George said. “But she’s known.”

“And now because of us that fat old man is the Federal Ace.”

“So what?”

“So, it must be nice.”

“What’s that?” George asked, grabbing his hat and tossing down some coin. “To get your picture in the paper?”

“For everyone to know you,” she said. “Look at ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd. He’s like some goddamn Robin Hood.”

“To hell with Floyd.” George stood, tipping the fedora’s brim down over his dark eyes as he frowned at her. “Let’s see him ever pull a job like this.”

“HOW ’BOUT YOU HANDLE KID CANN,” VERNE MILLER SAID. “THAT little Jew has problems with me.”

“About what?” Harvey asked.

“One night at the Cotton Club, we had a little talk.”

“A talk?”

Verne Miller shrugged and scratched the back of his neck. They were out of the Buick now-Harvey always preferring to buy or steal big, solid Buicks-and they walked in the falling sunlight of an abandoned farm close to the Iowa line. Harvey’s heel felt stiff and sore, and he had some trouble keeping pace with Miller’s strong, long-legged gait.

“The Kid made a pass at Vi,” Miller said, staring straight ahead. His blue eyes like ice. “He told her he’d like to place his pecker right between her titties and ride her like a mule.”

“The Kid said that?” Harvey asked, lighting up a Chesterfield and fanning out the match. “I don’t even know what that means. ‘Like a mule’?”

“He’d been drinking.”

“What’d you say?”

“I don’t know,” Miller said, shrugging again. “I didn’t say much. Just stuck a.45 inside his mouth and asked if he’d like to see how little brains he’s got.”

“He may hold a grudge.”

“You think?”

“I do, Verne,” Harvey said. “Things like that can stay with a person.”

The hot wind off the barren earth felt good on the men’s faces, and you could smell the hard earth and dust and dry land. The farm had a familiar old L-frame and a big red barn with a roof painted with the words MERAMEC CAVERNS U.S. 66 STANTON MISSOURI. The shadows were long and smooth across the rough-hewn boards, and the sunlight painted the side of the barn in a soft yellow glow.

“Vi’s got you wrapped tight, Verne,” Harvey said. “And don’t take no offense in this, but if you don’t watch your pecker, she’s gonna lead you right into a trap.”

“What’s a man to do?”

“Love.”

“Yeah,” Miller said with that cruel, twisted mouth. “It’s worse than the Spanish flu.”

“Now, take George,” Harvey said. “That’s another matter. He can’t even see the trap he’s in.”

“The pussy trap.”

“Snap.”

“You’re going to thieve their money, aren’t you?” Miller asked.

Harvey smiled and pinched the Chesterfield between his thumb and forefinger. He shrugged a bit and smiled again.

“You’re gonna get the Kid to switch out the cash on the bank job with Kelly’s dough, and we’re going to take it all.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t have any love for those people.”

The Buick sat in the slanting shadow of two big silos crawling with vines. A couple Ford tractors lay rusted and turned upside down in a gully. As the men stepped on the porch, they found a busted door held upright by an old padlock. A note from the bank ruffled in the wind.

“This country is turning to shit,” Harvey said, snatching the notice from the tacks and tossing it on the ground.

“Everything is turning to shit.”

“They took my gas stations,” he said. “They took goddamn everything.”

“Who?”

“Fat men.”

“Who?”

“Men who feed at the trough of our goddamn sweat.”

“You’re talking like a communist,” Miller said.

“Maybe I am.”

“Communism is for suckers, too.”

“What do you believe in, Verne?”

“Myself,” he said, his face not changing expression.

Harvey Bailey excused himself and walked along the beaten porch of the house, the wind making rattling noises through the broken windows. A door kept drumming with the shotgun wind, and every one of Harvey’s steps through the haunted guts of the home was counted until he reached the back stairs and walked out onto that wide expanse of cleared land, an old familiar path now grown up with weeds and destroyed and hidden. But he could walk that path in his sleep, feeling that draw and pull to a shadowed little grove of walnut trees blooming with nuts wrapped in green.

You wouldn’t know it to see it. The headstone simply read J. HARVEY BAILEY / SEPTEMBER, 5 1920-JULY, 12 1923. Bailey felt a shooting pain as he got to his knees and pulled away the weeds and vines and straightened the small stone lamb, storm-beaten, and now resembling more rock than animal. He stayed there, smoothing away the moss with his hand-painted tie, until he heard Miller calling for him, and, using the solid trunk of the tree for balance, he got back on his feet.

“You think Harry Sawyer’s back up there?” Verne Miller asked as he walked close, toting a shovel.

“Where else would he go?” Harvey asked, rolling the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbow and lighting another cigarette. “We’ll head to the Green Lantern first thing. I sure wouldn’t mind one of his pork chop sandwiches.”

“And maybe Nina’s?”

“How can a man go to Saint Paul and not stop by and say hello to the girls?”

“Right here?”

“Right here,” Harvey said. “Hand it to me.”

Harvey Bailey felt the hot wind push a cloud over the sun, sliding a cool shadow over his face. He slid the tip of the shovel to the known spot and began to dig.

“How much is buried?” Miller asked.

“Just enough.”

JONES THUMBED SOME TOBACCO INTO HIS PIPE AND EYED Mr. Charles Urschel. Urschel’s face was gaunt and hollow, the flesh around his eyes reddened and blistered. He had changed into fresh clothes that morning-lightweight navy trousers and a white short-sleeved linen shirt. Jones could tell he’d showered and shaved, had his breakfast and coffee. But despite the morning routine, Urschel hadn’t stopped tapping his foot and checking his timepiece since he’d sat down.

Jones struck a match and got the bowl going, the cavernous study empty besides Jones and SAC Colvin. The young boy displaying his talents as notetaker, keeping quiet and letting Jones take the lead, the interview continuing from where they stopped late last night, when Berenice Urschel begged Jones to let her husband get some rest. Jones had complied, but then had shown up at six that morning, and had waited damn-near two hours until Urschel said he was ready.

“I hope this won’t take long.”

“Could take a while, sir.”

“I haven’t set foot at my company.”

“You’ll have some time this afternoon.”

“But I didn’t see anything,” Urschel said. “Everything I could know I told you last night. I even told you about the well and how bad that water tasted. You seemed to take great interest in the mineral quality of it last night. Perhaps that will lead to something.”

“Yes, sir,” Jones said, walking and smoking and moving about in the room, lined from bottom to top with leather-bound volumes of old stories and old tales of murder and adventure, and very serious men taking things very seriously. “Tell me about the boy.”