Lone Star Noir

LUCK by JAMES CRUMLEY

Crumley, Texas

JASMINE

13th June, Slippery Rock

Little sister,

I fear that I waited too long to respond to your missive of early December. I hoped and prayed that I could find the time to write a short and sweet, perfectly reasonable explanation for the financial morass that seems to be dividing our true and deep sisterly love. (You understand.) So please forgive me if I rattle on in a dozen different directions before I discover the truth dancing in front of me, lost and fluttering like one of those monarch butterflies on his endless migrations.

The folks here in Slippery Rock seem to have recently arrived from some other time zone-the slow drip of molasses time zone, slow hands and deep pockets. But they have other advantages. They have no idea how the marble breaks down. Silver Slip had to twice physically restrain farmers who wanted to wager their bottom land against the illusive numbers. They went home, small slices of skin missing. They refused to believe a dwarf could be so quick. But, Lord, the women are so tight they won’t even spit on the ground or step into the honey-bucket flop. You know the kind of women I mean-like Momma-cat glasses, hair so tight in buns that their noses are pointed like the bills of the snapping turtles Daddy brought out of the Black River, hard, stingy eyes over skinny, pale mouths. They probably think a blow job is when you blow smoke in a guy’s ear. The things we could teach them, huh? (HA! Remember those two drummers at the Pow Wow Motel in Tucumcari? They should have been diamond miners.) But Jesus, they eat like lost hogs. Mounds of popcorn, miles of cotton candy, and enough Cokes to launch a ship, but they never shit. The whirlaround ride is shot, and this here’s a town that keeps little kids on the soft rides, these Slippery Rockers. Shit, the games are down 200 percent. Even the penny pits are losing money to the fucking rug rats. Which is why I’ve missed the last two payments. I’m sorry. We’re living on macaroni and welfare cheese. Maybe we need to put the shows back together. Maybe.

Speaking of rug rats-how’s little Harney doing? Same sort of straight dude his dad is? What is he now? Eighteen months? I hear little Pearl looks just like you. I know Harney would love to send you some money, but he’s still got those Kentucky peckerwoods on his back. It wasn’t Harn’s fault that the still caught fire. Hell, he nearly lost two fingers trying to put it out.

Well, baby sis, I gotta run. More soon.

Your loving sister,

Jasmine

GINGER

Flat River, August 31

Toad, it’s always a pleasure to get one of your wandering forays into the fucking miasma of your twisted, lying mind. You’re as ugly as Momma and twice as crooked. Stop whining and send the fucking money. Now. I’ve got a new sword swallower that will turn your bad news dwarf into mincemeat pie. And perhaps do a little cosmetic surgery so no one will ever mistake us again. Your excuse was late, mailed to the wrong place on purpose or by accident, no matter. The USPS is a fairly solid bet these days. Of course, there didn’t seem to be a check from you for $3,700, and no child support from Harney. Tell him I’ll put the sheriff on his ass and this time McAlaster will welcome him home. Or, hell, just forget it. I’ll come take the whole works, baby-in fact, forget everything. Like you always do. I didn’t fuck any drummers in Tucumcari, dear. I was in the governor’s suite with a fist full of cash and a mouth full of the governor’s press secretary’s cock. So we could get our permits restored, permits you’d lost with a rigged wheel. Then you told Harney it was me. That’s why I fucked him the first time. Or was that the first five hundred times? Who can keep it straight, bitch.

Wow. Time for a deep breath, a reassessment, then back to business. But before I forget, Pop didn’t leave because Mom wouldn’t go down on him. He left because she was boring, mean-spirited, and fairly stupid. And wall-eyed too. Just like you. Yeah, I can hear you sigh. She’s in denial again.

Maybe not, sis. Maybe not.

Look at it the real way, sister mine: you seduced him at thirteen for a pair Cherokee platform boots to impress Lauren Poltz. But you got Tommy Poltz in every orifice, didn’t you? Then it was off to Spokane to have the baby, then a flappy-ass job in the accounting wagon. While I shoveled Shetland pony shit and battled anklebiters as they covered me with baby shit, thin puke, and endless screams. I could have gone to college. You couldn’t finish grade school.

So when I was sixteen, I seduced the old bastard too, because he was the single most lonely man in the world, and I couldn’t stand it. He was a fine man. I don’t think he ever gave a shit about fucking you. You were so awful from the day you were born, you had to be forgiven for everything from the start. Or be throttled in the fucking crib.

And remember this too: Mom was too fastidious to nurse. She didn’t want too-big boobs to get in the way of her tumbles. So we were bottle babies. You were, at least until they discovered you had been stealing mine out of the crib in the dog cart.

You owe me the money. Or you’re ruined. That would be fine. On your own, sweetie, you’ll be in jail in six months. Where you’ve always belonged.

Pay or die, sister bitch.

Your sister in chains,

Ginger

HARNEY

I tried to stop it. I really did. I loved those women. Fire and ice, blood and guts, yin and Yankton, South Dakota.

The first time I saw them standing in a wheat stubble field outside Valentine, Nebraska, that long, stroking wind pushing their cheap dresses against their bodies so ripe… the sensation was this: lick your finger, then touch their skin, and try to get your finger back; touch them with your hand and pray that they don’t explode; hell, sometimes just looking at them made you think the whole fucking world was going to end in a single orgasm. Not with a bang, no, nor a whimper. But one long, glorious groan of infinite pleasure.

Romantic twaddle, I told myself as I bolted the aisle to the wheel. I’d been to several schools: Gunnison High, Colby, Soledad, and ten years drifting and grifting with the carnivals. I’ve learned some things. If you’ve never been locked up, you don’t know what the world is all about. Never trust anybody working the carnivals. Shit, never trust anybody. And never say romantic twaddle.

The first time with Jasmine, I thought I’d broken some ribs. The second time I was sure I’d broken my back. The third time I fainted.

I made a drunken mistake early on, in a citizen’s bar outside El Paso. I told the ring-a-ding guy about fainting. Drunk and in love until he said, “Shit, man, when she was a kid she used to jack off the Shetlands to keep them copacetic. Story is, man, she killed three of them one year.”

I ran. I came back. A dozen times. Jasmine was worse than Soledad. I knew that if I watched my back and walked their line, I’d get out. Eventually. Jasmine didn’t work that way. I stole her money; she had the roustabouts beat me until I cried. Something that never happened inside. I fucked her sister for a long time-great, but not the same-acknowledged our baby girl, and Jasmine laughed at me. She knew the worst.

Except for Ginger, the twin. How could two women be so different-bodies of long, sweeping curves frosted with glowing red-brown skin smoother than polished ivory and steaming with an internal fire-Jasmine seemed to laugh in flames when she came and her breath seemed hot enough to scorch my beard. Ginger was terrific, but ordinary. Jasmine was heaven and hell, cocaine and crank, star light and black hole.

I gave our little girl, Pearl, to a childless family outside Marengo, Iowa, and wished the people all the best luck. They seemed like nice people. If Pearl had been a cat, I would have had her fixed.

Jasmine had to be first, or I could have never finished it. After I cut her throat, I dumped her into a swamp outside Mud Lake, Wisconsin. In that shallow, muddy water, she floated like a queen. All I ever loved. Ginger was easier. She lifted her neck to the blade as if she’d been waiting for years. “Jasmine,” she whispered, as if she knew. Ginger’s yellow dress, blood like a flood, bobbed in the small Minnesota creek, drifted like a fading light. As always, I’d done what they wanted.

Now it was time for me. The raucous silence of Stillwater prison, the quiet needle smooth in the vein, the end of memories. Peace.

PREACHER’S KID by JESSICA POWERS

Andrews

Looking back on it, with everything that’s happened since, Sammy disappearing and all, I’m not sure I did the right thing. I’ve seen many things in my life, and I’ve learned to let many things slide, but it’s not just me, you see. It’s the wife. She cares about these things. So the second time Chief brought Sammy home, drunk as a skunk, saying he’d found him passed out just inside the Andrews County line, I felt I had to speak to the boy.

“You’re making your mother look bad to the church ladies,” I said, thinking he’d have some compassion for her feelings. They’d always been close. “Those are her friends. They’ve known you since you were a small boy, a good boy.”

He sneered.

There was something in that sneer that made me think twice about what I said next. But I went ahead, glancing at Charlene to see her reaction as I spoke. She was sitting on the couch in her bathrobe, looking as anxious as the bride I married thirty-three years ago.

“Drinking is the devil’s business,” I told the boy. “Don’t bring the devil’s business back to this house again.”

He looked at me then as if I’d said something curious, and that’s when I noticed the color of his eyes in the morning light-amber from one angle, green from the other, same as my own.

Later, I got to thinking. I got to thinking how maybe I should’ve asked him why. Why he was staying out all night. Why he was drinking. But at the time, I was just so concerned with what he was doing, why didn’t even occur to me. It was only after he disappeared for a while, then came back, then disappeared again for good, that I started thinking about how he’d looked haunted toward the end. Like something-or somebody-was driving him to drink.

In my line of business, I’ve seen worse than a drunk preacher’s kid, it’s true. Over to Seminole, just thirty-odd miles north, preacher’s kid went crazy in the middle of the night, strung up his parents in their bed with purple twine-purple!-and set fire to the bed. In Odessa, just south, preacher’s kid made news when they discovered he’d been doing drug deals on church property. The state came in and seized all the church’s assets, just like that, an entire church reduced to rubble in a matter of days.

Takes my breath away sometimes, the way evil can sink its teeth in somebody, shake them hard, until it’s their own neck broken and bleeding.

That’s what worried me about the boy and wherever it is he’d gone to.

It’s not easy to drink in Andrews. We’re a dry county. To buy any kind of liquor, you have to drive elsewhere. Out toward Odessa, just across the county line, you’ll find the first liquor store, just lying in wait. I’m not one to take up causes, but there’s something wrong when a town manages to keep itself free of sin yet has to contend with the devil permanently camping out on its perimeters.

For a while after our talk, Sammy didn’t drink, or if he did, it was in secret. Then one morning he wasn’t in his bed. Charlene wanted to call Chief right away and it’s true, I made her wait. I said, “There’s no reason to involve the police when, like as not, the boy’ll come dragging his sorry self through that door in another hour, barely able to stand on the two legs God gave him.”

I saw something in Charlene give then, in the way her eyes became all dark and soft. For a moment, it looked like she was resigned. But how could she be resigned to Sammy’s drinking? Or to his disappearing act? She had something tucked away in the back of her mind but I couldn’t figure it out.

One of us called the church secretary, I don’t even remember who, said I’d be in late that day. Then I sat myself down on the living room couch with a cup of coffee, waiting for the boy to show up so I could give him a piece of my mind.

I am not a fire-’n’-brimstone kind of preacher. The good church ladies who make up my congregation say I’m a salt-’n’-pepper kind of preacher instead, mostly pepper. “Too much pepper, Preacher,” one of them told me once as she left the church one day, never to return. “Too much pepper.”

That day, however, I was in a fire-’n’-brimstone kind of mood and I planned to give it to the boy when he came home.

Only he didn’t come. Both of us waited as long as we could. Eventually, Charlene had to get on over to the hospital-we like to joke that her boss isn’t as understanding as mine-and by lunchtime, fingernails bitten off to the quick, I decided to get off to the church before I started gnawing on the flesh too. Andrews is a small town and people know where to find me. If the boy turned up in a compromising situation, the church would be the first place they’d call.

But he didn’t turn up that day or the next. He didn’t show up until Sunday, showed up in the back of the church, right in the middle of my sermon. I was preaching on the loaves and fishes, the miracles our Savior performs, the way He multiplies and provides. It’s hard to yell at your boy when he’s been gone so long, the only thing you want anymore is to see him walk through the door, and then he shows up right when you’re talking about the mercy of God.

So I never gave him a piece of my mind. And now I wish I had, because a few weeks later he disappeared and never came back.

I suppose that at first I thought Chief would take care of it. I suppose that I thought, It’s a small town. Chief will put this case first, he’ll realize the importance, he’ll put every resource toward finding the boy.

Until then, I hadn’t realized how different police work is from church work. Police work isn’t about saving anybody. Or, at least, it isn’t about saving a teenager who’s just gotten a little off track, a little lost, who needs somebody to find him, to help him home.

In fact, the first thing Chief brought up when we went to see him was our recent trouble. “Didn’t Sammy disappear for a few days awhile back?” he asked, scratching his stomach, drinking out of a big mug on his desk, and eyeing us over the rim. Chief had an odd tic I’d never noticed before, the eye shuddering in sudden rapid winks and the skin underneath it trembling and heaving. It was distracting.

“You know he did, Chief,” I said.

“He’s probably run off again. My guess is he’ll show up in a few days, just like last time. These things happen.” He moved some papers on his desk and looked at Charlene as he spoke. “When he comes back, you should sit down and have a long talk with him.”

The wife was so nervous, I was afraid she was going to start chewing her handkerchief. I took it from her gently and put it in my pocket.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked.

“Not much,” he said. For the first time, he looked vaguely sympathetic. “He’s seventeen. As far as the law in Texas is concerned, he can leave Andrews whenever he wants. We don’t do much unless there’s some sign of foul play.”

“That’s that then,” I said, and we left the station.

On the way home, Charlene asked me what I wanted to do.

“I guess we wait,” I said.

After that day, the wife and I started fighting. We’ve always been a placid couple, but here was Charlene, snorting like an angry horse, face beet-red, screaming how this and that and the other thing didn’t make her happy or satisfied or what have you.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked her once after the screaming was over and she was sitting on the couch across from me, her hands in her lap, open and turned up toward the ceiling.

“It’s too late,” she said. She was staring at those hands, not me, when she said that.

“Do you want a divorce?” I asked, appalled and, frankly, ashamed. I spend so much of my time counseling couples on how to mend broken marriages and here I was facing it myself, no clue how it all happened. How did it happen? What had happened?

“That’s not what I meant, Charles,” she said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

She looked up at me then and I realized, all of a sudden, Why, she and I have the same eyes, the same eyes as the boy. I broke down weeping. All these years, thirty-three years now, I was looking into a mirror when I looked in her eyes, and I’d never realized it before.

“Do you believe in miracles?” she asked.

She’d asked me this question once before, back when she was supplicating the Lord to touch her barren womb and give her a child, just like Hannah in the Old Testament. And when her belly was swollen with the boy and her eyes swollen with joy, I reminded her of her many prayers, and that is when we decided to name him Samuel, which means God heard.

“Of course,” I said. “Isn’t our boy’s life a miracle?”

“No, I mean real miracles,” she said, her voice flat, emotionless. “Do you believe that we could pray and ask God to send our boy back-my boy back-and here he’d come, walking through that door, as if he’d never gone anywhere at all?”

I didn’t know how to answer her, so I said nothing.

I couldn’t get the question Charlene asked out of my head. Many nights, I can’t even count how many, I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at her face while she slept. I counted every single wrinkle-forty-two in all, if you included the soft folds of skin on her neck. Sometimes I think we don’t pay attention to all the tiny changes, and then one day we wake up and realize we don’t recognize the person we married.

I thought about the facts of our life together-how we married when we were so young, too young, I realize now, only eighteen and nineteen years old; how we tried to have a child for so many years before she conceived; the way she always had to work, because my salary as a minister in a small Southern Baptist church could never quite pay the bills; the way she wasn’t just a good mother, she was a great mother, because she’d wanted a child for so long before Sammy came; how our life had been made up of endless church meetings and hospital rounds. Charlene was a nurse, and we made a good pair, her healing bodies and me healing souls. She’d always worked with babies, newborns, and that’d been hard for her for many years when we were struggling and struggling to get pregnant. But, as she’d always said, sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Still, as I thought about all our years together, I realized more than ever how facts about a person can’t even come close to explaining them.

Sometimes when I counsel young couples about to get married, I like to tell them that the amazing thing about marriage is the way your spouse remains a mystery, even after decades of living together. After more than three decades, there are moments when I realize I don’t really know Charlene. Who she was. Who she is. Who she’s going to become.

Night after night, while Charlene slept, I sat in my study and remembered our lives together. The years before the boy were a haze made up only of Charlene’s desperate prayers. His birth, seventeen years ago, marked a complete transformation in our lives. It felt like we’d been wandering in the wilderness for years and the Lord had suddenly flung open the door to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey.

My biggest regret in life is the fact that I was out of town on the day of his birth. We were living in Amarillo at the time and I happened to be attending the annual Southern Baptist Convention on the day he arrived, early but healthy. I rushed home as soon as I could, and when I walked through the door Charlene was nursing him in the big rocking chair we’d bought when she found out she was pregnant.

I went and knelt beside them to kiss and welcome my baby boy, the one we’d been waiting for-all our lives, it seemed, now that he was here.

Sometimes-and it feels like a sin to say this-the day I was saved by the Lord and the day I knelt by their feet, the first time I saw Sammy, blur together as if they were the same day.

Still, I’ll admit I was surprised by the look of him. Charlene and I are both slight, and even as a baby he was big-boned and long, with ears and a nose I didn’t recognize. Some men might have wondered but I did not. I knew he was my son. I knew the way I knew Charlene would be my wife the day I met her.

We were never happier than after he’d come into our lives. It had been Charlene’s biggest heartache, the wait.

Around that time, there was a need for a pastor here in Andrews. I’d applied before the Convention and when the call came just days after Sammy’s birth, she begged me to take it. She wanted to raise Sammy in a small town, with small town values, she said. So we left Amarillo and made ourselves a home here.

Sammy was the darling of the church, a good student, and an excellent football player. I suppose there were girls that liked him, but we never talked about it. I warned him that carnal desires can ruin a man’s life and we left it at that.

Andrews had been a good place to raise a son, I thought, though when he started driving to the county line to drink, I was reminded of what the Lord said after He discovered that Cain had murdered his brother Abel, how sin is always crouching at your door, how it desires to have you, but you must learn to master it. No matter where you go, you cannot escape what is lurking in your heart.

A few weeks after the boy disappeared, Charlene stopped coming to church, not even bothering to explain why. The good church ladies-her friends, my congregation-they all asked after her. I said she wasn’t feeling well.

That’s when I hired Guy Neely, P.I. Asked him to find the boy, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, it didn’t matter.

“Just ask him to please come home,” I said. “Tell him his mother’s soul hangs in the balance. If he doesn’t care about his own soul, maybe he’ll care about hers. They were always close.”

Neely was a tall man, and his snakeskin cowboy boots only added to his height. He towered over me, the way the boy always had. He was the sort of man who chews gum and tobacco at the same time. While I talked, he was chewing gum so fast I wondered if his jaw would come unhinged.

He spat dark juice into a small cup. “You’ll excuse me for being blunt,” he said. “But what if your son is dead?”

“Then bring his remains home so his mother can have some peace.”

I had high hopes, even if the trail was a few weeks old. I was pretty sure the boy wasn’t dead. He was just hiding-from us, from God.

Or maybe he was seeking something he would never find.

Neely came to the house on a Monday.

He looked over the boy’s things, what little he’d had: the bookshelves with only one book, a Bible; some T-shirts; a pair of boots. He sat at the foot of Sammy’s bed, looking around. Then he hung around in front of the garage, observing the neighborhood where our son had grown up, where we’d spent most of our adult lives, right after Sammy came along. He was chewing tobacco and occasionally spitting on the sidewalk.

I thought about asking him not to spit. But I didn’t.

Neely regarded the two of us. “What was the first hint that something might be wrong?” he asked.

I looked at Charlene. She looked at the traces of tobacco juice staining the sidewalk.

“There’s always been something wrong,” she said, “since the first day I brought him home from the hospital. I always knew he wouldn’t stay, he was too perfect, too good, too right for us.”

She’d said things like that before during the years Sammy was growing. Charlene had been a fearful mother, possessive in the way she watched over him, as if afraid someone was going to come along and snatch him away. It had sometimes seemed like the fear would devour her.

“And more recently?” Neely asked.

“And more recently…” She stopped.

“He started to drink recently,” I said, to fill in the blanks. “He’d drive off down toward Odessa, get drunk. Chief brought him home a few times.”

“Kids his age will do that,” Neely agreed.

“No,” I said. “This was different. He was upset about something. Angry.” I thought back on the day he’d sneered at me. Come to think of it, the way he’d sneered, it was almost as if he thought it was funny that I didn’t want him bringing the devil’s drink home. Like there was something of Satan already here.

“Any idea what upset him?”

I shook my head. Charlene mumbled something.

“What?” I asked.

“Did you say something?” Neely asked.

“I upset him,” she said, louder this time.

“Are you a difficult person to get along with?” he asked.

“Not especially,” I answered for her. “Charlene has always been a good wife and a good mother. They’ve always gotten along.”

“Then why do you think you upset him?” His tone was gentle.

“He was upset by who I am,” she answered.

Neely nodded, like he’d heard all this before. “And who are you, exactly?”

She started to talk then. She had a hunger, she said. She’d had it for years. All her life, maybe, she said. It went deep. It had sharp teeth and bit her insides. Sometimes it felt as though the hunger was consuming her altogether. Sometimes it was all she could do, she said, not to give in to it.

Neely was looking at her from the corner of his eyes, as if he was afraid he would startle her if he looked directly at her. “Is that so?” he said. “And do you? Give in to it?”

“No,” she said. She smiled. “Okay,” she said. “One time. But only once.”

When she said that, I looked away, down the street, to the end of the block, where cement dribbles out until it becomes the flat, dry brown of west Texas, stretching to the place where land meets clear blue sky, as far as the eyes see, just a hazy line on the horizon separating heaven from earth.

The smell of Neely’s tobacco soured in my stomach.

I thought of the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. That had been the hunger in my life. What was hers?

For the first time, doubts about the wife crawled right into my head.

Charlene continued. “Do you know what I’m talking about when I say the word hunger, Mr. Neely? Have you ever felt like you’re starving? Have you ever looked in the mirror and all you see is a skeleton-that’s all that’s left of you, somebody you don’t even recognize because you’re so very, very hungry?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, courteous but firm. “Can’t say that I have.”

“Well,” she said.

We waited for more. But she was done.

My hands were shaking. I’m a preacher, so I know what sin is, the tragedy of it, the way it corrupts a person and turns everything they love to dust. But still I was surprised how calm Neely was. Like he’d seen everything under the sun already.

I paid him for a week in advance, gave him Sammy’s Social Security number, and watched as he drove away. I wanted him to find something, and at the same time I was hoping he would not. The wife had scared me.

I went inside, ready to ask Charlene about all that she’d said, but she was hunched up in bed, blankets over her head.

“Charlene?” I said softly.

She didn’t respond. So I went away.

Neely returned two days later, with Chief, which surprised me. They came to the church. I saw them from the office window, and went outside to greet them, to invite them inside. Neely cleared his throat. He spit out the remainder of his tobacco juice before entering the building, left the cup outside on the sidewalk. I appreciated that.

“Have you already found him?” I asked as soon as we were inside my office. I had closed the door. Stacey’s a good church secretary, but there are things she doesn’t need to know.

It was Chief who answered. “We found him all right.” He had a stern expression on his face, which seemed to have calmed the winking-blinking facial tic.

“Well, where is he?” I demanded. “How is he? Is he okay? Is he in trouble? Did you bring him back to Andrews?”

“He was in Amarillo,” Neely said. “But he’s here now.”

We were still standing and I made a gesture to open the door. “Take me to him.”

“We have a warrant, Preacher,” Chief interrupted.

My hand paused on the doorknob. “What has he done?” I asked, so quick, my mind going to a thousand scenarios, knowing how it’s possible to get going downhill so fast, you can’t stop yourself even when you want to.

“It’s not what he’s done,” Neely said.

“Then what? Who? Me?”

“Your wife, it’s what your wife’s done.”

“What’s she done?” My preacher’s voice-usually sonorous and controlled-was soaring. “You have a warrant to arrest Charlene?”

“No, we have a warrant for your DNA,” Chief said.

“What? Why?”

“We can do it here,” Chief said, “or you can come on down to the station.”

“Let me see the warrant.” My heart was racing. I scanned the paper quickly, but it didn’t tell me anything that they hadn’t already said. “What exactly is going on?”

“Do you mind coming down to the station?” Chief asked, only he didn’t really ask, it was more like a statement. His mouth was bunched up, the lips pressed firmly together.

Neely’s face had never been expressive, but now it was a blank slate.

“Okay,” I said.

We stepped outside my office, the two men following me.

“I’m gone for the day,” I told Stacey. I could barely think for the questions swirling around like dust devils in my head.

There were four cars in the parking lot-mine, Stacey’s, Chief’s, and Neely’s.

“You’ll come with me,” Chief said.

“Front or back?” I asked, still wondering how much trouble I was in.

“Your choice,” he said.

I sat in front.

As we drove out of the parking lot, tires spinning in the gravel, I looked back at the small redbrick building with its white steeple and the wooden cross hanging over the door frame. Neely’s spittoon sat on the sidewalk, right in front of the sanctuary door.

The sky was Texas-style blue, expansive and deep, clouds scudding across its face. Usually, that sky reminds me of the wide, wide mercy of God. Today, it made me feel like anything could happen, anything at all.

As we walked through the station, I caught a glimpse of Charlene sitting in a small room as a police officer went inside. Another officer was sitting across from her, a tape recorder in his hand.

“… there was the cord wrapped around his neck…” I heard her saying.

The door closed and I lost sight of her.

And then there was Sammy, sitting in the hallway, his big frame impossible to ignore. He looked tired and dirty. He hadn’t had a haircut or a shave since he’d disappeared, and the beard and scruffy hair made him look like a man and a stranger.

Oh Sammy. My Sammy.

The breath caught in my throat.

“Sammy,” I called, my voice high and unnatural and cracking.

He looked up and our eyes met and again I was startled by their amber-green, so like his mother’s, so like mine. Samuel. My boy. The Lord heard.

Neely pushed gently from behind, and we stumbled into a small room. Chief hustled inside behind us.

“You really did find him,” I babbled. “And he looks all right, doesn’t he? Isn’t he all right?”

“He’s fine,” Neely said.

“Thank you, Lord,” I breathed. “Thank you.”

The last thank you was directed at Neely, who nodded in acknowledgment. He seemed like a decent man, even if he wasn’t explaining to me what was going on.

After they swabbed my cheek to get their DNA sample, Chief gestured to a chair, and I sat.

“When can I see my boy?” I asked. I felt like a small child, petitioning an arbitrary adult.

“Actually, we have some questions to ask you, if you don’t mind,” Chief said. The tic was back. It looked like a worm moving beneath the skin.

“Sure,” I said, “anything I can do to help. What are you looking for, anyway? Why did you need my DNA sample?”

“We don’t think Sammy is yours,” Neely said.

I stood then, leapt to my feet. “No,” I said. “No, no, no! Sammy is mine, has always been mine.”

Had Charlene? Could Charlene?

I have a hunger, she’d said. Sometimes it’s all I can do not to give in to it.

And do you? Give in to it? Neely’d asked.

One time, she’d said. But only once.

“Charlene is a good woman,” I insisted. “A faithful woman, 100 percent. It’s not even possible, what you’re saying, that she would’ve-” I choked on the words.

And then I grew spitfire angry.

“All right,” I snapped. “Fine. It happens all the time. Maybe he’s my son, maybe he isn’t.” My face was growing red. “But even if he isn’t my son, adultery is a matter for the church, not the police. Sin is the Lord’s work.” It would have been a comfort to stand behind a pulpit and shout down the voices that whispered evil all around me. But here I was, weak and vulnerable in the face of something I didn’t expect. “I don’t see how this is any of your business,” I said.

I glared at the two silent men standing in front of me.

And suddenly, they both looked uncomfortable.

Neely cleared his throat.

“We don’t think he’s Charlene’s son, either,” Chief said.

It felt like a hammer to the spine, to the throat, to the chest, everywhere, my whole body beaten. “What?” And my voice didn’t sound like my own, it sounded like an old man’s.

Neely slapped a newspaper story down on the table in front of me. It was the Amarillo Globe-News, dated seventeen years back, July, the week or so after we’d left there to move here.

I scanned it, heart beating beating beating.

DEAD BABY SWAPPED

Parents in a Panic to Find their Missing Newborn AMARILLO, TX-Police are investigating a possible kidnapping at Amarillo General Hospital. On June 13, Rachel Smith, 26, gave birth to a healthy baby boy that appeared to have died during the night. In the course of a routine autopsy, hospital officials discovered that the dead baby was not related to Smith. Police are currently searching for both the Smith baby and for the parents of the dead baby.

I looked at the two men who stood before me. “What are you saying?”

“You know what we’re saying,” Neely replied.

“Sammy is my son,” I whispered.

“Correction: Sammy is Rachel Smith’s son.” Chief smirked. “Your son was buried by the city of Amarillo.”

My knees buckled and I had to sit.

“You gonna make it?” Neely asked.

“I don’t know how to make any sense of this,” I said.

“You really didn’t know?” he asked.

“Know what?”

“Your wife was alone when she went into labor,” Neely said, “and the baby was born dead. She went to the hospital where she worked and switched the dead baby with the Smith baby.”

There was a picture in my head, a picture of Charlene, alone, holding the dead body of our son close to her chest, weeping and cursing God for taking her miracle away.

“Charlene told you this?” I asked. “She’s talking about it?”

“Oh, she’s talking,” Chief said. He shook his head. “She won’t shut up. It seems she started feeling guilty about what she’d done after all these years. Apparently, a few months ago she told your son-excuse me, Rachel Smith’s son-the truth.”

A bitter laugh escaped my lips. “‘What is truth?’” I quoted Pontius Pilate, unsure who I expected to answer that question, the fallen men standing before me or the God I’ve served all my life. It felt like I’d been robbed of my very life. Something evil had slept right next to me for years, and I’d never known how close it was to me, how I’d loved it, how I’d nurtured it, how I’d been blind to it.

“When we found Sammy, he was in Amarillo looking for his real parents,” Neely said.

“We’ve contacted Amarillo police,” said Chief. “They’re trying to locate the Smith family. Once they have all the samples, it’s just a matter of waiting for the DNA results to confirm what we already suspect.”

“How long will that take?” I asked, throat dry.

“It depends on how long the forensics lab is backed up,” Chief said. “A few weeks. Possibly a month.”

I swallowed. Then I swallowed again. It could take a month to find out if my boy was really my boy? Because suddenly, that was all that mattered to me. Although deep down, I already knew. Maybe I always had.

“Can I bring you some water?” Neely asked.

“Sure.” I was parched, thirstier than I’d been all my life. If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.

Chief opened the door to let Neely through. I looked out at the busy police department. It wasn’t a big place, so I could see everything there was to see. Sammy was just outside, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, like he was tired beyond belief, a tired that went beyond the body, a tired that bit its sharp teeth into a soul and wouldn’t let go. And I wanted so badly to say to him, Come. Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

But I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to speak to him, not yet, maybe not for a long time, maybe not ever. Perhaps he would never want to talk to me, and with a clarity that comes with revelation, I realized I had no right to ask him to.

I had lost my boy.

The door to the interrogation room opened and for just a few seconds, I could see Charlene inside, talking to somebody, a police officer. She was talking to him the way one might talk to a pastor, I saw. She was saying everything, leaving nothing aside, confessing her sin, hoping for forgiveness, for salvation.

But police are not in the salvation business. That would be me, picking up the pieces after the trial. I didn’t want to lose her too.

Like Sammy, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back until it touched the wall. Images of the boy and the wife flooded the black space between my eyes and my eyelids. There was Sammy, just a boy, hefty and athletic, running down the sidewalk in front of our home after a football. There was Charlene, standing at the door, calling after him not to go too far, calling after him to come home. There they were, sitting in a church pew while I preached a sermon, Sammy fiddling until Charlene handed him a piece of paper and a crayon, her expression serene as she turned her face back toward mine. I saw her in her nurse’s uniform, kissing Sammy goodbye at the door as she headed out to work the night shift at the hospital, headed out to heal the bodies of sick babies and their mothers.

And I could not-I could not-believe he was somebody else’s boy.

I turned my thoughts toward the flatland surrounding the small town of Andrews, where I’d been a preacher of the Word for the past seventeen years.

I’d always said that land was like God, endless and encompassing everything.

I thought about how a man could just walk out into that land and keep going for miles.

I thought about how a man might never come to the end of it.

SIX-FINGER JACK by JOE R. LANSDALE

Gladewater

Jack had six fingers. That’s how Big O, the big, fat, white, straw-hatted son of a bitch, was supposed to know he was dead. Maybe by some real weird luck a guy could kill some other black man with six fingers, cut off his hand, and bring it in and claim it belonged to Jack, but not likely. So he put the word out that whoever killed Jack and cut off his paw and brought it back was gonna get $100,000 and a lot of goodwill.

I went out there after Jack just like a lot of other fellas, plus one woman I knew of, Lean Mama Tootin’, who was known for shotgun shootin’ and ice-pick work.

But the thing I had on them was I was screwing Jack’s old lady. Jack didn’t know it, of course. Jack was a bad dude, and it wouldn’t have been smart to let him know my bucket was in his well. Nope. Wouldn’t have been smart for me, or for Jack’s old lady. If he’d known that before he had to make a run for it, might have been good to not sleep, ’cause he might show up and be most unpleasant. I can be unpleasant too, but I prefer when I’m on the stalk, not when I’m being stalked. It sets the dynamics all different.

You see, I’m a philosophical kind of guy.

Thing was, though, I’d been laying the pipeline to his lady for about six weeks, because Jack had been on the run ever since he’d tried to muscle in on Big O’s whores and take over that business, found out he couldn’t. That wasn’t enough, he took up with Big O’s old lady like it didn’t matter none, but it did. Rumor was Big O put the old lady under about three feet of concrete out by his lake-boat stalls, buried her in the hole while she was alive, hands tied behind her back, staring up at that concrete mixer truck dripping out the goo, right on top of her naked self.

Jack hears this little tidbit of information, he quit fooling around and made with the jackrabbit, took off lickety-split, so fast he almost left a vapor trail. It’s one thing to fight one man, or two, but to fight a whole organization, not so easy. Especially if that organization belongs to Big O.

Loodie, Jack’s personal woman, was a hot flash number who liked to have her ashes hauled, and me, I’m a tall, lean fellow with a good smile and a willing attitude. Loodie was ready to lose Jack because he had a bad temper and a bit of a smell. He was short on baths and long on cologne. Smellgood juice on top of his stinky smell, she said, created a kind of funk that would make a skunk roll over dead and cause a wild hyena to leave the body where it lay.

She, on the other hand, was like sweet, wet sin dipped in coffee and sugar with a dash of cinnamon; God’s own mistress with a surly attitude, which goes to show even He likes a little bit of the devil now and then.

She’d been asked about Jack by them who wanted to know. Bad folks with guns, and a need for dough. But she lied, said she didn’t know where he was. Everyone believed her because she talked so bad about Jack. Said stuff about his habits, about how he beat her, how bad he was in bed, and how he stunk. It was convincing stuff to everyone.

But me.

I knew that woman was a liar, because I knew her whole family, and they was the sort, like my daddy used to say, would rather climb a tree and lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth and be given free flowers. Lies flowed through their veins as surely as blood.

She told me about Jack one night while we were in bed, right after we had toted the water to the mountain. We’re laying there looking at the ceiling, like there’s gonna be manna from heaven, watching the defective light from the church across the way flash in and out and bounce along the wall, and she says in that burnt-toast voice of hers, “You split that money, I’ll tell you where he is.”

“You wanna split it?”

“Naw, I’m thinkin’ maybe you could keep half and I could give the other half to the cat.”

“You don’t got a cat.”

“Well, I got another kind of cat, and that cat is one you like to pet.”

“You’re right there,” I said. “Tellin’ me where he is, that’s okay, but I still got to do the groundwork. Hasslin’ with that dude ain’t no easy matter, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. So, me doin’ what I’m gonna have to do, that’s gonna be dangerous as trying to play with a daddy lion’s balls. So, that makes me worth more than half, and you less than half.”

“You’re gonna shoot him when he ain’t lookin’, and you know it.”

“I still got to take the chance.”

She reached over to the nightstand, nabbed up a pack, shook out a cigarette, lit it with a cheap lighter, took a deep drag, coughed out a puff, said, “Split, or nothin’.”

“Hell, honey, you know I’m funnin’,” I said. “I’ll split it right in half with you.”

I was lying through my teeth. She may have figured such, but she figured with me she at least had a possibility, even if it was as thin as the edge of playing card.

She said, “He’s done gone deep into East Texas. He’s over in Gladewater. Drove there in his big black Cadillac that he had a chop shop turn blue.”

“So he drove over in a blue Caddy, not a black one,” I said. “I mean, if it was black, and he had it painted blue, it ain’t black no more. It’s blue.”

“Aren’t you one for the details, and at a time like this,” she said, and rubbed my leg with her foot. “But technically, baby, you are so correct.”

That night Loodie laid me out a map written in pencil on a brown paper sack, made me swear I was gonna split the money with her again. I told her what she wanted to hear. Next morning, I started over to Gladewater.

Jack was actually in a place outside of the town, along the Sabine River, back in the bottom land where the woods was still thick, down a little trail that wound around and around, to a cabin Loodie said was about the size of a postage stamp, provided the stamp had been scissor-trimmed.

I oiled my automatic, put on gloves, went to the store and bought a hatchet, cruised out early, made Gladewater in about an hour and fifteen, glided over the Sabine River bridge. I took a gander at the water, which was dirty brown and up high on account of rain. I had grown up along that river, over near a place called Big Sandy. It was a place of hot sand and tall pines and no opportunity.

It wasn’t a world I missed none.

I stopped at a little diner in Gladewater and had me a hamburger. There was a little white girl behind the counter with hair blond as sunlight, and we made some goo-goo eyes at one another. Had I not been on a mission, I might have found out when she got off work, seen if me and her could get a drink and find a motel and try and make the beast with two backs.

Instead, I finished up, got me a tall Styrofoam cup of coffee to go. I drove over to a food store and went in and bought a jar of pickles, a bag of cookies, and a bottle of water. I put the pickles on the floorboard between the backseat and the front; it was a huge jar and it fit snugly. I laid the bag with the cookies and the water on the backseat.

The bottoms weren’t far, about twenty minutes, but the roads were kind of tricky, some of them were little more than mud and a suggestion. Others were slick and shiny like snot on a water glass.

I drove carefully and sucked on my coffee. I went down a wide road that became narrow, then took another that wound off into the deeper woods. Drove until I found what I thought was the side road that led to the cabin. It was really a glorified path. Sun-hardened, not very wide, bordered on one side by trees and on the other by marshy land that would suck the shoes off your feet, or bog up a car tire until you had to pull a gun and shoot the engine like a dying horse.

I stopped in the road and held Loodie’s hand-drawn map, checked it, looked up. There was a curve went around and between the trees and the marsh. There were tire tracks in it. Pretty fresh. At the bend in the curve was a little wooden bridge with no railings.

So far Loodie’s map was on the money.

I finished off my coffee, got out and took a pee behind the car, and watched some big white waterbirds flying over. When I was growing up over in Big Sandy I used to see that kind of thing often, not to mention all manner of wildlife, and for a moment I felt nostalgic. That lasted about as long as it took me to stick my dick back in my pants and zipper up.

I took my hatchet out of the trunk and rested it on the front passenger seat as I got back in the car. I pulled out my automatic and checked it over, popped out the clip and slid it back in. I always liked the sound it made when it snapped into place. I looked at myself in the mirror, like maybe I was going on a date. Thought maybe if things fucked up, it might be the last time I got a good look at myself. I put the car in gear, wheeled around the curve and over the bridge, going at a slow pace, the map on the seat beside me, held in place by the hatchet.

I came to a wide patch, like on the map, and pulled off the road. Someone had dumped their garbage where the spot ended close to the trees. There were broken-up plastic bags spilling cans and paper, and there was an old bald tire leaning against a tree, as if taking a break before rolling on its way.

I got out and walked around the bend, looked down the road. There was a broad pond of water to the left, leaked there by the dirty Sabine. On the right, next to the woods, was a log cabin. Small, but well made and kind of cool looking. Loodie said it was on property Jack’s parents had owned. Twenty acres or so. Cabin had a chimney chugging smoke. Out front was a big blue Cadillac Eldorado, the tires and sides splashed with mud. It was parked close to the cabin. I could see through the Cadillac’s windows, and they lined up with a window in the cabin. I moved to the side of the road, stepped in behind some trees, and studied the place carefully.

There weren’t any wires running to the cabin. There was a kind of lean-to shed off the back. Loodie told me that was where Jack kept the generator that gave the joint electricity. Mostly the cabin was heated by the firewood piled against the shed, and lots of blankets come late at night. Had a gas stove with a nice-sized tank. I could just imagine Jack in there with Loodie, his six fingers on her sweet chocolate skin. It made me want to kill him all the more, even though I knew Loodie was the kind of girl made a minx look virginal. You gave your heart to that woman, she’d eat it.

I went back to the car and got my gun-cleaning goods out of the glove box, took out the clip, and cleaned my pistol and reloaded it. It was unnecessary, because the gun was clean as a model’s ass, but I like to be sure.

I patted the hatchet on the seat like it was a dog.

I sat there and waited, thought about what I was gonna do with $100,000. You planned to kill someone and cut off their hand, you had to think about stuff like that, and a lot.

Considering on it, I decided I wasn’t gonna get foolish and buy a car. One I had got me around and it looked all right enough. I wasn’t gonna spend it on Loodie or some other split tail in a big-time way. I was gonna use it carefully. I might get some new clothes and put some money down on a place instead of renting. Fact was, I might move to Houston.

If I lived close to the bone and picked up the odd bounty job now and again, just stuff I wanted to do, like bits that didn’t involve me having to deal with some goon big enough to pull off one of my legs and beat me with it, I could live safer, and better. Could have some stretches where I didn’t have to do a damn thing but take it easy, all on account of that $100,000 nest egg.

Course, Jack wasn’t gonna bend over and grease up for me. He wasn’t like that. He could be a problem.

I got a paperback out of the glove box and read for a while. I couldn’t get my mind to stick to it. The sky turned gray. My light was going. I put the paperback in the glove box with the gun-cleaning kit. It started to rain. I watched it splat on the windshield. Thunder knocked at the sky. Lightning licked a crooked path against the clouds and passed away.

I thought about all manner of different ways of pulling this off, and finally came up with something, decided it was good enough, because all I needed was a little edge.

The rain was hard and wild. It made me think Jack wasn’t gonna be coming outside. I felt safe enough for the moment. I tilted the seat back and lay there with the gun in my hand, my arm folded across my chest, and dozed for a while with the rain pounding the roof.

It was fresh night when I awoke. I waited about an hour, picked up the hatchet, and got out of the car. It was still raining, and the rain was cold. I pulled my coat tight around me, stuck the hatchet through my belt, and went to the back of the car and unlocked the trunk. I got the jack handle out of there, stuck it in my belt opposite the hatchet, started walking around the curve.

The cabin had a faint light shining through the window, that in turn shone through the lined-up windows of the car. As I walked, I saw a shape, like a huge bullet with arms, move in front of the glass. That size made me lose a step briefly, but I gathered up my courage, kept going.

When I got to the back of the cabin, I carefully climbed on the pile of firewood, made my way to the top of the lean-to. It sloped down off the main roof of the cabin, so it didn’t take too much work to get up there, except that the hatchet and tire iron gave me a bit of trouble in my belt, and my gloves made my grip a little slippery.

On top of the cabin, I didn’t stand up and walk, but in stead carefully made my way on hands and knees toward the front of the place.

When I got there, I peered over the edge. The cabin door was about three feet below me. I moved over so I was overlooking the Cadillac. A knock on the door wouldn’t bring Jack out. Even he was too smart for that, but that Cadillac, he loved it. I pulled out the tire iron, nestled down on the roof, peeking over the edge, cocked my arm back, and threw the iron at the windshield. It made a hell of a crash, cracking the glass so that it looked like a spiderweb, setting off the car alarm.

I pulled my gun and waited. I heard the cabin door open, heard the thumping of Jack’s big feet. He came around there mad as a hornet. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He hadn’t had time to notice the cold. But the best thing was, it didn’t look like he had a gun on him.

I aimed and shot him. I think I hit him somewhere on top of the shoulder, I wasn’t sure. But I hit him. He did a kind of bend at the knees, twisted his body, then snapped back into shape and looked up.

“You,” he said.

I shot him again, and it had about the same impact. Jack was on the hood of his car, then its roof, and then he jumped. That big bastard could jump, could probably dunk a basketball and grab the rim. He hit with both hands on the edge of the roof, started pulling himself up. I was up now, and I stuck the gun in his face and pulled the trigger.

And let me tell you how the gas went out of me. I had cleaned that gun and cleaned that gun, and now… it jammed. First time ever. But it was the time that mattered.

Jack lifted himself onto the roof, and then he was on me, snatching the gun away and flinging it into the dark. I couldn’t believe it. What the hell was he made of? Even in the wet night, I could see that much of his white shirt had turned dark with blood.

We circled each other for a moment. I tried to decide what to do next, and then he was on me. I remembered the hatchet, but it was too late. We were going back off the roof and onto the lean-to, rolling down. We hit the stacked firewood and it went in all directions and we splattered to the ground.

I lost my breath. Jack kept his. He grabbed me by my coat collar and lifted me and flung me against the side of the lean-to. I hit on my back and came down on my butt.

Jack grabbed up a piece of firewood. It looked to me like that piece of wood had a lot of heft. He came at me. I made myself stand; I pulled the hatchet free. As he came and struck down with the wood, I sidestepped and swung.

The sound the hatchet made as it caught the top of his head was a little like what you might expect if a strong man took hold of a piece of thick cardboard and ripped it.

I hit him so hard his knees bent and hot blood jumped out of his head and hit my face. The hatchet came loose of my hands, stayed in his skull. His knees straightened. I thought: What is this motherfucker, Rasputin?

He grabbed me and started to lift me again. His mouth was partially open and his teeth looked like machinery cogs. The rain was washing the blood on his head down his face in murky rivers. He stunk like roadkill.

And then his expression changed. It seemed as if he had only just realized he had a hatchet in his head. He let go, turned, started walking off, taking hold of the hatchet with both hands, trying to pull it loose. I picked up a piece of firewood and followed after him. I hit him in the back of the head as hard as I could. It was like hitting an elephant in the ass with a twig. He turned and looked at me. The expression on his face was so strange, I almost felt sorry for him.

He went down on one knee, and I hauled back and hit him with the firewood, landing on top of the hatchet. He vibrated, and his neck twisted to one side, and then his head snapped back in line.

He said, “Gonna need some new pigs,” and then fell out.

Pigs?

He was laying face forward with the stock of the hatchet holding his head slightly off the ground. I dropped the firewood and rolled him over on his back, which took about as much work as trying to roll his Cadillac. I pulled the hatchet out of his head. I had to put my foot on his neck to do it.

I picked up the firewood I had dropped, placed it on the ground beside him, and stretched his arm out until I had the hand with the six fingers positioned across it. I got down on my knees and lifted the hatchet, hit as hard as I could. It took me three whacks, but I cut the hand loose.

I put the bloody hand in my coat pocket and dug through his pants for his car keys, didn’t come across them. I went inside the cabin and found them on the table. I drove the Cadillac to the back where Jack lay, pulled him into the backseat, almost having a hernia in the process. I put the hatchet in there with him.

I drove the El Dorado over close to the pond and rolled all the windows down and put it in neutral. I got out of the car, went to the back of it, and started shoving. My feet slipped in the mud, but I finally gained traction. The car went forward and slipped into the water, but the back end of it hung on the bank.

Damn.

I pushed and I pushed, and finally I got it moving, and the car went in, and with the windows down, it sunk pretty fast.

I went back to the cabin and looked around. I found some candles, turned off the light, then switched off the generator. I went back inside and lit three of the big fat candles and stuck them in drinking glasses and watched them burn for a moment. I went over to the stove and turned on the gas, letting it run a few seconds while I looked around the cabin. Nothing there I needed.

I left, closed the door behind me. When the gas filled the room enough, those candles would set the air on fire. The whole place would blow. I don’t know exactly why I did it, except maybe I just didn’t like Jack. Didn’t like that he had a Cadillac and a cabin and some land, and for a while there, he had Loodie. Because of all that, I had done all I could to him. I even had his six-fingered hand in my pocket.

By the time I got back to the car, I was feeling weak. Jack had worked me over pretty good, and now that the adrenaline was starting to ease out of me, I was feeling it. I took off my jacket and opened the jar of pickles in the floorboard, pulled out a few of them, and threw them away. I ate one, and drank from my bottle of water and had some cookies.

I took Jack’s hand and put it in the big pickle jar. I sat in the front seat, and was overcome with nausea. I didn’t know if it was the pickle or what I had done, or both. I opened the car door and threw up. I felt cold and damp from the rain, so I started the car and turned on the heater. Then I cranked back my seat and closed my eyes. I had to rest before I left, had to. All of me seemed to be running out through the soles of my feet.

I slept until the cabin blew. The sound of the gas generator and stove going up with a one-two boom snapped me awake.

I got out of the car and walked around the curve. The cabin was nothing more than a square, dark shape inside an envelope of flames. The fire wavered up high and grew narrow at the top like a cone. It crackled like someone wadding up cellophane.

I doubted, out here, that anyone heard the explosion, and no one could see the flames. Wet as it was, I figured the fire wouldn’t go any farther than the cabin. By morning, even with the rain still coming down, that place would be smoked down to the mineral rights.

I drove out of there, and pretty soon the heater was too hot and I turned it off. It was as if my body went up in flames, like the cabin. I rolled down the window and let in some cool air. I felt strange; not good, not bad. I had bounty hunted for years, and I’d done a bit of head whopping before, but this was my first murder.

I had really hated Jack and I’d hardly known him.

It was the woman that made me hate him. The woman I was gonna cheat out of some money. But $100,000 is a whole lot of money, honey.

When I got home, the automatic garage opener lifted the door, and I wheeled in and closed the place up. I went inside and took off my clothes and showered carefully and looked in the mirror. There was a mountainous welt on my head. I got some ice and put it in sock and pressed it to my head while I sat on the toilet lid and thought about things. If any thoughts actually came to me, I don’t remember them well.

I dressed, bunched up my murder clothes, and put them in a black plastic garbage bag.

In the garage, I removed the pickle jar and cleaned the car. I opened the jar and stared at the hand. It looked like a black crab in there amongst the pickles. I studied it for a long time, until it started to look like $100,000.

I couldn’t wait until morning, and after a while, I drove toward Big O’s place. Now, you would think a man with the money he’s got would live in a mansion, but he didn’t. He lived in three double-wide mobile homes lined together with screened-in porches. I had been inside once, when I’d done Big O a very small favor, though never since. But one of those homes was nothing but one big space, no rooms, and it was Big O’s lounge. He hung in there with some ladies and bodyguards. He had two main guys. Be Bop Lewis, a skinny white guy who always acted as if someone was sneaking up on him, and a black guy named Lou Boo (keep in mind, I didn’t name them) who thought he was way cool and smooth as velvet.

The rain had followed me from the bottomland, on into Tyler, to the outskirts, and on the far side. It was way early morning, and I figured on waking Big O up and dragging his ass out of bed and showing him them six fingers and getting me $100,000, a pat on the head, and hell, he might ask Be Bop to give me a hand job on account of I had done so well.

More I thought about it, more I thought he might not be as happy to see me as I thought. A man like Big O liked his sleep, so I pulled into a motel not too far from his place, the big jar of pickles and one black six-fingered hand beside my bed, the automatic under my pillow.

I dreamed Jack was driving the Cadillac out of that pond. I saw the lights first and then the car. Jack was steering with his nub laid against the wheel, and his face behind the glass was a black mass without eyes or smile or features of any kind.

It was a bad dream and it woke me up. I washed my face, went back to bed, slept this time until late morning. I got up and put back on my same clothes, loaded up my pickle jar, and left out of there. I thought about the axe in Jack’s head, his severed hand floating in the pickle jar, and regret moved through me like shit through a goose and was gone.

I drove out to Big O’s place.

By the time I arrived at the property, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and had driven over a cattle guard, I could see there were men in a white pickup coming my way. Two in the front and three in the bed in the back, and they had some heavy-duty fire power. Parked behind them, up by the double-wides, were the cement trucks and dump trucks and backhoes and graders that were part of the business Big O claimed to operate. Construction. But his real business was a bit of this, and a little of that, construction being not much more than the surface paint.

I stopped and rolled down my window and waited. Outside, the rain had burned off and it was an unseasonably hot day, sticky as honey on the fingers.

When they drove up beside my window, the three guys in the bed pointed their weapons at me. The driver was none other than one of the two men I recognized from before. Be Bop. His skin was so pale and thin, I could almost see the skull beneath it.

“Well, now,” he said. “I know you.”

I agreed he did. I smiled like me and him was best friends. I said, “I got some good news for Big O about Six-Finger Jack.”

“Six-Finger Jack, huh,” Be Bop said. “Get out of the car.”

I got out. Be Bop got out and frisked me. I had nothing sharp or anything full of bullets. He asked if there was anything in the car. I told him no. He had one of the men in the back of the pickup search it anyway. The man came back, said, “Ain’t got no gun, just a big jar of pickles.”

“Pickles,” Be Bop said. “You a man loves pickles?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Follow us on up,” Be Bop said.

We drove up to the trio of double-wides. There had been some work done since I was last here, and there was a frame of boards laid out for a foundation, and over to the side there was a big hole that looked as if it was gonna be a swimming pool.

I got out of the car and leaned on it and looked things over. Be Bop and his men got out of the truck. Be Bop came over.

“He buildin’ a house on that foundation?” I asked.

“Naw, he’s gonna put an extension on one of the trailers. I think he’s gonna put in a poolroom and maybe some gamin’ stuff. Swimmin’ pool over there. Come on.”

I got my jar of pickles out of the backseat, and Be Bop said, “Now wait a minute. Your pickles got to go with you?”

I sat the jar down and screwed off the lid and stepped back. Be Bop looked inside. When he lifted his head, he said, “Well, now.”

Next thing I know I’m in the big trailer, the one that’s got nothing but the couch, some chairs, and stands for drinks, a TV set about the size of a downtown theater. It’s on, and there’s sports going. I glance at it and see it’s an old basketball game that was played a year back, but they’re watching it, Big O and a few of his boys, including Lou Boo, the black guy I’ve seen before. This time, there aren’t any women there.

Be Bop came inside with me, but the rest of the pickup posse didn’t. They were still protecting the perimeter. It seemed silly, but truth was, there was lots of people wanted to kill Big O.

No one said a thing to me for a full five minutes. They were waiting for a big score in the game, something they had seen before. When the shot came they all cheered. I thought only Big O sounded sincere.

I didn’t look at the game. I couldn’t take my eyes off Big O. He wasn’t wearing his cowboy hat. His head only had a few hairs left on it, like worms working their way over the face of the moon. His skin was white and lumpy like cold oatmeal. He was wearing a brown pair of stretch overalls. When the fat moved, the material moved with him, which was a good idea, ’cause it looked as if Big O had packed on about a hundred extra pounds since I saw him last.

He was sitting in a motorized scooter, had his tree-trunk legs stretched out in front of him on a leg lift. His stomach flowed up and fell forward and over his sides, like 400 pounds of bagged mercury. I could hear him wheezing across the room. His right foot was missing. There was a nub there, and his stretch pants had been sewn up at the end. On the stand, near his right elbow, was a tall bottle of malt liquor and a greasy box of fried chicken.

His men sat on the couch to his left. The couch was unusually long, and there were six men on it, like pigeons in a row. They all had guns in shoulder holsters. The scene made Big O look like a whale on vacation with a harem of male sucker fish to attend him.

Big O spoke to me, and his voice sounded small coming from that big body. “Been a long time since I seen you last.”

I nodded.

“I had a foot then.”

I nodded again.

“The diabetes. Had to cut it off. Dr. Jacobs says I need more exercise, but, hey, glandular problems, so what you gonna do? Packs the weight on. But still, I got to go there ever’ Thursday mornin’. Next time, he might tell me the other foot’s gotta go. But you know, that’s not so bad. This chair, it can really get you around. Motorized, you know.”

Be Bop, who was still by me, said, “He’s got somethin’ for you, Big O.”

“Chucky,” Big O said, “cut off the game.”

Chucky was one of the men on the couch, a white guy. He got up and found a remote control and cut off the game. He took it with him back to the couch, sat down.

“Come on up,” Big O said.

I carried my jar of pickles up there, got a whiff of him that made my memory of Jack’s stink seem mild. Big O smelled like dried urine, sweat, and death. I had to fight my gag reflex.

I sat the jar down and twisted off the lid and reached inside the blood-stained pickle juice and brought out Jack’s dripping hand. Big O said, “Give me that.”

I gave it to him. He turned it around and around in front of him. Pickle juice dripped off of the hand and into his lap. He started to laugh. His fat vibrated, and then he coughed. “That there is somethin’.”

He held the hand up above his head. Well, he lifted it to about shoulder height. Probably the most he had moved in a while. He said, “Boys, do you see this? Do you see the humanity in this?”

I thought: Humanity?

“This hand tried to take my money and stuck its finger up my old lady’s ass… Maybe all six. Look at it now.”

His boys all laughed. It was like the best goddamn joke ever told, way they yucked it up.

“Well, now,” Big O said, “that motherfucker won’t be touchin’ nothin’, won’t be handlin’ nobody’s money, not even his own, and we got this dude to thank.”

Way Big O looked at me then made me a little choked up. I thought there might even be a tear in his eye. “Oh,” he said, “I loved that woman. God, I did. But I had to cut her loose. She hadn’t fucked around, me and her might have gotten married, and all this,” he waved Jack’s hand around, “would have been hers to share. But no. She couldn’t keep her pants on. It’s a sad situation. And though I can’t bring her back, this here hand, it gives me some kind of happiness. I want you to know that.”

“I’m glad I could have been of assistance,” I said.

“That’s good. That’s good. Put this back in the pickle jar, will you?”

I took the hand and dropped it in the jar.

Big O looked at me, and I looked at him. After a long moment, he said, “Well, thanks.”

I said, “You’re welcome.”

We kept looking at one another. I cleared my throat. Big O shifted a little in his chair. Not much, but a little.

“Seems to me,” I said, “there was a bounty on Jack. Some money.”

“Oh,” Big O said. “That’s right, there was.”

“He was quite a problem.”

“Was he now… Yeah, well, I can see the knot on your head. You ought to buy that thing its own cap. Somethin’ nice.”

Everyone on the couch laughed. I laughed too. I said, “Yeah, it’s big. And if I had some money, like say, $100,000, I’d maybe put out ten or twenty for a nice designer cap.”

I was smiling, waiting for my laugh, but nothing came. I glaced at Be Bop. He was looking off like maybe he heard his mother calling somewhere in the distance.

Big O said, “Now that Jack’s dead, I got to tell you, I’ve sort of lost the fever.”

“Lost the fever?” I said.

“He was alive, I was all worked up. Now that he’s dead, I got to consider, is he really worth $100,000?”

“Wait a minute, that was the deal. That’s the deal you spread all over.”

“I’ve heard those rumors,” Big O said.

“Rumors?”

“Oh, you can’t believe everything you hear. You just can’t.”

I stood there stunned.

Big O said, “But I want you to know, I’m grateful. You want a Coke, a beer before you go?”

“No. I want the goddamn money you promised.”

That had come out of my mouth like vomit. It surprised even me.

Everyone in the room was silent.

Big O breathed heavy, said, “Here’s the deal, friend. You take your jar of pickles, and Jack’s six fingers, and you carry them away. ’Cause if you don’t, if you want to keep askin’ me for money I don’t want to pay, your head is gonna be in that jar, but not before I have it shoved up your ass. You savvy?’

It took me a moment, but I said, “Yeah. I savvy.”

Lying in bed with Loodie, not being able to do the deed, I said, “I’m gonna get that fat son of a bitch. He promised me money. I fought Jack with a piece of firewood and a hatchet. I fell off a roof. I slept in my car in the cold. I was nearly killed.”

“That sucks,” Loodie said.

“Sucks? You got snookered too. You was gonna get fifty thousand, now you’re gonna get dick.”

“Actually, tonight I’m not even gettin’ that.”

“Sorry, baby. I’m just so mad… Ever’ Thursday mornin’, Big O, he goes to an appointment at Dr. Jacobs’. I can get him there.”

“He has his men, you know.”

“Yeah. But when he goes in the office, maybe he don’t. And maybe I check it out this Thursday, find out when he goes in, and next Thursday I maybe go inside and wait on him.”

“How would you do that?”

“I’m thinkin’ on it, baby.”

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

“You lost fifty grand, and so did I, so blowin’ a hole in his head is as close as we’ll get to satisfaction.”

So Thursday morning I’m going in the garage, to go and check things out, and when I get in the car, before I can open up the garage and back out, a head raises up in the backseat, and a gun barrel, like a wet kiss, pushes against the side of my neck.

I can see him in the mirror. It’s Lou Boo. He says: “You got to go where I tell you, else I shoot a hole in you.”

I said, “Loodie.”

“Yeah, she come to us right away.”

“Come on, man. I was just mad. I wasn’t gonna do nothin’.”

“So here it is Thursday mornin’, and now you’re tellin’ me you wasn’t goin’ nowhere.”

“I was gonna go out and get some breakfast. Really.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Yeah, shit,” Lou Boo said.

“How’d you get in here without me knowin’?”

“I’m like a fuckin’ ninja… And the door slides up, you pull it from the bottom.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“Come on, Lou Boo, give a brother a break. You know how it is.”

Lou Boo laughed a little. “Ah, man. Don’t play the brother card. I’m what you might call one of them social progressives. I don’t see color, even if it’s the same as mine. Let’s go, my man.”

It was high morning and cool when we arrived. I drove my car right up to where the pool was dug out, way Lou Boo told me. There was a cement-mixer truck parked nearby for the pool. We stopped, and Lou Boo told me to leave it in neutral. I did. I got out and walked with him to where Big O was sitting in his motorized scooter with Loodie on his lap. His boys were all around him.

Be Bop pointed his finger at me and dropped his thumb. “My man,” he said.

When I was standing in front of Big O, he said, “Now, I want you to understand, you wouldn’t be here had you not decided to kill me. I can’t have that, now can I?”

I didn’t say anything.

I looked at Loodie, she shrugged.

“I figured you owed me money,” I said.

“Yeah,” Big O said. “I know. You see, Loodie, she comes and tells me she’s gonna make a deal with you to kill Jack and make you think you made a deal with her. That way, the deal I made was with her, not you. You followin’ me on this, swivel dick? Then, you come up with this idea to kill me at the doctor’s office. Loodie, she came right to me.”

“So,” I said, “you’re gettin’ Loodie out of the deal, and she’s gettin’ a hundred thousand.”

“That sounds about right, yeah,” Big O said.

I thought about that. Her straddling that fat bastard on his scooter. I shook my head, glared at her, said, “Damn, girl.”

She didn’t look right at me.

Big O said, “Loodie, you go on in the house there and amuse yourself. Get a beer or somethin’. Watch a little TV. Do your nails. Whatever.” Loodie started walking toward the trailers. When she was inside, Big O said, “Hell, boy. I know how she is, and I know what she is. It’s gonna be white gravy on sweet chocolate bread for me. And when I get tired of it, she gonna find a hole out here next to you. I got me all kind of room here. I ain’t usin’ the lake-boat stalls no more. That’s risky. Here is good. Though I’m gonna have to dig another spot for a pool, but that’s how it is. Ain’t no big thing, really.”

“She used me,” I said. “She’s the one led me to this.”

“No doubt, boy. But you got to understand. She come to me and made the deal before you did anything. I got to honor that.”

“I could just go on,” I said. “I could forget all about it. I was just mad. I wouldn’t never bother you. Hell, I can move. I can go out of state.”

“I know that,” he said. “But I got this rule, and it’s simple. You threaten to kill me, I got to have you taken care of. Ain’t that my rule, boys?”

There was a lot of agreement.

Lou Boo was last. He said, “Yep, that’s the way you do it, boss.”

Big O said, “Lou Boo, put him in the car, will you?”

Lou Boo put the gun to back of my head, said, “Get on your knees.”

“Fuck you,” I answered, but he hit me hard behind the head. Next thing I know I’m on my knees, and he’s got my hands behind my back and has fastened a plastic tie over my wrists.

“Get in the car,” Lou Boo said.

I fought him all the way, but Be Bop came out and kicked me in the nuts a couple of times, hard enough I threw up, and then they dragged me to the car and shoved me inside behind the wheel and rolled down the windows and closed the door.

Then they went behind the car and pushed. The car wobbled, then fell, straight down, hit so hard the air bag blew out and knocked the shit out of me. I couldn’t move with it the way it was, my hands bound behind my back, the car on its nose, its back wheels against the side of the hole. It looked like I was trying to drive to hell. I was stunned and bleeding. The bag had knocked a tooth out. I heard the sound of a motor above me, a little motor. The scooter.

I could hear Big O up there. “If you hear me, want you to know I’m having one of the boys bring the cement truck around. We’re gonna fill this hole with cement, and put, I don’t know, a tennis court or somethin’ on top of it. But the thing I want you to know is this is what happens when someone fucks with Big O.”

“You stink,” I said. “And you’re fat. And you’re ugly.”

He couldn’t hear me. I was mostly talking into the air bag.

I heard the scooter go away, followed by the sound of a truck and a beeping as it backed up. Next I heard the churning of the cement in the big mixer that was on the back of it. Then the cement slid down and pounded on the roof and started to slide over the windshield. I closed my eyes and held my breath, and then I felt the cold, wet cement touch my elbow as it came through the open window. I thought about some way out, but there was nothing there, and I knew that within moments there wouldn’t be anything left for me to think about at all.

DUCKWEED by GEORGE WIER

Littlefield

Carlos McDaniel was skimming duckweed when the two men came and shot him full of holes.

It was at his ex-wife’s uncle’s place, fifteen miles south and east of College Station, Texas, and it had a summer cabin on it, complete with air-conditioning and an ancient refrigerator always stocked with Cokes, cheap beer, and sandwich materials. The cabin stood ten feet from the edge of the one-acre lake.

The lake was little more than an overgrown duck pond, but it was all the water anyone could need on a hot summer day when the only breeze came from the flapping wings of wild waterfowl and even the water moccasins lay listless on the floating platform, unmindful of interlopers. It was a hidden spot, well away from competing salesmen and customers who gravitated to the two extremes: bored-stiff disinterest or unrealistic expectation. Carlos got more of those two kinds than any other as a real estate salesman. And when they got to be a little too much for a bright-eyed young man with all of life ahead of him and a ticket for this Saturday’s Lotto Texas in his pocket, he would climb in his ’77 Datsun short-bed pickup and head for the country and the cool, spring-fed waters of Hidden Lake. And his share of the beer.

When blacktop gave way to caliche gravel and a long-following geyser trail of fine, reddish dust spreading out like a comet’s tail, only then could he breathe deeply and begin to take in life again.

Hidden Lake, as his ex’s family called it, lay at the tail end of everything. The last county road doubled back on itself toward the north and west at the turnout of the lane to his ex’s family property. The property was the last customer on the water and electric line, and it was five hundred yards from the Navasota River, which defines the county’s easternmost border.

The family-the few that were left of them-hardly ever came out, and almost never in the middle of the week. Carlos would have some alone time. Some time to look at nature and think and let things settle out. Skimming the duckweed was a damned dirty job, and damned if he didn’t love doing it.

This day he hadn’t bothered locking the gate to the property behind him, as he more often than not did. Possibly things would have turned out differently if he had, but then again, who could know? There are no could-have-beens, should-have-beens, or would-have-beens to life, other than what we consider in the universe-wide space behind our eyes. There is only the moment right here and now.

Carlos looked up from the task at hand when he had the feeling he was being watched.

He had managed to get the floating landscape timbers in a fairly straight line and was just skirting the edge of the floating platform, whereon lay three large and completely still cottonmouth moccasins, when he felt it. There was movement there under the shade trees some thirty feet away. The sun was hot and bright overhead and he squinted.

“Hello,” he called out.

They weren’t family-or rather ex-family. He’d never seen the two men before in his life.

They were dressed as if they had just come from a highend real estate closing. His first errant thought was that they were potential clients who had gone to a lot of trouble to find him.

In a way, he was right.

The water came up to Carlos’s chest. It was a good thing they had waited until he was nearly done before happening along. Ten minutes before and they would have come upon him slogging through the muck on the opposite shore with his bare ass dripping mud and water.

“Hello,” one of the two men said, and waved. The man smiled.

Carlos almost waved back, but he was mindful of the snakes, just three feet away. Snakes couldn’t hear worth a damn, but they could sense movement, and cottonmouths are known for their aggressiveness.

“Give me a minute, will you? Go on in the house. There’s beer and Cokes in there. Also, I’m not exactly dressed for visitors at the moment.”

Carlos had a towel in his pickup, and he was thinking about how he’d look trying to move across the yard to get to it before the two glanced back out the front window. Chances were they’d get an eyeful no matter what he did. But that was all right. They were guys, after all. And something else was beginning to take hold inside of him. A far-off song, like a radio picking up a skip on a clear night: the opening chords of the world’s oldest song-opportunity. Anyone coming this far to see him must want something awfully bad.

And he was right about that as well.

The two men went inside without further word.

Carlos pulled the leading timber up into the mud of the bank and made a break for the truck. The towel was there behind the seat where he’d left it, but it wasn’t a beach towel. He kept it there for those moments when the old Datsun itself had had enough and decided it was time to overheat. You had to have a thick, dry towel to remove a hot radiator cap, and the towel-complete with the three Powerpuff Girls: Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup (the only thing he’d truly walked away with to call his own from his former marriage)-wrapped around him just enough for him to make a small knot. Even that, in the final analysis, would do him little good.

The towel would have to do.

Carlos stepped up to the front porch and slid the glass doorway back on its tracks. The track needed a good cleaning out and a bit of graphite to smooth the slide of the door, but like all things, there was never enough time.

The air inside was cool. Not cold, but just enough to make him shiver. He was still wet and water trickled down his legs. There were tiny green specks of duckweed all over him. He usually went from the lake right into the shower because if he dried off with the duckweed still on him it tended to stick like glue.

The two men came in from the kitchen. Each had a Coke in hand. One of the men was smiling, the other looked at him with dead-fish eyes.

Carlos shivered again.

“How can I help you fellas?” he asked. It came out sounding uncertain, and he knew it.

“Just a little information,” the smiling fellow said. His big teeth were as false as the rest of him, Carlos suddenly knew. That song-that radio-skip melody-was no closer now than the background hum leftover from the Big Bang.

“You guys cops?” Carlos asked.

The dead-fish-eyed fellow laughed. It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

For Carlos the temperature in the room plummeted.

“No,” Smiley said, cutting his own light chuckle off short. “Not cops. Businessmen, Mr. McDaniel. Just like yourself. You had a client. A lady.”

“I’ve got a lot of lady clients. And you said ‘had.’ I don’t keep track of my old clients very well. Which is maybe why I’m not pulling down a hundred Gs a year.”

“We understand, Mr. McDaniel. We really do. This lady you’d not easily forget.”

“Who is she?”

“Your first name is Carlos, right?” Smiley asked. “But your last name is McDaniel. You got some greaser blood in you?”

“I don’t think I like you,” Carlos said.

“You don’t have to,” Smiley said. “Who’s the bean eater? With a last name like McDaniel, it’d have to be your mother, right?”

He felt it then, strong. The floodgates of adrenaline opening somewhere in his body. It was going to be either fight or run. Running, at the moment, looked best. Two on one with him naked in his ex’s uncle’s cabin, a mile to the nearest neighbor? Not good odds.

But Carlos fought the urge to run. Who can truly tell the future?

“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said. “Then you can leave.”

“Smart fellow, right, Sammy?”

“Yeah,” Sammy said. He was the broad-shouldered, deadeyed one. Or perhaps his eyes were more reptilian than merely dead. “Fart smellow,” Sammy said and laughed again. Carlos’s instant assessment of him was bleak at best. He was all gristle and fat with little brain. If Sammy ever graduated high school, Carlos was willing to bet he’d been in his mid-twenties at the time.

“Okay, kid,” Smiley said. “Her name is Linda Sneed. That’s two e’s. Remember her?”

“The penthouse deal. Haven’t talked with her in six months. Lost my ass on the deal too. What do you want to know?”

“See, Sammy? I told you today something was gonna break.” His eyes never wavered, but the tone of his voice dropped a whole scale. “Where is Ms. Sneed, pepper-belly?”

Carlos considered. The moment had arrived. The moment he’d known was coming the instant he’d seen Sammy’s dead-fish eyes.

Sammy’s hand went into his suit jacket, and what came out was exactly what Carlos McDaniel knew was going to come. It was a gun. A black 9mm.

“Tell him,” Sammy said.

Carlos’s control of his bladder slipped for just an instant. He knew without looking there would be a small spreading stain on the front of the towel. It felt like hot lava in the chilly room.

“She’s… gone. Long gone. I’m not lying. I tried to reach her. Everybody did.”

“Yeah?” Smiley said. “Who’s everybody?”

“Me. My broker. The title company. The lawyers. Last I heard she was somewhere in West Texas.”

“Yeah? That’s a pretty big area. You mind narrowing it down for me a bit?”

“Littletown. No. Littlefield. That’s northwest of Lubbock.”

“Thank you, Mr. McDaniel,” Smiley said. He turned toward Sammy and nodded.

Carlos stood frozen.

Sammy shot him three times: once in the leg-he had been aiming for Carlos’s groin and missed by half an inch-once in the stomach, and once in the chest.

The two men left him for dead.

Carlos McDaniel didn’t hear the sliding door close behind the two men. He was concentrating on the ocean of pain that had suddenly invaded his life. He hurt. The pain was deep-a fundamental thing that could not be ignored-and blackness was coming. He was already graying out.

His hand moved, touched the widening pool of blood soaking into the old carpet beside him. He brought it to his stomach and traced five letters.

He pulled his finger away and looked at it. There was a tiny speck of green in all the red.

Duckweed, he thought, because for some reason he couldn’t speak, and then the blackness rolled over him and carried him away.

Carlos McDaniel was either a fortunate or unfortunate man, depending upon one’s point of view.

He was unfortunate to be in the path of the two-man tornado which was composed of a couple of Brooklyn hoodlums named Sammy “The Gootch” Rosario and Victor Cicchese.

Carlos was fortunate in that he initially survived the tornado. The three muffled reports were heard by a man named Charles Lyman, who was walking the power-line cut on the north side of the property that had the idyllic little lake and the cabin. It was the last property on the line, and when he was done he was supposed to turn around and head back. But there was a little glade near the end of the line where it was his custom to stop and have a smoke before returning. Lyman was grinding the spent cigarette butt into the earth near all the others that he’d smoked at the spot over the last twelve years when he heard the reports. He was two hundred yards away and instantly knew what the sounds were.

A person can hear all kinds of things when walking through the east and central Texas woods. A gun going off is not uncommon. It was, however, an uncommonly hot day and the only game in season at the moment was the kind of game that was always in season: rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, and other varmints that weren’t worth shooting in 105-degree weather. Moreover, these shots had come from indoors. A gun being fired indoors has a peculiar and particular sound to it. Most of the noise rattles around inside, crossing and recrossing itself, and consequently has a distinctive muffled, and yet hollow, rattle quality to it.

Charles Lyman ducked through the brush and a barbed-wire fence and was behind the cabin within a minute after the last shot was fired. A pair of ducks had taken to the air and were beating their wings hell for leather to the south, just disappearing over the line of trees past the lake.

Glancing out from around the rear corner of the house, well hidden by brush, he saw two men walking back down the lane toward the main gate and the road beyond. They wore business suits.

It was hot, powerfully so, but the blood in Charles Lyman’s veins felt as though it had been transfused with ice.

He stepped around the side of the house with the lake, away from the two departing men, stepped up onto the porch from the side, peered through the window, and saw a man who was busy dying.

It took thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive from town. During that time he had resuscitated the dying young man three times.

The EMTs, when they did show up, would have bet against Carlos McDaniel. The odds were too long and the kid had lost an ungodly amount of blood. They went to work in earnest. They were both veterans who had seen their measure of curtain calls.

There was severe internal bleeding, the kid’s pulse was thready, and according to the grisly-looking gas company fellow who had called them, he’d been repeatedly pulled back from the grave.

The representative from the Brazos County Sheriff’s Department arrived as the kid’s gurney was being loaded into the ambulance.

The deputy didn’t have time to say “howdy.” He walked up as the kid was trundled past, took a snapshot picture of him with his eyes, fished a pocket notebook out, and wrote one word on it: Linda. It must have been a hell of an effort making those letters in his own blood on his stomach, he thought.

“Don’t wash that name off his stomach, fellas,” he said. “Take a picture of it. Especially if he… doesn’t make it. Where you fellas takin’ ’im?”

“To meet the life-flight chopper.”

“Oh. Where’s he going to from there?”

“God only knows. Excuse us, officer.” The younger of the two paramedics hopped down from the truck and closed the door behind him. “Gotta go,” he said.

“See ya,” the deputy said.

Charles Lyman was sitting on the porch of the cabin looking out onto the still duck pond. There was a half-ring of floating landscaping timbers out there tied end-to-end. One end of the daisy chain was anchored to the opposite shoreline and the closest end was lodged in the mud on the nearby bank.

“That’s what he was doing,” Lyman said.

The deputy wheeled around.

“What?”

Lyman pointed.

The deputy glanced away, quickly, and then back to the man sitting there. It was difficult to look away from him. He was a craggy-looking fellow, mid-fifties, with sparse, rustcolored hair and large freckles all over him. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. But none of these things were as notable as the amount of drying blood covering the man. His hands were two dark red gloves. His arms, chest, and face were spattered with it. And he just sat there, looking toward the lake.

“He was skimming the lake when they came along,” the blood-covered man said. “He was in his birthday suit and was still wet. He had duckweed all over him.”

“You’re the fella that saved his life. Lyman, right?”

“Not if he don’t make it, I ain’t. Yeah, I’m Lyman.”

“Okay,” the deputy said. “My name’s Ralph Bigham. We need to talk.”

Charles Lyman looked at the deputy, then back toward the lake. “Have a seat,” he said.

Carlos McDaniel gave up the ghost three days later. When he went, his hand was gripped by that of his new best friend, the craggy-faced angel who was there whenever his eyes opened, swimming into focus when consciousness slowly yet inexorably returned.

“Who’s Linda?” the angel asked him.

Carlos blinked, smiled, and uttered the name in a whisper: “Linda Sneed.”

Two weeks later, when he got the word that the case had been closed on the shooting, Charles Lyman left his job with Central Texas Gas. At ten minutes till five, he stuck his head in the air-conditioned substation office in the little town of Kurten, Texas, and told the foreman he wasn’t coming back. The foreman-a forgettable fellow named Seth Sweet-shrugged at the closed door, lit another cigarette, and turned back to his weekly report.

“Politics, that’s why,” Ralph Bigham told him.

“Politics?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t look good to have open files, so it’s easier to close them.”

“I’ll be damned,” Charles Lyman said.

“Tell me about the two men again,” Ralph Bigham said before the other fellow could start losing his temper.

“One was big,” Lyman replied. “He looked like a big scoop of muscle and a dollop of fat poured into a suit, but he walked sort of like a penguin. The other guy was shorter and slim. Their backs were to me.”

“What do you think all of this is about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I found something you missed.” Charles dropped the leather binder on the cafe tabletop.

Carlos McDaniel’s Day-Timer business calendar contained the details of his appointments for the six months leading up to the shooting. Bigham leafed through it. There were upcoming real estate showings, open houses, closings, and appointments scattered throughout. There was nothing for the weeks previous to the shooting that seemed to amount to anything, but then, leafing his way back, he saw one entry all by itself: L.S. Littlefield.

“Who’s L.S. Littlefield?” Bigham asked.

“L.S. is probably Linda Sneed. At least I hope it is. Now, the name Littlefield is about as Austin as you can get. There’s a Littlefield Building here, the Littlefield home, the Littlefield statue. You name it, and there’s a Littlefield ‘it.’”

“That name is familiar to me somehow,” Bigham said. “But I’m not an Austonian.”

“Austinite,” Charles corrected.

They were in a little Mexican restaurant on College Avenue near downtown Bryan, Texas. A waitress came by and cleared away their plates and left a ticket. Lyman fished out a twenty and dropped it on the table.

“Thanks,” Deputy Bigham said.

“Sure. The guy everything is named after is George W. Littlefield. He was a Civil War hero and land baron. He owned the Yellowhouse Ranch up in the Panhandle. I think it was land trimmed off of the original XIT Ranch, which was how the state funded the construction of the new capitol building after the old one burned. I think that was back around the 1880s, 1890s. Littlefield was almost single-handedly responsible for the establishment of UT Austin.”

“Seems to me like there might be a town with that name as well,” Bigham said.

“You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that before? It’s up northwest of Lubbock, not far from the New Mexico state line.”

Bigham nodded and kept rifling through the pages of the Day-Timer, while Charles Lyman, who actually liked the deputy, found himself wanting to slam it on his fingers.

“You know,” Bigham began, “the name Linda Sneed keeps sticking in my craw. Seems to me there was some news item in the local paper some months back. If it’s the same person then I think she’s some kind of fugitive from justice. Something about some real estate dealings.”

“Wanted, huh?” Charles said.

“I think so. I’ve never been much of a newspaper reader, myself, but all you have to do is glance in the direction of the damned things and the stuff jumps out at you.”

“That’s for sure. I’m stuck on that name myself. Not sure why.”

“Okay,” Ralph said. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I’m leaving town,” Lyman said.

“I thought you might.” Ralph Bigham reached beside him, pulled up a leather case, and slid it across the table to Charles Lyman.

“What’s this?”

“Something you might need.”

Lyman tugged the zipper on the side of the case and saw a round metal cylinder. It was the barrel of a.357 Smith & Wesson magnum.

“I can’t accept this,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t hold a gun in my hands.”

“Not a religious thing, is it?” Deputy Bigham asked.

“Also, I can’t vote.”

“You’re a felon.”

“Yeah. I was a kid, and it was a long, long time ago. I’m only lucky we live in an age where they don’t brand your forehead or otherwise mark you.”

“What did you do?” Bigham asked.

“I killed a man,” Charles Lyman said.

The next question was there between them, an invisible yet wholly tangible thing, and Ralph Bigham found himself asking it.

“Who did you kill, Chuck?”

Lucid, teal-blue eyes looked up at Ralph Bigham, measuring, weighing.

“My brother,” Lyman said.

A deep silence settled in around them. It was one of those moments where each was expecting the other to say or ask something first. Bigham waited long enough to be sure that Lyman wasn’t going to give him his life story.

When Lyman didn’t, Bigham pushed the leather pouch directly in front of him and said, “Keep it anyway. Something tells me you’re going to need it.”

Farmhouses, windmills, grain silos miles away, vaguely reminiscent of old, well-crafted dime-store miniatures of such, slowly dwindled in the distance as he passed. The Caprock is a true plain. He felt its solidity, its permanence, as he drove into town in his ancient battered Ford F-150 pickup.

Charles Lyman whistled.

He passed a population sign: 6,032.

Somebody likes it here, he thought.

A wind was up and dust was blowing from the west. It was fine dust, and it was coming in through the air-conditioning vent enough to make his nose itch.

It wasn’t difficult finding downtown Littlefield. Phelps Avenue is an undivided street, with bluish-green metal seats covered by 1950s-style awnings near each intersection. Half of the businesses were closed, permanently, and there were no more than a few dozen cars along the four-block stretch leading from the train tracks to the courthouse.

“I’d say this town has seen better days,” he said to himself. “Reminds me of The Last Picture Show.”

Two blocks from the courthouse-which was not on a town square like most of the rest of Texas’ small burghs-he found a Mexican restaurant. A red neon sign in the front window declared it to be open.

Inside there was red carpet in need of a good cleaning and a pleasant smell wafting from the kitchen.

There was a hand-lettered sign on one wall that declared: Absolutely NO Table Moving.

The waitress was a pudgy young lady of perhaps nineteen. She wore a burgundy apron and a beatific smile. She had dimples in her cheeks and her name tag read Cassandra.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“You said it,” Charles replied. “Coffee first, though. Then bring me whatever you think I’d like to eat.”

She glanced down at his ring finger quickly, saw that it was bare, then looked back up to his eyes. He winked at her, and she smiled, turned, and darted off.

He was nearly done with breakfast and thinking about Carlos McDaniel when they came in the restaurant door. A smile flashed at him, all false teeth and malice. Lyman smiled back.

The two men were the Undertaker and Lardman, Lyman’s new pet names for them in the two seconds that it took him to fully assess them. They were wearing the same clothing he’d last seen them in as they walked away from the cabin, three hundred miles to the south and what seemed a lifetime ago.

And again, Charles Lyman’s blood froze in his veins.

He waited until they took a seat before he fished out his wallet and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table. He’d liked the waitress, and he was already sorry for the trouble he was about to cause her if things didn’t go well. Then he reached down into his right boot and brought out the magnum. He stood, forgetting to put his truck keys in his pocket, turned, and walked to the table where they were sitting, the pistol with his finger lightly on the trigger behind him.

“Hi,” he said. “My name is Charles Lyman.” He stood there and looked down at the two killers.

The men looked up at him quizzically.

He swung the gun around and pointed it between the two. Their eyes riveted to it. The two men tensed, as if to spring.

“Not a good idea,” Lyman said. “Let’s make an agreement. You two guys be nice and we’ll take us a little ride and have us a little talk. That sound all right with you?”

“Talk? What about?” the Undertaker asked.

“About Carlos McDaniel. And Linda Sneed.”

When he got outside he realized his predicament.

There were two of them, and he had to cover them both. Also, he couldn’t find his truck keys.

He turned back toward the diner for just an instant, but in that short space he noted the face between the still window curtains. It was Cassandra, the waitress.

The face vanished, as if it had never been there.

He made Lardman drive their black Crown Victoria while the Undertaker rode shotgun and he covered the two of them from the backseat.

The late-model Crown Vic wended its way through town and out into the countryside where the sun beat down relentlessly on the stubby cotton and the tall corn.

“You guys are pretty quiet,” Lyman said. “Remember our agreement.”

“We ain’t got nothing to say,” the Undetaker replied.

“See?” Lyman said. “We’re having a conversation already. Tell me where she is.”

Lardman and the Undertaker exchanged glances, and suddenly Lyman knew what was coming.

Lardman made an abrupt turn down a dirt road, then began accelerating.

So much for agreements, Lyman thought.

The Undertaker moved, quick and catlike. His hand went inside his jacket.

Charles Lyman fired the Smith & Wesson point-blank into the back of the driver’s seat. Lardman jerked the wheel to the right as he crumpled over it. His foot came off the gas and the car slewed toward the ditch.

Lyman reached forward as the Undertaker came up with a gun, took it from him, grabbed the back of his suit collar, and shoved forward with everything he had.

The Undertaker’s face got very personal with the windshield.

The car came to a stop in the sand at the side of the road and fetched up against a culvert, hard. The Undertaker flopped back in his seat, out cold.

“Should have buckled up,” Lyman told him. “It’s the law.”

He dropped the snub-nosed.38 he’d taken from the Undertaker onto the floorboard and kicked it under the seat in front of him.

Lardman was slumped over the steering wheel. He had a hole in his back. Probably the bullet had gone through the seat of the Crown Vic, through his back an inch to the right of his spine, and most likely was lodged in his right lung. His days of eating linguini were over.

Lyman got out, opened the driver’s door, fished out Lardman’s wallet, and found a driver’s license. The license was out of state. Samuel Rosario. No middle name. Some address in Brooklyn, New York. There was nothing else. He replaced the wallet, went through the man’s pockets, and came up with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a wad of cash about the size of a small horse apple.

“I’m giving this to Carlos’s family,” Lyman told him.

He went back around to the passenger side and checked the glove box. Nothing.

He went through the Undertaker’s pockets and found an ancient calfskin wallet and with it a name: Victor Cicchese.

Victor sported a nose that grew in size and kept emitting a stream of blood and mucus as Lyman continued the search through his pockets.

“One pocket comb. Check,” Lyman intoned. “One prophylactic, unused. Check. One tin of Altoids. Check. Aha,” he said. “What have we here? One slightly tarnished photograph of a little cutie-pie.”

The photo was a black-and-white studio shot of a platinum-blond young lady of that indeterminate age somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five.

He flipped it over.

Blue ink told the tale: Linda, sophomore year, NYU.

In the inside pocket of the Undertaker’s jacket he found a magnetic key card with a bright Motel 6 logo emblazoned across it.

At that moment, Mr. Victor Cicchese let out a low moan.

“Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Lyman said.

Victor’s head lolled to one side. His eyelids fluttered for a moment and then slowly opened.

“Hello,” Lyman said.

“Uh… what?”

Lyman punched him, hard. His eyes closed.

“Sometimes I just can’t help myself,” Lyman said.

A truck was coming, trailing dust.

“Ah, hell,” Lyman said.

The truck slowed. It was his own pickup, and as it drew closer, he recognized the face behind the wheel. It was Cassandra from the restaurant.

Cassandra got out, raced over to Lyman, and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him on the cheek. It took not a little effort to get her to stop.

“I thought you’d be dead,” she said.

Lyman chuckled, holding her in the air. After a moment he had to set her back down.

Charles Lyman’s first thought was to turn the Undertaker into a hood ornament and strap him across the front of his truck like a trussed deer, but then he reminded himself that he wasn’t looking for more attention than he could handle at the moment.

Cassandra found a spool of twine in his truck, which he used to bind up their captive and ensconce him in the bed of his pickup truck. He took a moment to get the Crown Victoria off the road and into the corn.

He walked back to the road.

“Darlin’,” he said, “where’s the Motel 6?”

Cassandra directed him to the motel.

“Be right back,” she said, and climbed out. “I know the girl who works the counter here. This won’t take a minute.”

True to her word, she was back beside him in the pickup in seconds.

“Around in back and down on the end, number 167,” Cassandra said.

“What’d you tell her?”

“I told her that we were borrowing our friend’s room. I told her I got lucky and found a man.”

Charles laughed. “I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you,” he said.

The door had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the handle.

They found Linda Sneed inside, barely alive. Charles had to fish out a pair of bolt cutters from his pickup in order to get the handcuffs off of her while Cassandra held water to her swollen lips. She was dehydrated, had fouled the bed linens underneath her, and was talking out of her head.

The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes after she regained full consciousness. Ten minutes after that, the sheriff came knocking.

“What was it all about?” Ralph Bigham asked him.

“It was about money and revenge. She knew her life wasn’t worth anything if she told them where it was stashed. So she rode it out.”

“What money?”

“Lardman’s,” Lyman said.

“Who?”

“His name was Sammy Rosario. I call him Lardman because I like that name better. Linda met him at a bar in the Bronx. He bragged about being a hit man who had just made a big score and was going to retire. She took him to bed, robbed him blind, and cut out.”

“How much?” Bigham asked.

“Quarter-million. That is, if she’s telling the truth.”

“What about the other guy?”

“The Undertaker? His name was Victor Cicchese. Lardman’s cousin.”

“Okay. What about McDaniel? Why’d they kill him?”

Lyman released a long, slow breath. The answer came to him, and as he said it, he knew he was right.

“Because. Some guys are lucky. Some ain’t. They make their own luck, good or bad. Carlos put himself in the path of the tornado. In that respect, he was a lot like my brother.”

“I don’t understand,” Bigham said, knowing it was the only way to finally pull it out of the craggy-faced, teal-eyed man in front of him. But Lyman shifted the subject from himself, from his own past, and back to McDaniel.

“McDaniel screwed up pretty bad. Linda Sneed was his client, and he broke a rule. He took her to bed. Word got back to Lardman somehow, where she was, what she was doing, who she was screwing, and they came looking for her. But they found him first.”

The silence grew around them. The restaurant had grown still.

“I’ll go ahead and tell you,” Lyman said. “Because you want to know, and it’s secrets that always get us. My brother made his own bad luck. I caught him in bed with my girl. We were going to be married, you know.”

A moment passed. Then another.

“I killed him with my own bare hands. It was rage, Ralph. Consuming rage.”

“When was that?” Bigham asked.

“Twenty years ago. My parole expired last month. I’m a free man now. I can go where I want, do what I want.”

“Yeah?”

“But we’re never free, I think. That is, until we somehow make it right.”

Ralph Bigham looked down at the table, weighed his own words before speaking. “I hope,” he said. “I hope you’ve made it right again, Chuck.”

Lyman smiled. “Me too,” he said. “Oh. I almost forgot.” He reached into the large paper bag beside him, pulled out the leather gun case, and pushed it across the table. “I gave it a thorough cleaning.”

“Thanks,” Ralph said.

A horn blared.

Lyman turned toward the restaurant window and waved.

Cassandra waved back.

“Impatient, isn’t she?” Bigham said, and then laughed.

“Yeah. Women. I gotta go,” Lyman said. “My girl’s waiting, and I think she’s waited long enough.”

CHERRY COKE by MILTON T. BURTON

Tyler

Sam MacCord was at the poker game at Matty’s Truck Stop in Kilgore, Texas, the night Cherry Coke got his nickname. Cherry claimed it was his first time playing poker. When he said that, one of the players laughed and remarked that he’d come to the right place to bust his cherry. With a last name like Coke, the handle was a natural, and it stuck with him from then on. It was also easy for the players who’d been there to remember Cherry because he walked away from the table the big winner. And that just doesn’t happen the first time around. At least not in the kind of games Sam MacCord played in. So everybody assumed Cherry was an experienced gambler who ran out a strong line of con about not ever having played before. But after an incident that happened at a game down in Lufkin one cold, rainy night about a year later, Sam wasn’t so sure about that.

Cherry was a slim guy of medium height who appeared to be about forty. He had a face-shaped face that fronted for a head-shaped head and a pair of unassuming eyes whose color hovered somewhere between pale gray and hazel, depending on the lighting. His neatly combed hair was dark brown with a little gray at the temples, and he usually wore dark pants, white dress shirts, and a sand-colored tweed sport coat. Nothing about him stood out. In fact the opposite was true. If you’d asked Sam to describe Cherry and then given him a minute to think before answering, he would have said there was something blurry about the man, something vague and indefinite that made it hard to remember what he looked like even while you were staring directly at his face.

According to Cherry, he’d gotten into poker almost by accident. His car was a coal-black Mercury Marquis he’d bought from a dealership in Henderson. Cherry was an amiable sort who paid the sticker price on the car without quibbling, and the dealer, who was himself a gregarious individual, took an instant liking to him. While the dealer’s secretary was finishing the paperwork, the conversation drifted around to poker. Cherry mentioned that he’d recently acquired an interest in the game and would like to give it a try sometime. Right then the dealer invited him to sit in at Matty’s that coming weekend in Kilgore. This, Cherry claimed, had been his start.

During the year we knew him, he played mostly in East Texas. Though Sam now lived in Dallas, he was from East Texas and gravitated back homeward whenever he got a yen for the cards, even though the really lucrative action was to be found in the western part of the state. “A man can hide better where there’s lots of trees,” he always said with a friendly smile when anybody asked why he’d never tried the big games out around Lubbock and Odessa. The truth was that as far as poker went, Sam was nothing more than a recreational gambler, even though he sometimes won or lost several thousand dollars at a sitting. Back in his younger days he’d been a hijacker whose name was linked in the papers with a collection of Southern criminals who journalists tagged with the lurid name Dixie Mafia. He’d also been the main suspect in a couple of contract killings, but that was back then. Now things were a lot different. That was because one fine fall afternoon a decade earlier, a light of sorts had gone off inside Sam’s head, and he’d suddenly realized that he was the only one of his associates who’d never been to prison. Not one to travel too far on luck, he pulled up on the heavy stuff. Then, after getting the go-ahead from the right people a few weeks later, he opened what eventually became a very successful sports book. And Sam really liked Cherry Coke, which was why he was supremely irked the night Jackie Fats Reed pulled out the.357 snub-nose and stuck it in Cherry’s face during that Lufkin game.

Jack J. Reed, who was still called “Jackie Fats” years after his health had forced him to slim down from 300 pounds to his current 180, was a surly whiner who’d never been known to lose a hand with any degree of grace. Indeed, he was only allowed to play because he lost consistently, and because he was a hoodlum and a known killer who could not be safely excluded from the table. Jackie Fats was not a happy man. The cardiac he’d suffered in his late thirties and the subsequent triple bypass had forced him to get his life and his diet under control, but they’d left him very disagreeable because he missed lolling indolently around and scarfing up gargantuan quantities of whatever caught his fancy-things he certainly couldn’t do anymore unless he wanted an early checkout date. He also wanted to win at poker, which he almost never did. Consequently, everybody had mixed feelings whenever Jackie Fats showed up at one of the games. Regulars were happy to see such a steady loser bring his bulging bankroll to the table, but his propensity for violence also set everybody on edge.

Cherry and Sam became casual friends, and often after a game broke up they went out for breakfast, where Cherry always requested double and sometimes even triple orders of sausage. From time to time they’d meet at some club to hoist a few, though both were light drinkers. Cherry’s real name was Richard, and once Sam got to know him well enough to mount a personal question, he asked if there was any chance he was related to Richard Coke, Texas’ beloved Restorationist governor who ran all the carpetbaggers out of the state at the end of Reconstruction.

Cherry shook his head and said, “No honchos in my family, Sam. My dad was just a dirt farmer.”

“Where, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“A little ways outside Athens.”

At the time, Sam naturally assumed he meant Athens, Texas, a small agricultural town about seventy miles southeast of Dallas. Then, a week later at a game in Longview, somebody said something about Socrates. That was when Cherry, who rarely volunteered anything, smiled and said, “He was queer as a three-dollar bill, you know.”

“Who?” one of the other players asked.

“Socrates.”

“Some people claim that,” said Tom Wilkins, who was a fine player besides being a history teacher at the junior college in nearby Tyler. “But I don’t think anybody really knows for sure.”

“Oh, I know for sure,” Cherry said.

“How so?”

“Because the old rascal made a pass at me the first time my dad took me into town. I was about fifteen at the time, and he was famous. Everybody knew who he was.”

For a few moments there was a befuddled silence at the table. Then one of the players, a boisterous older fellow from Nacogdoches who was reputed to be rich as Midas himself, laughed and slapped Cherry on the back and said, “This boy comes on so sweet and innocent that if a man didn’t watch himself he’d wind up believing everything he says.”

They all had a good laugh and Cherry gave them a bland smile and the game resumed. But that business about Athens and Socrates came back to haunt Sam after Cherry had his little dust-up with Jackie Fats in Lufkin.

Cherry gambled around East Texas for a year or so. After that first night, he rarely took home the big money, but he won steadily if undramatically, and he always left with enough to live well for a couple of weeks. Which was highly unusual. Everybody goes all the way down to broke sometimes. It’s just in the nature of a gambler to do so. But not Cherry. He didn’t cheat either. Too many of the people he played with were far too savvy not to have eventually spotted something if he had. In fact, he seemed to win more consistently when he hadn’t even touched the cards than he did when he was dealer.

Spooky.

Now, as a general rule, it’s not considered polite to ask personal questions across the poker table. But it happens, especially when a group of guys have played together here and there over several months and feel like they have gotten to know one another. After all, even seasoned gamblers are human, and we humans are a snoopy lot whose curiosity sometimes gets the better of us. Finally, one night when a cattleman named Bob Robbins got to bitching about the sorrows of the beef market, a couple of other businessmen at the table chimed in with their grievances about the general economic condition of the country. Then somebody broke the ice and asked Cherry what he did for a living. Cherry ran out a song-and-dance about how he’d sold advertising novelties “up until a couple of weeks ago,” and then went on to say he was out of work and looking for a job. Nobody believed a word of it, of course. But the message was clear, and it was the only thing Sam MacCord ever knew for certain about Cherry Coke: the man might have started late in life and learned fast, but he was a professional gambler.

The Lufkin game that finally ended Cherry’s run in East Texas took place every weekend in the back room of a very successful used car dealership owned by a guy named Eddie Ray Atwell Junior. Eddie Ray Senior had been one of Sam’s Dixie Mafia cohorts. Almost forty years earlier, when Eddie Junior was just a little tyke, somebody had let the hammer down on the old man in a motel out in San Gabriel, a sinfilled little West Texas city that sprawled on both sides of the aptly named Rio Diablo-the Devil’s River. Nobody ever had a clue as to who was behind that dastardly deed, or why they were behind it, not even Sam, who knew as much about the Southern criminal underworld as anybody. Not that it really mattered. In the final years that Senior graced this world with his presence, he’d come to be known as Eddie the Rat, a man willing to screw his own partners anytime the opportunity presented itself. So his passing was mourned by few, and probably not even by his wife, a smart, tough woman who had been the brains behind the car lot in the first place, and who kept the business going while her husband was off running up and down the roads in a fancy Lincoln convertible, cranked to the gills on speed and trying to get something going in the Mexican heroin trade, an endeavor for which he was uniquely unsuited. She never remarried. Instead, she devoted her energies to teaching her kid the ins and outs of the used car trade. Eddie Junior was a fast learner who wound up even more successful than his mother. He also loved poker, and a lot of money passed across his table every weekend.

It was a Friday night in late fall. The area had been plagued with storms and tornado warnings all week. Thunder could still be heard rumbling in the distance, but by dark the rain had slacked off to a steady drizzle. The weather forecasts called for more bad weather in the next few days, and the temperature was expected to drop below freezing before dawn.

The cards were cold that night too. The game was nolimit Texas Hold’em, but nobody could seem to get any traction, not even Cherry. Then, a little before the witching hour, one of those freak hands came along, and two kings and an ace flopped. Jackie Fats bet $200 and Cherry raised him $500. Jackie smiled-which was a rare thing for the cranky bastard-and called even. Cherry smiled right back at him. This sudden heat caused everybody else to fold, and the next card was the king of spades. After that, Cherry knew the die was cast, even though the rest of us didn’t find out until a couple of minutes later. Fats bet $1,000 and Cherry raised him another $1,000. The last card was the seven of clubs, which neither helped nor hurt either of them. Jackie Fats smiled again, and with all the confidence in the world, he laid down twenty brand-new hundred-dollar bills. Cherry didn’t even hesitate. He called and raised $2,500, which only left him a couple of hundred on the table. For all practical purposes he was all in, a move that should have made Jackie Fats study the situation over for at least a few seconds. But Jackie was a natural bully, one who was always eager to stomp down on somebody, and he fell all over himself pushing the call into the pot. Eddie Junior, who was dealing that hand, said, “Showtime, boys.”

Jackie Fats had made the last call, which meant it was Cherry’s obligation to show his cards first. But Jackie was hungry for blood. His eyes were bright and gleeful, and his face was positively vulpine as he reached down with his short, once-plump fingers and flipped over his hole cards to reveal an ace and a king, which gave him an A-A-K-K-K full house. “Can you beat that?”

Cherry didn’t even bother to answer. He just casually turned over his cards to reveal the other two aces for an A-AA-K-K full. As I said, it was a freak hand.

Jackie Fats gaped at the cards for the longest time, his face getting gradually redder and redder. A drop of spittle dripped off his lower lip and hung by a thread as it made its slow way down to the table. Then he bellowed like a wounded bull and lunged to his feet. That’s when the revolver appeared in his hand. Which surprised no one. It was considered the worst of manners to come armed to another man’s place, but etiquette had never been Jackie’s strong suit.

“Get up,” he said, waving the gun wildly under Cherry’s nose. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t on his feet.”

Cherry was unperturbed. “I don’t think so.”

“I said, get up!”

“No. I’m comfortable where I’m at.”

Jackie Fats licked his lips. He’d never had a man refuse one of his “requests” when he was pointing a.357 at his head. It was a new experience for him. Combined with Cherry’s utter calm, it rattled him. “I want to know how,” he said.

“How what?”

“How you always win.”

“He don’t,” Bob Robbins said.

“Shut up, Bob,” Fats said without much rancor. “I’ve paid the price here tonight and I want an answer.”

Ever the gentleman, Sam had left his piece in the car, but now he regretted it. He was beginning to realize just how long he’d been deeply annoyed with Jackie Fats and just how much he wanted an excuse to smoke the man. Still, he said as diplomatically as he could, “Let it pass, Jackie. It’s not worth gunplay.”

“I’ll be the one to decide that,” Jackie barked. “And this bastard is going to tell me how he does it.”

“There’s no reason-” Bob Robbins began.

“Seventy-two percent,” Cherry said, interrupting him.

“What?” Fats growled. His face was almost purple, and he was gripping the gun so tightly his knuckles were white and bloodless. Cherry was as calm as a mortician.

“Seventy-two percent,” Cherry repeated. “That’s how much of the time I know what the cards are. It’s always been that way, though I only started to gamble in the last few years.”

Jackie Fats was baffled. “What are you saying?”

Cherry sighed a tired sigh. “You wanted to know how I do it, and I just told you.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Okay, then try this. We sit down and somebody deals a hundred hands. In roughly seventy-two of them I’ll know what everybody has.”

“You mean you guess right almost three quarters of the time?” one of the other players asked.

Cherry shook his head firmly. “There’s no guess to it. Some hands I don’t have a clue, but most of the time I know. And I’m never wrong. I either know for sure or I don’t know anything. It’s either the whole hog or nothing with me. That’s just the way it works, but I’ve got no idea why.”

Sam was more alert than the others. “How did you get that precise figure?” he asked. “The seventy-two percent, I mean.”

“I was tested in the Rhine experiments in ESP at Duke University.”

“But that was…” Sam began, then tapered off in confusion.

“About fifty years ago, Sam.”

“Damn! You can’t be that old.”

“Why can’t I?” he asked. Then he turned and looked at Sam, and his face was full of weariness. For a fleeting moment, Sam thought he saw something in Cherry Coke’s eyes that was deep and dark and ancient beyond knowing. Then Cherry blinked and it was gone, and he was once again the same bland, fortyish fellow Sam had known for a year, staring back at him out of a face so plain and undistinguished that it could hardly be remembered.

Cherry got leisurely to his feet and stood looking across the table at Jackie Fats. “If you’re going to shoot me, go ahead and do it,” he said.

Sam looked across at Jackie Fats. For some reason, all the fight had gone out of him, and he wasn’t in a shooting mood anymore. His hand trembled a little as he slowly lowered the gun. His gaze was riveted to Cherry’s face, and his expression was unreadable. Sam reached out and took the.357 gently from Jackie’s hand and tucked it in his belt. Cherry slowly and carefully stacked his winnings and slipped them into his inner jacket pocket. Then he looked around the table and smiled. “It’s been a real pleasure,” he said. “You were fine fellows to be with.”

When Cherry walked out, Sam MacCord followed him. The air was cold and bitter and full of a fine mist. In the parking lot Sam came abreast of Cherry and asked, “If what you said in there about the Rhine experiments is true, then…” Sam let his voice taper off.

Cherry didn’t look at him. He just kept walking, but he said, his voice resigned, “Then what?”

After a moment’s thought, Sam decided not to push the matter. “Nothing,” he replied with a shake of his head.

When Cherry got to his car, he turned and stuck out his hand. “I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Sam,” he said. “I’ve always liked having friends, but it’s never paid me to try to hold on to them too long.”

A few seconds later the Marquis whisked softly off into the night. That was the last time Sam MacCord ever saw Cherry Coke, but he heard stories. About a year later, a couple of regulars at the Lufkin game took their wives out to Las Vegas on vacation. One evening they left the women parked at a show and took a cab over to sample the delights of the Mirage. That’s where they saw Cherry at the five-dollar-minimum blackjack table, still clad in his dark pants and sand-colored sport coat. Whatever warm reunion they might have expected wasn’t forthcoming. Cherry was civil but unsmiling and distant. After a couple of aborted attempts at reliving old times, they gave up and left him there amidst the clatter of chips and the whir of the slot machines, a loner in a lonely land. Six months after the game, Jackie Fats Reed was found sprawled on the living room floor of his Houston apartment with a.22-caliber bullet hole in the center of his forehead and an expression of pure amazement frozen on his ugly face. Speculation was that Cherry Coke had extracted his revenge for that dreadful night in Lufkin, but Sam MacCord knew better.

After he heard about Cherry turning up at the Mirage, Sam made a point of asking everybody he knew who went to Vegas about him. Word filtered back to Texas that the man had become a minor legend on the Strip, a sort of silent specter who never won heavily but who rarely lost, and who moved from casino to casino taking a thousand or so a week away from the tables-enough to live on reasonably well but never enough to annoy the Powers That Be. Then he vanished.

It was several months before Sam managed to shake loose from his affairs long enough to travel out to Nevada and try to run down the story. The trail led to an elderly Texas road gambler named Diamond Red Nash who now worked as a gaming consultant for one of the casinos. He and Sam had always liked one another, and their reunion was cordial. Sam quickly learned that Diamond Red had been Cherry’s only real friend in Vegas. He also learned that Cherry had left town on his own.

“Didn’t nobody run him off or do nothing to hurt him,” Red said. “He just told me that he hadn’t seen Europe in a long, long time, and then he was gone.”

“Europe?” Sam asked in surprise. “Why there?”

“Well, he claimed he wanted to revisit some old memories. And he said he intended to try the baccarat at Monte Carlo.”

Sam nodded and looked out the window into the desert air shimmering in the bright noonday sun and thought back to that cold, rainy night when he’d last seen Cherry. It seemed a whole world and a lifetime away, and for the first time he felt the full weight of his sixty years. “What was your estimate of him, Red?” he finally asked.

“I think he was the best blackjack player I ever laid my eyes on.” Then he grinned. “And I believe he loved good pork sausage more than anybody I ever knew.”

Sam smiled and nodded. “And…?”

“I really liked the boy, Sam. I believe he’d do to ride the river with.”

“I thought so too, Red. I thought so too…”

Sam shook the old man’s hand and caught a late-night flight back to Dallas. The next day he called in a marker with a couple of local detectives who stayed a few hundred in debt to his book year-round. It wasn’t long before one of them phoned to tell him that a Richard Coke had flown from Las Vegas to Atlanta and then on to Munich, where he had leased a brand-new BMW from a German agency. After that, there was no trace of him.

Sam decided to drop it. He considered Cherry a friend, and friends were entitled to their privacy. He also did his best to put the matter out of his mind. But from time to time, especially when he awoke in those lonely hours after midnight and sleep wouldn’t return, he found himself thinking about Cherry Coke. He finally decided that besides being the best gambler he’d ever met, the man had been a consummate actor who could convince anybody of almost anything. That’s what he believed because that’s what he wanted to believe. The only other explanation that fit the facts led down a dark road that Sam MacCord did not want to travel.