“Still got this,” I said, and fished it out. I laid it back on my lap.

“How’s Hank?” I asked.

I hung a right, hoping to take us both further into the neighborhood and farther away from anyone who might want to stop us.

“He’s alright,” Keesha said. Julie and I took it as authority.

“Thank you, darlin’,” I said.

“Hank,” I heard her coo to him softly. “You gonna be just fine.”

The night had taken on the surreal quality of a good nightmare.

“We can’t go to Hank’s place,” Julie said. “It’s too long of a drive. Besides, there’s nothing we need there except your car. Shoot!”

“What?”

“We left my car!”

“Oh. Yeah,” I said.

“But wait. That’s okay.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s not my car.”

“Oh.” I let it go, for the moment. Maybe I’d remember to ask later. “Ordinarily,” I said, “this would be a good time to talk to a very nice policeman. You know, I do know one or two.”

She punched me in the arm.

“Ow!” I yelled.

“She does that a lot, doesn’t she?” Hank said from the back seat. He was still lying down. “I think that means she likes you. Must be why she was punching me earlier.”

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I said to Julie, ignoring Hank’s comment.

I began to see what she was talking about: the explosion, Dock dead, a sack of guns on the floorboard of her car-or not her car, as the case may be-parked across the street from a duplex that looked like what was left of Saddam Hussein’s summer home. Also, it appeared that we weren’t checking into any hospitals, as we’d told Julie’s neighbor. Then, on top of all that, there would be questions, assuredly, about Keesha. Where she’d come from and why we had not taken her directly to the police upon finding her abandoned. Then there were the imponderables: such things as stalkers, sniper-fire, and more than likely a whole host of other interesting things that Julie hadn’t told us yet.

It wasn’t the first time, I realized as we sped through the night toward destinations and futures uncertain, that I had been wholly and completely guilty of taking a wrong turn in life.

I had a few things to latch onto, though. Important things. Beside me sat a cute reddish blond girl who was depending on me no matter how reliable she might or might not prove herself to be. And there was a kid in the back seat that we all seemed to care more than a damn about.

All in all, since none of us were capable of altering the immediate past as we ate up the night, things still weren’t too far from perfect.

*****

The highway moved along and the Suburban seemed to stand still. Four of us and a dog, slip-streaming into the night.

I visited ghosts of souls I had known. It could have been me instead of the old man, eyes fixed and lifeless staring into dark skies.

But it hadn’t been.

The old guy had had a way of smiling. The loose skin around his eyes and mouth had crinkled up when he was enthralled-as he had been with Keesha. I wished I had had the chance to get to know him better. That chance was gone.

I don’t have many regrets about my life. Maybe I had come to be just a little too careful with it, holding onto life like a firefly in a jar, shirking danger and responsibility.

There in the night I was having an epiphany. There would surely be blood and pain to come, but at least I’d be living it. I wouldn’t be dead from the age of forty until eighty or so, or whenever that appointed date and hour was scheduled to come to pass. I’d be living it.

As I turned Dock’s dented and baptized-by-fire Suburban out onto the expressway, I watched the traffic lessen with the approaching midnight hour. I watched as Julie appeared to calm down a bit. I listened to Hank moan and breathe, and to Keesha’s subdued, yet cooing words that didn’t seem to make any sense but were somehow both powerful and perfect as she stroked Hank’s cheek. And somehow, the moment, like all moments that had come and gone before, passed right on by.

In its wake an inexpressible agonized feeling departed from my chest to be replaced by a sense of place and peace that I had never felt before.

CHAPTER TEN

White’s Barbecue looked more alien and far less welcoming in the hours before midnight than it had during the bright early-morning hours a few days past. The willow fronds became drooping, other-worldly tendrils in the sultry, windless night. A bare, too-bright back porch light revealed this fundamental difference in its stark, cold electric glare.

Hank was under his own power. I stood next to him by the car and kept a close watch over him without appearing, hopefully, to do so. Hank never was the kind of guy who liked to be thought of as needing help, and just maybe that was why it was so hard for me to get close to him; that is, aside from the fact that I didn’t know what he had done with that IRS agent.

I knocked on the side door of the house.

After a minute the door opened a crack. I held my palm up against the glare of the light. Julie and Keesha stood at the bottom step behind me.

“What the… What you doin’ here, Mr. William?” the deep voice of a woman enquired.

“Ms. Coleeta, I was wondering if Lawrence is home.”

“Naw. He ain’t home. What’re you doin’ with all these people?”

“It’s a long story, Ms. Coleeta, and it’s a bit of an emergency, and-“

”Stop right there, Mr. William. Who is this here?” She asked, gesturing toward Julie and Keesha.

“That’s also what this is about,” I told her.

The door opened wider and a large yet gentle hand came to rest on the screen door spring.

“That’s enough,” she said. “You can tell me all about it in a little while. Lawrence will be back directly. He’s gone to Waco to pick up some chickens. You’re welcome in this house, Mr. William, so come on in here. That’s all of you. You too, Slim,” she said, raising her voice and hailing Hank, who leaned back against my car at the edge of the light.

I stepped up to the top step and in through the door into the waiting warmth inside.

“Come on in here, child,” I heard her say behind me. “Don’t be shy, now.”

Just inside the kitchen I turned and waited.

First came Keesha, with Julie’s hands resting gently on her shoulders, propelling her forward with just a touch. Julie looked worn out. Her eyes met mine.

There came an indefinable moment, no more than just an instant, in which something passed between Julie and me. We had been alone before, had been as physically close as two people could be, and yet this was, for some reason, a far more intimate moment. A sharing. Her somewhat pale, thin lips moved soundlessly. I was vaguely aware of little-girl eyes looking up at me, head tilted, and for an instant rapt. Keesha was watching.

I acknowledged Julie, smiling in spite of myself, and mouthed the same.

Hank came after Julie. I noticed the color was returning to his face. His hand had stopped bleeding through the makeshift bandage of one of Julie’s brown socks.

“Ya’ll go on in and sit at the dining room table,” she said, shooing us further on into the house. “I’ll get some coffee going.”

“Thank you, Ms. Coleeta,” I said.

“ You,”she told me. “You and me are going to have some words, right after I find out what’s going on.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. What else could I say?

“That child needs a bath,” she said, turning toward the dining room.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

Ms. Coleeta was Lawrence’s mother. I had been on a nodding acquaintance with her for a good number of years, but this was my first opportunity to get to know her without Lawrence being there.

When Lawrence left the Army back in ’88, he’d been home only a week before he fired up the grill. His uncle, Benjamin Finley, came up from Houston and spent two weeks with Lawrence and his mother, showing Lawrence the ins and outs of the barbecue business. Ben ran one of Houston’s most successful barbecue stands off of Jensen Drive. I got to know the fellow when I was in college down there. That was the history of White’s Barbecue according to Lawrence.