“No.”

“No? What do you fucking mean no?”

“I have to…” Think, Jay. “I have a function on campus. I was honestly just walking out the door.”

“Oh, bullshit. I’m coming over there right now.”

“Uh…”

“I’ll see you in a few minutes.” He hung up.

Morgan flew for the door, grabbed keys, jerked his coat off the back of a chair.

Outside, the rain still fell but only gently. Halfway to his car Morgan noticed he was still wearing slippers, water soaking through cold. He thought about going back for shoes. Screw it.

He jumped in his car, cranked it.

Fled.

Ginny drove home.

She felt confident she could make Morgan want her, could manipulate him with the right combination of tears and sex. Men were insecure, horny, ego-driven apes. Control the dick and you control the man. The tears pressed the guilt buttons.

Of course, too many tears at the wrong time could send a guy running. Owning a man was a delicate business.

She thumbed a Nine Inch Nails tape into her cassette player, pounded the steering wheel in time with the driving rhythm. She squirmed in the seat, wet clothes uncomfortable.

Maybe Morgan had hit a dry spell. His writing output had evidently slowed to nothing. Maybe the professor was all out of inspiration. But Ginny could fix that too. Like that woman who inspired Pollock in the Ed Harris movie.

Ginny rubbed lightly between her legs. Sore. Morgan had pounded her good. A slight tingle.

She hurried home, wanted to flip on her computer. She felt like writing.

nine

Harold Jenks discovered the graduate dorms were full and were going to stay that way. They wouldn’t kick anybody out just so he could move in. Jenks had thrown a shit fit.

The deputy director of student housing showed up to hush him, and Jenks called the man a racist. When the director of student housing and the vice president of student affairs showed up, he’d called them racists too.

They finally agreed to find him housing off campus and to foot the bill. At first, they’d assigned Jenks an unfurnished apartment five miles from campus. Jenks had loudly pointed out he had no furniture and no car, so they located a furnished studio four blocks from campus. The vice president had even called security to come drive Jenks to his new digs.

Looking around his new place, Jenks nodded and smiled big. These dumb rednecks were fucking pushovers. He threw his duffel on the bed. He shoved Red Zach’s gym bag underneath. He went to the room’s only window, leaned on the sill, and looked at the wet street below. The studio was warm and comfortable, over a garage in a quiet residential neighborhood.

Stealing Sherman Ellis’s life was going even more smoothly than Jenks had planned.

Jenks had a rap sheet of minor crimes as long as his arm. That sort of reputation dogged a man, pulled his life down into the mud. Jenks had tried to right himself once, get out of the ghetto life of poverty and petty crime. But he found all doors closed to him. No one believed a thug would reform. Nobody wanted an employee you couldn’t turn your back on.

So Harold Jenks decided he would simply cease to be Harold Jenks. Sherman Ellis had no family and no record. Jenks would drape himself in Ellis’s innocence, wrap himself in Ellis’s accomplishments, a cloak of safety and legitimacy.

There’d be problems, of course. He’d need to stay clean. If he got picked up even for jaywalking the whole scam would be shot to shit. He couldn’t let himself be fingerprinted. He’d already vowed never to return to East St. Louis. Too many people knew him there.

But what worried him most were the classes, the teachers. Worried? Hell, he was terrified. Jenks knew he was smart. You had to be to survive on the streets. But he was smart enough to know the difference between intelligence and education. Jenks had barely made it out of high school.

But poetry? Shit, how hard could that be?

He pulled an N.W.A. CD out of his duffel and a Walkman. He thumbed the PLAY button and slipped on the headphones, bobbing his head with the rap music and slapping his thigh to the beat. But this time he really listened, took note how the rapper bit off the words. Jenks mouthed the syllables, moved his mouth over the vowel sounds. Yeah, this was his kind of poetry. He could do this, no problem.

And they’d give him a college degree for it? White people were crazy.

He shut off the Walkman, dropped it on the bed. He’d study more later. Right now he had more immediate problems.

He took his rapidly shrinking roll of cash from his jeans pocket, counted the wrinkled bills. Jenks had exactly sixty-one dollars to his name, and that wasn’t going to do it. The minifridge was empty, and he strongly suspected he was going to need books and other supplies. Pencils and shit, notebooks.

He counted it again. Still sixty-one bucks. He checked his other pockets. Nothing.

And he hadn’t set up the deal yet to move Red Zach’s coke. Once he did that he’d be set for a while, but that wasn’t helping him now. Jenks needed operating capital. Going straight would need to be put on hold just a little longer.

Okay. He knew what to do.

He stripped out of his clothes. His body was lean, hard, three knife scars about an inch long across his belly. He pulled a pair of plain black sweatpants out of his duffel and stepped into them. He put on the matching sweatshirt. Then the black knit ski mask. He rolled the mask up above his eyes until it just looked like a watch cap.

The Glock would be a problem. A nice bit of heat, 9mm. He checked the clip. It was full, so he smacked it into the pistol. Jenks liked the metallic click when the clip snapped into place.

But it wouldn’t stay in the elastic band of the sweats. He took a half-used roll of duct tape from the duffel, ripped off a piece. He used it to tape the Glock across the small of his back. He danced around a little, hopped twice, shook his ass, but the Glock stayed put. Good.

Jenks looked at his watch. Shit. It was too early. He pulled the gun off his back and dropped it on the bed next to the Walkman.

The little twenty-four-hour convenience store he’d spotted three blocks away might still be busy, students filling up on RC Colas and MoonPies. He’d wait.

The convenience store was not the perfect target. It was too close to where he lived, but he didn’t have a ride and you can’t take a taxi to a holdup.

Also, it might not be much of a score. Last time he’d done a Quickie-Mart, he made off with only twenty-three dollars and a fistful of SlimJims.

But Jenks had to have some cash.

No matter how much Jenks had screamed and ranted and called everyone within earshot a racist, the lady at the financial aid office insisted that stipend checks were only-ONLY-disbursed on the last day of the month.

About two in the morning, Jenks figured it was time.

He taped the gun to his back again, and made sure nobody was watching when he left the garage apartment. Once, on his way to the convenience store, a set of headlights scared him into a row of low hedges.

At the convenience store, he watched through the window for ten minutes, nerving himself up and making sure the old guy behind the register was alone.

Then he pulled the Glock and went in fast.

The old man turned big eyes on Jenks in slow motion, mouth dropping open, blood draining from his face.

I can’t kill this guy, Jenks thought. Black man kill a white dude in this dumbshit, redneck town and they’ll level the place looking for him. Too many of these convenience stores had hidden cameras, and there was always the chance of some bystander seeing him no matter how careful Jenks was. But he’d need to put the fear of Jenks’s 9mm into this guy. Let him know not to twitch. Bluff him.