That’s How I Roll

THIS COULD HAVE BEEN ANTHRAX

If the man was smart enough, that would do it.

But maybe the man had himself committed so deep that he’d already built himself some stronger walls. Maybe he’d never get mail at his home, so any package delivered there would just sit unopened until he had someone come by and pick it up for him.

For a man that cautious, a better move would be if his electricity went out late one night. No warning, everything just snaps! off.

Now, that does happen around here. Which is why so many folks outside of town keep backup generators. But this man would look out his window and see all the other close-by houses still showing lights.

Before he can ponder that mystery, his phone rings. The house phone, not his cell. The house phone with the number kept in someone else’s name, and unlisted to boot.

A mechanical voice says: “It would be just as easy to turn off your lights.”

Then the phone goes dead in the target’s hand. And the electricity in his house suddenly pops back to life.

It wouldn’t take that kind of man too long to think over all the different electrical things he uses every day. All the things he has to touch.

That’s when he understands that there’s people out there somewhere who can touch him.

t’s a formula: the higher the target’s intelligence, the more subtle you can be about sending him a message.

Some people are just plain mulish. Science can do a lot of things, but there’s no cure for a man’s personality.

That threw me at first, and it shouldn’t have done so. I’d seen too many times how a man’s ego can take over everything else inside him—make a usually accommodating man as stubborn as a tree stump.

That’s why I always delivered my messages direct into the hands of the man I got paid to fix. I learned the force of ego not so much by reading as by watching. I’d learned that if a man gets warned off in front of his crew, he’s never going to act reasonably. It’s almost as if he can’t do that.

I could always get the job done. No matter what it took, I knew where to find it. Or how to build it. All I ever needed was certain knowledge I couldn’t get on my own. Knowledge of the target, I mean.

My preference was always for precision. There’s no reason to blow up a whole schoolhouse just to kill the principal. That’s why I needed the best possible knowledge of the target … so I could decide on the best method to make him go away.

I turned myself into a persistence hunter. The fastest animal on earth is a cheetah, but there’s a tribe that kills them for food. They can’t outrun a cheetah, but they can keep running long after the cheetah can’t draw another breath. Takes them hours and hours each time, but they know, if they stay at it, the outcome is always the same.

When I took a job, it was known I’d stay on it until it was done. How could I charge the prices I did—how was I supposed to keep earning the money I needed—unless my word carried its own worth?

Here’s an example of that. I didn’t know why Judakowski needed that new preacher gone, but I was assured the Reverend Elias never went to sleep in his own bed without spending some time with his Presentation Bible—the one they give you when you graduate from divinity school.

That Bible was precious to him. It never left his house, even when he traveled. But he had others—whoever heard of a preacher who went around without at least a pocket-sized one? And he was leaving on a two-week circuit soon.

I’m no burglar—that’s understood, and such a service is never expected from me—so Judakowski’s men had to bring that Bible over to his place for me to pick up.

When I told them they had to take digital photos of that Bible from several angles, including tight close-ups, before they so much as touched it, they gave me a funny look. When I told them I would need the camera they used, too, so I could check to see if they’d done their job right before I started on mine, I felt them getting ready to buck.

“Do what the man tells you,” Judakowski said. He didn’t have to say any more.

His men were expert thieves, but they didn’t know anything about putting stuff back.

It was almost three days before I was satisfied with the wire-thin string of microchips I built. But it took me only a couple of hours to drill a tiny hole through the binding between the pages of paper and the spine. Then I threaded the string of microchips through that hole and touched each end with a tiny droplet of nail polish to hold it in place.

When I handed that Bible back to Judakowski, it was open to the same page it had been when it was stolen. I told him his men had to use the blown-up digital shots I’d made to guide them through putting the Bible back exactly where they’d found it. I even drew a diagram for them, with all the measurements in inches.

I also told him they had to handle that Bible like it was made of spun glass. Most important of all, they had to be absolutely sure not to close it.

hen I say “fix,” that’s just what I mean—solve a problem. That’s why Judakowski never hired me for one of those blood feuds he was always getting into—that’s not the kind of job you can outsource.

Lansdale never seemed to have those kinds of feuds. Whenever he hired me, it was to move someone aside who was standing in his way. Business. Nothing personal.

That’s why I was so taken aback when he called over to the barmaid one night, “Bring Esau his usual, will you, Nancy? Uh … better make it a double, okay? We’ve got a lot to talk over.”

Everyone who worked in Lansdale’s joint knew I only drank apple juice—not even cider, pure juice. They always kept some on hand for me. Fresh, too.

I didn’t show it, but that meant a lot to me. Not the juice itself, the way they respected the decisions I made about my own body.

The first time I’d ever come alone to his bar, Lansdale had asked me what I’d have. Didn’t bat an eye at what I told him. Ever since then, I could count on a big mug of apple juice being brought over to the table whenever I visited.

What had taken me aback was that Lansdale asked the barmaid to bring me that drink after we were done talking business. That made it clear that he didn’t want anyone else hearing whatever it was we were about to talk over.

Neither of those things had ever happened before.

“Thank you,” I told the barmaid when she brought my drink.

“You might be the only man who ever brings his church manners into a bar, Esau,” she said, flashing me a grin. “But don’t be leaving me any more of your tips. I warned you about that, didn’t I?”

“You did,” I admitted. “But I can’t just—”

“What, call me Nancy? Trust me, I’ve been called a whole lot worse than my own name.”

“It’s not that,” I told her. “It’s just that … well, you being a young girl, it seems like I’d be taking liberties, doing that.”

She put her hands on her hips and stood there, her eyes searching my face.

“It’s been a long time since anyone called me a young girl, Esau. You know why I choose to work here? It’s the one bar in this whole lousy town where they don’t allow drunks. Mean drunks, I’m talking about. And nobody’s ever crazy enough to start a fight in here. But the best thing of all is that every man who walks through the door knows buying a drink doesn’t give him leave to paw the help.

“Most of the men in places I worked before? Far as they’re concerned, when they buy a drink, pinching the serving girl’s ass is included in the price.”

“I didn’t know that” is all I could think to say.

“No,” she said. “No, you wouldn’t. You’re too smart for that, aren’t you?”

“Smart?”

“Oh, come on! A man’s been around as much as you, he knows a rich silver tongue works better than a cheap gold bracelet. On a real woman, that is.”

Right about then, I was grateful for the soft lighting in the bar. And for the even darker pool of shadow where Lansdale kept his personal table.

“The way I see it,” Lansdale said, “you ain’t got but two choices, Esau. And little Miss Nancy here, she’s famous for her stubbornness.”

“With your permission, then,” I said to her.

“With your permission, Nancy,” she corrected me.

“Nancy,” I surrendered.

“You’re missing the show,” Lansdale said to me as Nancy walked away. “That girl can flat-out bring it.”

“I don’t—”

“Tell you what,” he said. “Roll on over to the side, next to me. And empty that drink, Esau. That way, you’ll see exactly what I mean when Nancy brings you a refill.”

ansdale was right on that score. In fact, I downed a whole lot of apple juice that night.

Just as well I did—Lansdale had a story to tell, and it wasn’t a short one.

“You’ve heard of Casey Myrtleson, I take it? To hear folks talk him up, you’d bet that young man is going to set NASCAR on fire one day. Sure, he’s kind of wild, but nothing wrong with raising a little hell when you’re still in your twenties. It was our own people who really got NASCAR started, and you know how they learned their driving skills—by now, it’s in our blood.

“But a young buck like Casey Myrtleson, he doesn’t just drive fast, he does everything fast. Stirs up a whole lot of rumors in his wake.”

“I suppose he might,” I said, not having even a clue as to where all this was going.

Not that I cared. I would have been content to sit there all night.

“You and me, we’re the same,” Lansdale said. Not like asking a question, stating a fact. Before I could ask him how he could possibly think such a thing, he told me.

“A man can put up with a lot of things. Some more than others. But there’s a bottom to every well, and a man who won’t protect his own, that’s not a man.”

“I’d never argue that.”

“Just think of the lengths you’d go to to protect your little brother, Esau.”

“You can’t have lengths for that.”

“Why do you say?”

“Lengths means there’s a limit.”

“And you’re saying, when it comes to protecting your own, there is no limit.”

“That is what I’m saying,” I told Lansdale, fear of some threat to Tory-boy already darkening my mind.

But then he went off in another direction entirely. I knew he had two children, a boy and a girl. And I knew his boy was a real terror in his own way—a newspaperman who got the Klan mad enough to burn a cross in front of his house over some articles he wrote when he was first starting out. The paper he wrote for now, it was the biggest one in the state, published in the capital. That was a long way from here, so I didn’t imagine his father could protect him much.

Anyway, Lansdale was peacock-proud of his son, but I could see he thought of him as a grown man. Old enough to pick his own road, and already walking it.

Not so his daughter—she was still in high school. One of those special-blessed beauties. Folks could legitimately argue over which was more lovely, her church-choir voice or her movie-star face.

“I do admit I worry myself about her,” Lansdale said. “A girl her age, she’s likely to be impressed by the wrong things, you know what I mean?”

I just nodded, so I wouldn’t be stopping him from talking.

“Judgment, that’s something you have to learn,” he said. “Some never do. Take that Casey Myrtleson we were just talking about. Now, he can burn up a racetrack, for sure. Thing is, he’s full-grown, but not yet grown up. Keeps on taking chances, just to be doing it.

“There’s chances a man shouldn’t ever take. You can bounce your life off the rev limiter one too many times—there’s a reason why they paint red lines on tachometers.”

“A warning.”

“Now, that is exactly what it is!” Lansdale slapped his hand on the table hard enough to break it. “But there’s always going to be men like Casey Myrtleson. They see a ‘No Trespassing’ sign, they figure they just found themselves a fine place to go deer hunting.”

That’s when I finally understood what Lansdale was really talking about. “Man like that, he’d probably take a doe out of season, even if he had to jacklight her,” I said, just to make sure.

Lansdale looked me full in the face, like he was trying to read something written in a language he knew a little bit, but not to where he’d be called fluent.

“Good talking with you, Esau,” he finally said. “I know we do business, but I hope you regard me as your friend, because that’s how I regard you.”

asey Myrtleson was big stuff. And going places, too. But he hadn’t gotten there yet, and he wasn’t so big that he didn’t open his own mail. Especially a pink-wrapped box with little red hearts all over it.

few weeks after, I rolled into Lansdale’s bar. I’d spent those weeks listening to the stories. It seemed like Casey Myrtleson being blown to bits was all folks could talk about.

They had it every which way the mind could imagine. Casey had been using cocaine to sharpen his reflexes and ran up a big debt in the process. A certain driver Casey had put into the wall a few times had made sure that wouldn’t ever happen again. A wealthy old man’s young wife had told too many stories at the beauty parlor. Casey had been trying to brew up his own mixture for the track, and playing around with nitro-mixing fuel isn’t for amateurs.

On and on. After a while, I swear there were more stories than there were people telling them.

As I came in the door, Lansdale stood up and walked over to his table. Nobody else was there. Nobody would ever be there unless Lansdale himself had invited them over.

Somebody stepped behind me and took hold of the handles of my chair. I didn’t understand that, but it didn’t worry me, considering where I was.

That night is so fixed in my memory that I can recall what was playing on the jukebox when I saw Nancy coming over to me:

I used up all my pity on myself;

Ain’t got one bit left for no one else.

Only this time she wasn’t smiling. Not even close. “Just what in hell do you think you’re doing, Elmore?” she said to the man behind me.

“I was just trying to help—”

“You think Esau needs your help to get around? The man’s got arms on him like thick lumps of iron.”

“Now, how would you be knowing that?” the man Nancy had called Elmore said to her.

“And how would that be any business of yours?” she snapped back.

Before he could say anything, Lansdale stood up and waved me over.

hank you, Nancy,” I said when she put the mug of apple juice in front of me.

“Let it go, now,” Lansdale told her. “The way you’re fuming, you’ll give yourself a damn stroke.”

“Where does that bucktoothed white trash think he—?”

“Nancy,” I said, “could you do me a favor?”

“I … Sure, Esau. What would you like?”

“I’d appreciate you asking that Elmore fella if he’d come over here for a minute. I know he tried to do me a service, and I’d like to shake his hand.”

She stole a quick look at Lansdale. He nodded his head, giving her the okay.

Elmore came on over. He was a big guy. Not Tory-boy’s size, but over six foot, easy.

I offered my hand. He took it.

It wasn’t five seconds before he called it off.

“Hah!” Nancy said to him. “I told you—”

“Could I get one more of these?” I asked her, holding up my empty glass.

“You can get anything you want, honey,” she said, and planted a little kiss on my cheek before she walked off.

I don’t know where Elmore went to. Me, I was in Heaven.

“You are truly something else, Esau,” Lansdale said, shaking his head like he’d just seen an amazing sight. “Your spine may be all messed up, but you got enough backbone for a tribe of gorillas.”

I didn’t want to reply to that, so I just waited for Nancy to get back, then held up my glass by way of saying “thank you” to Lansdale and Nancy both.

Lansdale had been right about the beauty of how Nancy walked, and I hadn’t missed an opportunity since. As soon as she was out of sight, Lansdale offered his own hand.

It was a man’s handshake, firm and strong, but nothing like that foolishness Elmore had tried.

“There isn’t a liquor store in the world that lets you buy on credit. So, if a man walks into a liquor store after dark, it’s either because he’s got money … or because he doesn’t.”

“That’s why they all deal from behind that bulletproof glass,” I agreed. “Because, just looking at a man walking in, there’s no way you can tell.”

“Unless you know the man,” he said, holding up his square-cut whiskey tumbler.

“Unless you know the man,” I said, tapping my mug of apple juice lightly against his glass.

“My wife and I, we’d be honored if you and your brother would take supper with us Thursday night, Esau.”

That hit me like a shock wave of … well, I don’t have a name for it. That invitation was beyond anything I’d ever expected to happen in my life. And including Tory-boy, well, that was exactly the way such things are done—you invite a man for dinner at your home, you invite his family, too.

Treating Tory-boy like he wasn’t “special” was the most special thing anyone had ever done.

“I’m truly honored by your invitation,” I said, keeping it as formal as a tea dance, “but I’m also honor-bound to refuse.”

“Why would that be?” Lansdale said. His voice was as polite as mine, but I could feel something darker lurking around its edges.

“It’s not right to accept an invitation when you can’t reciprocate. Our place isn’t suitable for a man to bring his family to.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Lansdale said, all the darkness suddenly gone from his voice. In fact, he was outright grinning at me. “No offense, but I don’t know anyone in this whole county who’d accept an invitation to have a meal at your place, Esau. More than likely, they’d think you were inviting them to be the meal.

“You know how people talk. There’s all kinds of horror stories about those dogs of yours—supposed to have a real taste for human flesh, the way I hear it.”

“Not a word of truth to that,” I said, feeling the smile come out on my own face. “But they really do fancy the organs.”

“So you’re saying—?”

“Pardon the interruption, but I couldn’t wait to say this. I accept your kind offer, sir. And the honor would be ours.”

ansdale had a fine house. Nothing showy, but you could see it had taken real craftsmanship to put it together.

The only thing that didn’t go perfect was when I had to touch my finger to my cheek, the signal for “Stop it!” Tory-boy had been staring at Lansdale’s daughter like he’d been hit over the head with an ax handle. A whole bunch of times.

Not that I really blamed him. Patsy was every bit as beautiful as folks said. But I’d taught Tory-boy better than that. And not just for politeness’ sake—gawking at a girl gives away too much information about yourself.

There’s much better ways to pay a compliment. Such as when Lansdale’s wife insisted that I call her Kay. Later on, I told her I was a man who’d studied science all my life but it didn’t require a deep knowledge of genetics to see where Patsy had taken her looks from. I could tell she knew I wasn’t slick-talking, just telling the truth in a polite way.

“You’ll always be welcome here, Esau,” Kay told me at the end of the evening. “You and Tory come on back anytime you get tired of eating your own cooking.”

“I can cook,” Tory-boy immediately piped up.

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Lansdale’s wife said, as she reached out and patted Tory-boy’s forearm. “I don’t imagine there’s much you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it.”

It was right there that I learned the difference between just having good manners and having genuine class.

acquired some of my knowledge late. But after working for a time, I came to understand that everything in life always boils down to principles.

Principles come in two forms.

Some you can never change, like a scientific principle that had proved itself, over and over again. That reliability test: x always causes y.

It’s the “always” that makes it science.

The scientific principle for making a bomb is as logical as not scratching a poison ivy rash. All you need is a container that isn’t strong enough to hold whatever you put inside of it. The stronger the container, the stronger that inside force has to be.

Another scientific principle is that accuracy will defeat firepower. One truly skilled sniper could wipe out a whole gang, provided he had good enough cover and plenty of time. A tiny dash of poison in a cup of coffee could take down a man powerful enough to bend a crowbar in his bare hands.

But inside that principle there’s another one, which you can’t see. No matter how powerful the explosive or how potent the poison, they’re absolutely worthless without a direct-delivery system.

You want to kill a powerful man with poisoned coffee, you have to get him to drink that coffee.

The other type of principles are those a man chooses to live by. No man can change scientific principles, but any man can change his own.

How else could there be traitors?

ansdale had made himself an enemy. He didn’t know who it was—although I suspect he had an idea—but he knew someone was committed to his death.

“It came out of nowhere,” he told me. “The box I was sitting on slid just a tiny bit, the side of my face felt this little bee-sting … and then I heard the crack of the rifle. I dropped and rolled behind some rocks, but it was another few seconds before I realized I was bleeding. Whoever he was, he didn’t miss by much.”

“You were in Grant’s Tomb?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Now, how would you guess something like that, Esau?”

So that’s why he wanted to meet, I thought to myself. Part of me was saddened that he might think such a thing. I had been a guest in his home, and I was sure he knew how much that had meant to me.

I promised nothing but truth in this record, so, even though it shames me to admit it, another part of me was offended. If I’d been sitting behind that sniper’s scope, I wouldn’t have missed.

But all I said out loud was “That box you were sitting on, sliding a little like it did, that probably saved your life. You said you didn’t hear the sound of the shot until after you felt it kiss the side of your face. That means it was fired from a long distance—half a mile, minimum. There’s no shortage of mountains around here, but they’re all covered with leafy trees, especially this time of year. That’s how I figured it had to be Grant’s Tomb—where else could a sniper get a clean shot at you from that far away?”

That calmed him down right away. I could see it on his face as he followed the trail I had reasoned out.

The trail actually started about fifty or sixty years ago, depending on who you ask.

A big-time strip miner named Silas Grant had a vision come to him. Lots of folks have visions, but Silas Grant had piled up enough coal money to actually chase his vision down.

Gold, that was his vision. A vein of gold so thick it would take you a day just to walk across it. So much gold that it made the Mother Lode look like her baby.

Silas Grant spent his whole fortune trying to find that gold he saw in his vision. He bought up hundreds of acres, set up his mining operation, and built a whole little town around it. Years and years went by. Folks said the workers dug down so deep they could feel the heat of Hell.

But Silas Grant died without ever extracting anything but tons of rock so worthless that he even lost money having it hauled away. That’s why the folks around here call that spot Grant’s Tomb—Silas Grant was a man who worked himself to death digging his own grave.

When he died, that property was about all he left behind. There wasn’t any reasonable use for it—just to fill it in and level the ground would cost a thousand times more than the land was worth.

His family was rendered poor. Well, poor by the standards they were all used to. That made them so bitter that they didn’t even bother to put on the kind of funeral folks would expect from people of their standing.

For years, the ground stood fallow. The whole mining town ghosted out. All that remained was a bunch of rickety old buildings, a couple of looted trailers, and some heavy equipment that was rust-shut forever.

When Lansdale went and bought the whole site from Grant’s family, they thought he was Heaven-sent. He probably hadn’t paid all that much, but it was enough for them to leave here and start over someplace else. Someplace where they weren’t known.

Nobody knew what Lansdale wanted that place for, but it was no secret that he held meetings down there.

“So …” That was just Lansdale, thinking out loud. I kept quiet. I waited in that quiet because I knew he’d ask me questions when he got done with whatever he was thinking through in his head. That had happened so often that I’d come to expect it.

“So it could only be one of two things, then,” he finally spoke out loud.

I nodded. When he didn’t say anything else, I knew he was waiting for me to spell it out.

“Somebody’s camped up there permanent,” I said. “Built himself a hide he could live in for months, if he had to. All he’d need was restocking—supplies, food, batteries for his phone and radio, maybe stuff to read. And he’d have to be the kind of man who could handle being alone.”

Lansdale nodded. Then he held up two fingers, like making a “V” sign.

There was no sugarcoating the other possibility, so I just said, “Or one of your men is taking someone else’s money.”

“Or just plain talks too much,” Lansdale said. He shifted his body a little, and looked at me real close. “So that’s three possibilities, Esau. If you were a gambling man, which horse would you put your money on?”

“Those last two, you’re splitting the same hair.”

“The same? Come on. There’s a million miles between a man who will sell you out if the price is right and a man who can’t keep his fool mouth shut when he gets liquored up … especially around a woman.”

“Still no difference, really.”

“Meaning, if he isn’t camped up there permanent, that sniper had to know I’d be out there that day he took his shot. So, a traitor or a drunk, it still comes out the same?”

“The reason the sniper was in place doesn’t much matter—if he’d’ve hit you, you’d be just as dead.”

“I’m trying to be cold-blooded about this,” he said, “but I just can’t see any of my men selling me out. Or even talking out of turn.”

“That’s what doctors call a ‘rule-out.’ One of the football players from the high school takes one of those helmet-to-helmet hits. Knocks him unconscious. Even if he comes to on his own, even if he gets up and walks over to the bench, even if he says he wants to go back in, they’ll still carry him over to the ER.

“That’s why they perform all those tests—CAT scans and other stuff like that. They have to rule out brain damage. Some concussions, the brain actually bounces back and forth against the inside of the skull. You send that kid back to play too soon, he could end up talking like some of those old boxers do.

“That’s the scientific method of working: there are times when you have to make sure what something isn’t before you can start looking for what it is.”

“That sounds right to me, Esau. Ruling out a sniper camped out up there first. That was the case, they wouldn’t need an inside man in my crew.”

“If you want to know for sure, just take me out there. If you can show me the exact spot where you were when—”

“Nothing’s been moved,” he interrupted.

“Makes it even easier, then,” I told him. “That bullet left a nice trail down the side of your face, but it would have to flatten itself out on the rock behind you. Too much of a mess to tell you much from looking at it, but I’d put my money on it being a NATO round.”

“That’s like a .22, right?”

“Not much difference in size,” I told him. “But a whole lot in speed.”

I wonder if he knows? I remember thinking. But I let that thought go. Lansdale was a subtle man, but he wasn’t a game player. So I just kept rolling:

“You put yourself in the exact same position, give me some time to work with my instruments, I can probably point you to within ten yards of wherever that sniper was roosting.”

“What good would that do me?”

“It’ll answer your question. If it was a sniper planted up there, that’s a card whoever wanted you dead can only play once. If a hide was built, there’ll still be plenty of traces left behind. The sniper fired only once, and you went down right after. He couldn’t see you behind those rocks, so a second shot wouldn’t do any good—he either nailed you or he didn’t. So he probably took off without stopping to clean up after himself. And even if he’d tried to, there’s no way he could have covered up the signs a man would leave being up there for that long.”

“I’ll do it,” Lansdale said. He’d started to get to his feet when I made a little motion with my hand. When he sat down again, I leaned close:

“What I just said only works if the sniper had really been planted there, waiting. You understand? If he didn’t know when you’d be showing up …”

I could tell Lansdale didn’t like even the thought of any other possibility. “Yeah,” he said. “And so?”

“So, if you go out there, and you don’t find a blind, you’re as good as telling whoever betrayed you that you’re on to him. Maybe not to him, exactly, but you’d still be showing your hand without making him pay to call it. If you know it was someone from inside your organization, would you want them knowing you knew?”

“I can’t not go out there, Esau. I’ve got … all kinds of business that needs to be done from that place. Hell, that’s why I bought it—nobody could get close enough to listen, and there’s no place to plant a microphone.”

“Can’t have your men think you were scared off, either. Or that you might be questioning someone’s loyalty.”

He smiled at that. “So you’ve got a plan, do you?”

“I do.”

“How are you going to spot a sniper’s roost up in all that mess? It could be damn near anywhere.”

“I’d need two men,” I said. “Not hired hands, men you’re willing to trust with your life. I’m guessing that both Eugene and Coy are on that list.”

“If I’m wrong about them, I’d rather die than learn of it.”

“I understand,” I told him. And I truly did.

oy put me over his shoulder and carried me all the way to where we finally found the sniper’s hide. Whoever had put it together had spent a lot of time and effort on the job.

And I was right—the sniper had bailed out after his one shot missed. No point in hanging around. Lansdale’s survival instinct had kicked in the second he’d heard the shot. He rolled behind one of the boulders, and all his men had taken cover, too. Some had scoped rifles; they were already scanning. A couple of others had backed all the way out without showing themselves, and the sniper had to figure they were on their way up to where he was.

He’d left plenty of things behind. Nothing that would tell us who he was, but more than enough to catch sun-glints from the refractory mirrors I’d set up for Eugene and Coy to move around every time I told them to.

“A setup like this, he wouldn’t need anything but patience,” I said.

“Yeah,” Lansdale said, “I’ve got a bit of that myself.”

But I could see he wasn’t really paying attention. From the moment we’d found that hide, he’d been grinning like a kid who got a pony for Christmas.

“I knew that stupid Polack couldn’t wait his turn,” Lansdale crowed. “Probably thinks all that’s left to do is pay the sniper off with the same coin he deals out, and then everything’s his.”

“Can you be sure it was Judakowski?” I said, more out of concern for Lansdale than anything else. “Might be more than one person around who felt unkindly toward you.”

“Might be at that,” Lansdale said, chuckling. “Come on, Esau, aim your own weapon. Use that deadly brain of yours. A man might get mad enough to take a shot at me, sure. But any sniper that patient and that professional, he’s not going to come cheap. Times are hard. Who’s got the money to be throwing around like that?”

f you’re wondering about how Lansdale knew I’ve got what it takes to shoot a man in cold blood, I can tell you how that came about.

It was mid-afternoon when we all heard a car’s tires crunch against the pebbled parking lot behind Lansdale’s office. In front, it was a poolroom, but it was no secret that the back office was where you had to go if you wanted to do business.

“It’s a dark-red Hummer, boss,” Zeke said, peeking out between the blinds. “Tinted windows, big wheels. Parked sideways.”

Lansdale didn’t say anything, waiting on more information. I rolled my chair into a corner, adjusted the blanket over my lap, and slitted my eyes.

“Three men,” Zeke said. “Could be more of them in there—that’s a damn big ride, and the windows are tinted so dark I can’t make out a thing inside.”

“Strangers?” Barton asked.

“Niggers,” Zeke said.

“Not what I asked,” Barton said. He was just as loyal as Zeke, but a whole lot smarter.

“If they know enough to come in the back way, we may not know them, but they know us,” Lansdale said. He pointed to his right. Barton stepped into that spot. Zeke went over to the door and opened it, like it had been standing that way all along.

There were three of them, but it was clear there was only one in charge.

“My name is DeAngelo White,” he said, talking right at Lansdale, who was still behind his desk. “I came a long way to see you. We can make some money together—serious money, I’m saying.”

He hadn’t offered his hand. Neither did Lansdale. “Have a seat” is all he said.

As DeAngelo sat down across from Lansdale, his two men moved smoothly to each side, standing like bookends. That triangle-forming move looked so natural you could tell it was something they were used to doing. Even though each of them was outflanked by one of Lansdale’s men, they stood relaxed, keeping their hands in sight.

That looked practiced, too. Or maybe they just shared the same overconfidence as their boss.

DeAngelo got right to it. “You’ve probably never heard of me. I believe you’ll agree that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s what you might call a business advantage.”

His voice was that of an educated, intelligent man. He spoke like a college graduate, not a thug. I felt ashamed—professionally ashamed—for the assumptions I’d been making since he and his two men walked in the door.

Around here, a dangerous man wouldn’t call attention to himself, never mind wear such outlandish clothes and jewelry. A man in my business has to be able to judge dangerousness in others, and overlooking their intelligence is a good way to get yourself killed.

“But I’ve heard of you,” DeAngelo went on. “I know I need to reach an understanding with you if I want to move my product in this part of the state.”

“Not going to happen,” Lansdale said. “Your people come to these parts, they’re going to stick out like the bull’s-eye on a shooting range.”

“No, man. I’m not talking about some little hand-to-hand stuff. In the business I’m speaking of, you’d be a retailer, okay? Which means you have to get your product from a wholesaler. Now, me, I am a wholesaler.

“All that means is weight; it doesn’t say a word about quality. So I came here to give you my personal guarantee that my product is pure. You can step on it a lot heavier than anything you’re getting now and you’ll still be selling better stuff. Despite that, I’ll match any price you’re paying.

“So far, all I’ve done is talk. You don’t know me, you don’t know my reputation, so I understand that I have to prove myself in. And I’m ready to do just that.

“How would it be if I left you a serious sample—I’m talking three keys—completely on trust? You take my sample, you test it anyway you want, then you’ll know how much cut it’ll hold. After that, you just distribute it. You’ll at least double your usual take from the same amount. And you don’t owe me a dime until my stuff proves out.

“Now, sure, you could just give me a blank look when I showed up later, looking to get paid. You could say, ‘What three keys?’ I’ll take that chance, because, once you see how much money there is to be made, ripping off three keys wouldn’t be worth it. A bad business decision.

“See what I’m saying here? No way you can lose. When you’re out of product, you just let me know—we got all kinds of ways you can do that—and I come back with a new load. All you have to do is pay me for the one you already made serious money on.

“Now, where else could you find a wholesaler who’d hand over product on trust? That’s not the way the game works. But I’m not just a wholesaler, I’m an innovator.

“If you and me can do business, then we both make bank. I get a bigger market for my product than anyone expects I could—and you make more money for yourself … a lot more money.

“And I don’t want to stop there. We can agree to sharing the wealth, sure. But if we increase the wealth, we could end up sharing a much bigger pie. You feeling me?”

It was quiet for a couple of seconds. Then Lansdale said, “I wouldn’t feel you with barbecue tongs.”

Then it was DeAngelo’s turn to go quiet. But not for long. “Yeah. All right, my man. I see where you stand on this. I’m a student who does his homework. That’s why I’ve never taken a fall—I study the situation before I ever make a move. I gave you the respect of making you my first visit. But you know how the game works: one player passes, another one sits in.”

“No” is all Lansdale said.

“What is it that you’re trying to tell me, man? I already got your answer. Next stop is this guy they call Jackhammer. You’re not telling me I can’t ask him if he likes my offer, are you? I mean, the way I understand it, you guys aren’t exactly cut buddies.”

“What I want to hear—and this is the only thing I want to hear—is that you’re leaving,” Lansdale said. “Leaving now. And not coming back.”

“You don’t need to be worrying about that. DeAngelo White never goes where he’s not wanted.”

“I guess I’m not making myself clear,” Lansdale said. “I’m not talking about coming back to me; what I’m saying is, don’t come back here. Anywhere around here.”

“Be serious, man. I’m in business. You can turn me down, and I can respect that. But no way you speak for your competition, am I right?”

“This isn’t about who I’m speaking for,” Lansdale told him, “it’s about who I’m speaking to.”

“You might not like certain colors; I get that. But the only thing whiter than my own name is my product.”

“I wouldn’t know that,” Lansdale said. “And I’m not ever going to find out.”

Something in his tone told DeAngelo that his antenna had been tuned to the wrong station. “People know I’m here,” he said. Said it calm, like he was doing Lansdale a favor, keeping him from making a big mistake.

“Who?” Lansdale said. “Your parole officer? I’m not going to keep saying the same thing over and over.”

“Not necessary. Neither am I. And when—not if—when I come back up here, I won’t be coming with a couple of friends like I did today. You feeling that?”

“I am,” Lansdale said. He looked kind of sad when he spoke. The instant I saw DeAngelo’s two men slowly shifting their outside shoulders, I shot DeAngelo in the back of his head.

The single-shot pistol I used was my own invention. The barrel was as big as a 12-gauge, but that was mostly the baffling—the bullet was the same .220 Swift I like so much, but I’d packed it with far less powder, to keep it subsonic.

The shot made a noise like a puff of air. DeAngelo crumpled to the floor, the slug still inside his skull.

His men froze, not sure what had just happened. It was only for a split second, but that was enough for them to realize Zeke and Barton already had them covered.

“I’m truly sorry about this,” Lansdale told DeAngelo’s men. “But your boss brought it down on both of you.”

“DeAngelo never could make up his mind about what he was. Which means he was guaranteed to overstep his bounds one day,” the man standing to my right said. There was no fear in his voice; just a man reciting some facts. “We ain’t his partners; we ain’t in his crew. We’re just men he hired to come along today. That’s what we do, hire out. DeAngelo pays good, but he don’t think good. Likes to put on a show. That’s why he had us both facing you. Looks cool, but don’t leave nobody to watch his back.

“Like you said, he brought it down on himself. Just something that happened. Got nothing to do with us.”

“It kind of does, now,” Lansdale said. “I don’t bear you any ill will, but I also don’t know you. So letting you walk away, that would be a bad business decision. You feeling me?”

Barton and Zeke fired at the same time. Their pistols boomed like thunder inside that closed space.

Zeke got down to check that all three men on the floor were gone. He spent quite a bit of time on DeAngelo. He and Barton had fired heavy hollow-points at such short range that survival wasn’t possible, but he had no idea what had taken DeAngelo out.

“I can’t see no blood, but this one’s gone for sure, boss,” he said, his fingers on DeAngelo’s carotid artery.

Lansdale just nodded.

Barton came back into the office. “There were three more of them inside that Hummer, boss. The engine was running. Real quiet—probably never turned it off. One was behind the wheel. The other two had MAC-10s.”

“Cover fire,” Lansdale said.

“Had to be,” Barton agreed. “That’s why they had the back doors standing open. Just enough so they wouldn’t have to waste time piling in.”

“I didn’t hear any shots.”

“With Eugene, Coy, and Adam, why would you?”

Lansdale smiled. Not his usual grin; this was more like just showing his teeth. “If that car of theirs could carry six of them out here, it can just as easy carry them all away. We’ll have to flatbed it. Call Delbert. And make sure he brings a big tarp with him.”

en came into the back office and rolled up the bodies on the floor in individual shrouds. It was clear they’d done it before by the way they used box cutters on the room-sized sheet of heavy black plastic that was always under the rugs.

“You want—?” Zeke started to ask.

“Not until Junior runs his blue light over the floor,” Lansdale stopped him. “We might have to bleach the wood, then sand it down good, before we put the new rugs in. And we don’t want to move the bodies out of here until it gets just a little darker, so you can leave them right there for now.”

After the men left, it was just me and Lansdale.

“You’re a man of many talents, Esau” is all he said.

After that, the range of jobs I did for him expanded significantly.

t was almost fifteen years before I could make things right with Mrs. Slater. She still lived in that same house, so I was a little concerned about how Tory-boy would react when we had to go back past the place where all those ugly things had happened. But if he even recognized what was left of that burned-out shack, he didn’t show it.

I hadn’t needed to wait that long to stack up money; it was my timing that had to be perfect. Not only would I have to wait until Mrs. Slater needed something more than just my thanks, I knew I’d be facing some powerful resistance from her.

Lansdale had someone at the bank. That’s how I learned Mrs. Slater was a widow. And that her husband hadn’t carried any life insurance since he’d been laid off from his last job.

The house should have been paid off, anyway. The way the banks do it, you have to buy insurance from them, so that if you die that pays off whatever’s left on the mortgage.

But the bank said the policy only covered the face amount of the mortgage. With all the late charges the Slaters had racked up, plus the interest on that, never mind that they were already some months behind on their payments, by the time they finished playing with their computers Mrs. Slater owed almost three thousand dollars.

Still, she was working, and the bank could have written her a new note. Refinanced the property so that her payments wouldn’t be more than a few dollars a month.

But the bank knew real estate was really going up. Rich folks from the big cities were “discovering” towns like ours all over the state. Nice and cool in the summertime, with plenty of fishing.

And with all the work Mr. Slater had put into the house, it was worth a lot more than when they’d first bought it. The vultures floated high, riding the air currents, always watching with great care. They had to be sure their prey was really dead before dropping down to feed.

Foreclosure was the meal they planned on having.

With such a small balance left, Mrs. Slater could have just sold her house and walked off with a profit. But she wasn’t going to do that.

People around here, they don’t do that. It just doesn’t feel right to them.

Lansdale also told me Mrs. Slater had an old Ford. She didn’t owe anything on it, but it was damn near shot; probably wouldn’t see her through the next winter. Not only that, she had to drive about forty miles a day just to get to the only job she could find after her husband had stopped bringing home a paycheck.

When I asked Lansdale about her children, I admired the way he answered my question. “Never had any” is all he said.

The women around here can be crueler than the men. They can say things that cut to the quick, and they’re not reluctant to use that knife. When they talked about a married woman who had no children, they’d always use that sympathy-sounding voice that was nothing but gloating covered with fake skin.

“That poor Mrs. Johnson. The Lord never blessed her with children.” That was the nicest way they’d put it.

“It’s too bad about Mrs. Johnson never being able to give her husband any children.” That was a step up their cruelty ladder, but nowhere near the top.

The meanest—and their favorite—was to just shake their heads in false sorrow whenever they referred to Mrs. Johnson, always making sure the word “barren” found its way into their pretend-pity.

That really made me think on how—“prepared,” I guess is the word I’m searching for—on how well prepared Mrs. Slater had been to help me with Tory-boy when he first came.

hen we pulled up in the van, Mrs. Slater came out onto her porch. That’s the way folks do. No need for a doorbell when your driveway is gravel or chipped stone. Or if you have a dog.

She looked like most of the women around here do after a while: gaunt, hard lines cut into her face. Worn hands, suspicious eyes.

But all that changed when the van’s side door opened and the release system lowered my chair to the ground.

“Esau? Esau Till. Is that you? My goodness. And this is—”

“This is my little brother, Tory,” I said. “That’s why we chose Mother’s Day to visit. Had it not been for your saintly kindness, he wouldn’t be standing next to me right now. The way I always looked at it, you’re Tory’s real mother. I’ve been telling him about you since he was old enough to understand.”

She clapped her hand over her heart, like she was about to faint. “My goodness! I’d heard … Well, just listen to me! Like I was raised in a barn. Can you sit a spell?”

“Yes, ma’am. I came out here for that very reason. There’s something that’s been worrying at me for a long time, and now that I’ve been led to the righteous answer, this was the place I had to come to.”

I could see she was puzzled by what I said. And she drew quite a breath when she saw Tory-boy pick up me and my chair the way another man would pick up a newspaper.

He carried me up to the porch; then he pulled back Mrs. Slater’s chair for her. I believe that may have shocked her even more—good manners count for a lot around here, but the older folks never get tired of saying that young people just don’t know how to act anymore.

Both Tory-boy and me said we’d love a glass of the lemonade she offered. We weren’t lying, either—the month of May can get brutal around here.

We each took a little drink, and Tory-boy beat me to telling her it was delicious. I was never prouder of him than that day—there wasn’t a single thing he did that wasn’t perfect.

When I told Mrs. Slater I was deeply sorry for her loss, she just nodded. I took that for what it was: an acknowledgment, maybe even thanks. But nothing more than that. Showing the truth of herself—this was not a woman who would ever seek sympathy, especially from a man who knew all about suffering firsthand.

Still, me and Tory-boy bowed our heads. A moment of silence for the departed.

She understood without a word being said.

After that, we went back to visiting. In the midst of all the polite talk, I saw the opening I’d been waiting for.

I almost never went to church when I was young. Even the most devoted of the congregation—the folks who’d come and carry you to church if you didn’t have your own way of getting there—they never came near our shack on a Sunday. In fact, Mrs. Slater was the only one who had ever dared.

But I’ve read my Bible and taught myself. I can talk Christian with the best of them. I knew I’d have to call on that skill if I was to succeed on that special Mother’s Day. In a way, I was just like the sniper who fired at Lansdale. My intent couldn’t have been more different from his, but, like him, I’d only get the one shot.

“Mrs. Slater, the reason I’m here today is because I’ve done wrong, and you’re the only one who can help me put things right.”

“What could you have done, Esau?” I didn’t get my feelings hurt. In fact, I felt some pride. I knew Mrs. Slater. I knew she wasn’t questioning what a crippled man like me could do, not after knowing how I’d raised Tory-boy all by myself. No, she was speaking of my character, of my reputation.

“I don’t want to come off as some kind of boaster, ma’am, but … well, I’m generally considered to be a pretty intelligent man.”

“Intelligent? Esau, you’re the smartest boy we ever had come from here. It was in the papers when you won first prize at that Science Fair, and everyone says you’re doing so well, earning such good money with your business and all. I’m not sure exactly what it is you do—”

“I’m a consultant, ma’am. It’s work I can do from home, and, what with the Internet, I can deal with problems all over the country. All over the world, in fact.”

“I am not one bit surprised.”

“And I thank you for that, ma’am. But let me explain what I meant about doing wrong. Now, you know what is written: if a man is blessed with powers, he is obliged to use them only for good.”

I waited for her nod of agreement—and the confused look on her face that came with it—before I went on.

“Well, the good Lord has blessed me with a fine mind. And I’ve used that mind to make a good living, for myself and my brother.

“So I had no need for money. But I was tempted, and I fell. Somebody told me about this big poker game they have in town every Saturday night.

“I know I shouldn’t have gone into a gambling den, but I told myself I was only curious about such things. And maybe that was actually true, at first. I couldn’t say what brought me there, because I honestly don’t really know.

“But what I do know is that I ended up studying that poker game. Not only the game, but the men who were playing. And I kept on doing that, week after week.

“If I had stopped there, if I had gotten bored, if I’d had my fill of the foul language some of them used, or the whiskey they swilled, there would be no story to tell.

“Only, it didn’t end there. One night, I brought my own money to that table, and sat down to play.”

Mrs. Slater sat there, waiting for me to finish my story. She worked at keeping a shocked look off her face, but she couldn’t do anything about her eyes.

“From the second I put my money down on that green felt table, I knew I was doing wrong,” I told her. “But my sin was much worse than gambling. You see, I had all the advantages over the others. I know how to compute odds in my head faster than this,” I said, snapping my fingers into a sharp crack. “And from having watched them so close for weeks, I knew what each man was holding. I could tell by the way they acted when they looked at their cards.

“This is what I mean: one man, every time he’s bluffing, he always takes a tiny sip of his whiskey while he’s waiting for other people to decide. Another one, he has a little tic in his right cheek that goes off every time he’s holding top cards.

“The plain truth is that there was no way I could lose. I wasn’t playing poker; I was using a poker game to take money from others. The only difference between what I did and sticking up a bank is that I didn’t use a gun.

“I have repented what I did. I know that’s not sufficient, and I accept the responsibility of that knowledge. But surely you understand that I can’t just give the money back. Not to those people—that would only cause more trouble. And I can’t keep the money, either.

“So I went over to see Pastor Knight—I don’t know if you’ve ever met him; his church is way over the other side of town. I was looking for guidance. To be honest, I thought he was going to tell me to give the money to the church.

“But the pastor told me he didn’t have an answer. He said such a question was too big for him—it was a question for the Lord Himself.

“I understood that to mean I would have to pray for guidance on my own. If my prayers were sincere, the Lord would answer. And I did pray on this. I prayed long and hard. Time passed—but the Lord finally answered. It was almost as if He was punishing me for my sins, making me prove I was truly penitent before He would show me how to truly atone.”

I drank some of her lemonade, as if it was a strength-giving elixir.

“The Lord told me that I must make an offering. Not to the church, but to a person who had both sacrificed greatly and suffered unjustly.

“And then it came to me, like a bolt of lightning in the night. A true vision, it was. I looked back on how you had sacrificed to make sure that I could raise my baby brother. I saw how you had suffered the loss of your husband.… God’s truth, there was nobody else I could see—the harder I prayed, the more you flooded my mind.”

“Now, Esau—”

“Please forgive me interrupting, Mrs. Slater. But Tory and me, we are each bound to ask you to grant our greatest wish. Each of us has a wish, and you are the only person on God’s earth who could grant either one.”

“Esau, you know if there’s anything I can do …”

“Two things,” I told her. “For me, I must hand this over to you, and I beg you to accept it.”

I had the money in one of those oversized yellow envelopes, the kind that are bigger and stronger than the regular ones. I reached it out to her. Reached out to her as I had so many years ago.

The way I put it, she couldn’t refuse. I knew that, just as I knew she wouldn’t open the envelope until I was gone.

She tucked it into her apron, signifying my part was done. Then she turned to Tory-boy.

Oh, sweet Jesus, he was just perfect. Better than perfect. I swear there was a glow all around him when he leaned forward and said:

“Mrs. Slater, ever since I was old enough to understand, I always called you ‘Mom’ in my heart. On this day, if you would allow me, I would like to say it out loud, just this one time. It would mean the world to me.”

Even though I expected tears, I wasn’t prepared for Mrs. Slater crying and smiling at the same time. She didn’t say anything, but I nodded at Tory-boy as if she had.

He reached over and took her hand. “Thank you, Mom,” he said. “Thank you for giving me life.”

We stayed with her for quite a while after that. I didn’t think she would ever stop crying, but she finally did. Then she had to hug Tory-boy and kiss him. Over and over.

I hadn’t prepared Tory-boy for all this, but he took in every drop of that mother’s love he’d been starving for his whole life.

It was the finest day any man was ever blessed with. I can’t say it any better than that.

ven if Mrs. Slater had wanted to check into my story—and I knew that was highly unlikely—there were any number of folks who’d tell her that winning $18,475 in one night wasn’t anywhere near unusual, not with the stakes those people played for.

She was a strong woman, there was no doubt on that score. When I first heard about her husband passing, I feared what we call “busted nerves.” I never heard of a man getting a case of it, but it’s not uncommon for a woman who’s lost her husband and has no children.

They don’t get thoughts of suicide, but you can tell they have no real interest in living, either. Like flat tires with punctures that can’t be repaired. Just sad and empty. Sometimes they have all kinds of physical pains, too, but the doctors never find anything wrong with them, so they write them up as depressed or whatever, and they end up on Disability.

I don’t know what this place would be without those kind of paychecks. Probably like that little mining town built all around Grant’s Tomb.

The next time we went, Tory-boy took her a gift as natural as you please. Miss Webb had shown him how to make a bouquet from wildflowers, and he’d done a beautiful job.

Miss Webb even looked up the records, so we knew when Mrs. Slater’s birthday was.

When Miss Webb told me the date, I wasn’t surprised. But when she told me it was Tory-boy who had asked her to find it for him, my hopes for my baby brother took off like a bottle rocket.

Tory-boy handed over the bouquet the next time we visited. “For you, Mom,” is all he had to say.

After that, he said it a lot.

ver since we’d given up selling my drugs, I’d kept Tory-boy a good distance away from crime. I never tried to cut myself in on anyone’s operation. I never wanted to run anything. I didn’t even want to have anyone working for me.

No crime I ever did was on a contingency basis. I didn’t want a percentage share; I wanted to do a job of work and get paid for it. Nothing more, and surely nothing less.

he way it is here, it’s not just the poverty, or crooked politicians, or anything else you might want to blame. It’s … environmental, I believe. An invisible cold gray acid rain that never stops falling.

Around here, even dying can be hard. Horribly hard. Only death itself comes easy.

By easy, I mean frequent. Death happens so often around here that people regard it pretty much the same as that never-ending rain.

When life itself is hard, you have to be hard to live. Even a bitch will cull one of her own pups if she doesn’t think he’s going to be tough enough—she knows she’s only got but so much milk, and there’s none to waste.

Around here, survival isn’t some skill you learn—it’s in all our genes. Nobody needed to be told to step aside when they saw the Beast coming. But not everyone stepped fast enough.

“Hard” isn’t the same as “mean.” We’ve got all kinds here. Some of the finest, most honorable folks are also the kind you don’t want to interfere with. But they don’t give off signals like the Beast did, so a lot of mistakes get made. And people die.

Death is always here. Black lung takes longer than a methane-gas explosion, but they end the same way.

There’s always hunters in the woods. The ones hunting for food aren’t dangerous, but those hunting for fun sure can be.

Everyone keeps some kind of firearm around. Most carry a knife, others keep taped-up lead pipes in their trucks. There’s whole barns full of decomposing dynamite.

The only difference between one Friday night and another is that they’re not all fatal.

But when they are, if the dead man left kin, you know there’s going to be more than one funeral.

Going to prison is pretty common. Coming out a better person than when you went in, that’s never been done.

There’s rock slides. Floods, too. Those are natural phenomena. You live here, you expect them. But just because a man’s found under tons of rock, or floating in the river, doesn’t mean his death was due to natural causes.

Folks drink a lot. Wives get beaten something fierce. Some of those wives can shoot pretty good. And some of their husbands never think it can happen to them, even when they’re sleeping off a drunk.

Any old man who tells some story about how the town was once prosperous, people just think his brain’s gone soft.

I’m not saying that there isn’t good in the folks we have here, only that it isn’t appreciated like it might be in other places.

There’s supposed to be good and bad in everyone. Probably is. But here, it’s the bad in you that’s more often the most useful.

Like the difference between climate and weather. Most folks around here don’t view a killing as good or bad—just something that happens, like a flood or a fire.

That’s why a whole lot of bodies never get viewed at all.

or a man like me, this is a good part of the country to do my work. I don’t care what stupid book you read or what silly TV show you watch, it never so much as occurred to me to enjoy my work. No more than it would occur to me to work without getting paid.

I did take pride in the quality of my work, but I never deceived myself that every death at my hands was justified, never mind righteous or noble.

I never saw myself as … much of anything, really. I was a crippled, cornered rat, trying to protect my little brother with whatever I could use. In the process, I learned a lot of things. But I never did anything without testing it first.

Not everything I experimented with was a success. A lot of that was my own fault. I spent weeks putting together what looked like a pair of clamps. The top clamp had a pair of hollow steel tips on its upper side. And a spring that would discharge venom from the fangs as soon as they closed down.

I knew the width of a mature timber rattler’s fangs. I knew how a pit viper delivers its poison, and how deep its fangs would penetrate. I practiced on different slabs of meat. Naturally, full penetration was easiest on fat, harder on muscle, hardest of all on bone.

Collecting some of that venom was no problem. Tory-boy could move faster than any copperhead. After all, he’d been training to move fast ever since he could crawl. Besides, the snakes would usually freeze in position, because that’s how they got their prey to come close enough for them to strike—camouflage.

But after all that work creating what I thought would pass any autopsy test as an accidental snake bite, I discovered that the chances of someone actually dying from a bite were pretty remote. In fact, snake handling was such a common practice—mostly Pentecostal, but other sects did it as well—that it was even outlawed in some areas. Some of the handlers had been bitten dozens of times, and were none the worse for it. Timber-rattler neurotoxin was designed for varmints, not humans.

So, even with all that custom design work, the only time I ever used my invention was on a man with an impressive potbelly and a known habit of going hunting alone. He claimed to have invented a 12-gauge deer slug that was as accurate as any rifle bullet, and he wasn’t giving anyone a look until he got it patented.

He had another habit, too. I don’t know for a fact that this habit would have bothered Judakowski under other circumstances—it wasn’t cutting into his business. But one of Judakowski’s girlfriends had a little boy who the fat man was bothering in a real bad way.

“It has to be an accident,” Judakowski told me. He didn’t believe in warning people off like Lansdale did.

The man’s name was Jonah. I didn’t know if that was first or last. Or even why Judakowski thought knowing his name at all would be useful to me.

By the time they found that Jonah, all my work to mislead an autopsy turned out to be needless. The copperhead struck so perfectly that its fangs hit a prominent vein on his forearm, and the fat man must have stepped into a bear trap as he tried to run for help.

It’s not legal to trap bears, so, the way the cops figured it, whoever set that trap had gone back to check it, seen Jonah caught in it, and faded back into the forest.

They did the autopsy anyway, but they stopped just about as soon as they opened him up—his heart had blown its valves, probably from a combination of pain and fear. No need to look further. He could’ve also died from loss of blood, but “accidental” was the only possible entry on the death certificate.

Besides, by the time someone stumbled across what was left of him, he’d been out there over a month, and various creatures had sampled his flesh.

“Worth every penny,” Judakowski told me as he handed over the rest of the cash he owed me.

I thought it was worth that much to him because his girlfriend would be so pleased with how he’d handled her little boy’s problem without going near the police. But it wasn’t even two weeks later that she disappeared. Her and her little boy, too—vanished without a trace.

lowing up those White Power defectives who had tried to take Tory-boy from me wasn’t hard. With all the advance notice I got from him about their big meeting, I was able to drop over a dozen of my little black helicopters on the flat roof of their bunker. I had the position dialed in; I only flew them real early in the morning, when it was still dark; and they hardly made a sound.

It was the worst kind of luck that the FBI had a man planted inside one of those groups that had come there that night. Like I said, they never would have caught me otherwise.

Why would it have been anything else but bad luck? Bad luck had been in charge of our lives from the very beginning. Me and Tory-boy were born under the most evil sign there was.

Don’t read me that speech about “bad choices.” I had all kinds of bad in my life, way before I had any choices.

Put it this way: once I began, I never minded killing any more than I had ever minded dying. So, if it hadn’t have been for Tory-boy, there’s no evidence that I would have turned out any different than I did.

But if it wasn’t for Tory-boy, I wouldn’t ever have gotten caught, either.

They call us—me and the others locked up with me—they call us “condemned men.” Some snarl saying it, others sob.

Neither changes a thing.

I once had thoughts about what could have done that—what might have actually changed things? If I hadn’t been born bad, if I hadn’t seen things no child should, if … if I had been a normal man, could I have courted the woman I came to know as Evangeline? Could I have married her?

Those thoughts almost killed me. I had to make a pyramid of them and set fire to it. Because I don’t lie to myself. And I know what I was really thinking, underneath all those dream-thoughts. I was thinking, what if Tory-boy had never come along?

Here’s the truth I’m left with: if I hadn’t been afraid of losing Tory-boy to those Nazi idiots, I wouldn’t have blown up their fort, and doing that is what got me caught.

But there’s a stronger truth, and that’s the one I hold closest: whatever good is in me, whatever honor I have, it all came from my little brother.

ow that I think it through—and I do that every night—I realize that’s where my train went off the tracks. Not where, actually—more like Why. If I’d stuck straight to business, me and Tory-boy would still be going on just like we always had.

It really started with Judakowski. Jayne Dyson had never told me about the man who … did what he did to set her on the only path she was allowed to walk. But after Judakowski beat her to death, it was the same as if she had.

Sometimes, I get so full of how smart I am that I forget there’s others just as smart. And when it comes to certain things, a whole lot smarter.

I was at Lansdale’s place. After we’d finished talking over some job that needed doing, he kind of casually mentioned how terrible it was, what had happened to Miss Jayne Dyson.

I don’t think I showed anything on my face, even when he told me how the cops said whoever did that to her was some kind of animal—tore her up so bad they could tell it was the first time anyone had ever … had her that way.

She had horrible bruising on her where no woman should have. And everybody knew Miss Jayne Dyson wouldn’t let anybody do something like that to her, no matter how much they offered.

“I’ll tell anyone, Miss Jayne Dyson was a real lady,” Lansdale said that night. He looked genuinely sad. “But even if she was … something other than a lady, she didn’t deserve what was done to her.”

I agreed with him. It was no secret that I had visited her a number of times. There’s no secrets in the part of town where she lived. But I think everyone assumed my visits were all about Tory-boy.

Lansdale hadn’t made that assumption, although I didn’t figure that out until later.

“She must’ve fought like a wildcat,” he told me. “I heard Judakowski’s face is going to be marked for life.”

“Judakowski?”

“Sure,” Lansdale said. “I think his last stay in the penitentiary gave him a taste for … well, you know what I’m saying, don’t you, Esau?”

“Yes, I do. But why would he …? I mean, there’s plenty of other …”

“That’s Judakowski,” Lansdale said, shrugging his shoulders. “He’s not a man you can say no to, not when he thinks he’s got power over you. He’s not even denying he did it. See Henry over there?” Lansdale nodded his head in the direction of a man sitting at the bar, his back to us. “He was in the Double-J a couple of nights ago. Judakowski has his own table, naturally, but Henry was close enough to hear him say, ‘You can’t rape a whore,’ like he was reciting a verse from the Good Book.

“Of course, nobody argued with him. A man’d have to be crazy to do that in Judakowski’s own place, especially when he was all liquored up.”

Then Lansdale went back to talking about other things.

hen I called and told Judakowski there was something I wanted to talk over with him in private, I could see right inside his head. Judakowski was the kind of man who thought he knew the whole world just because he knew himself so good.

I could see him thinking I was going to offer to take Lansdale out if Judakowski would make me a partner. He knew that respect was really important to me, so he figured maybe I was sick of being paid by the job.

If he was right—and Judakowski would never even imagine otherwise—I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear me make that kind of offer; it would be too risky.

Judakowski himself was always looking over his own shoulder. He didn’t trust everyone in his own crew. And if he didn’t trust people who worked for him, why would I trust them myself?

What he didn’t figure on was me wheeling over to where he was sitting on a big tree stump in that clearing, working on a cigar. I wheeled over close enough to see his face. I had to see for myself those marks Miss Jayne Dyson had left.

“I’m proud of you,” I said.

Judakowski knew I wasn’t talking to him. But before he could open his mouth to ask a question, I shot him in the face. Right at the bridge of his nose. I didn’t want to spoil those rip scars on his cheeks if they decided on an open-casket sendoff.

The shot hardly made a sound. And nobody was ever going to trace the bullet in Judakowski’s brain to the gun in my hand. I’d made that pistol myself; I knew how to unmake it just as well.

I rolled up even closer. Then I held his head back by the hair and put two more bullets into his head, one for each eye.

It was peaceful and calm in that glade. The birds kept on singing while I laid the pistol in my lap and took out my wire cutters.

I left Judakowski’s tongue on his chest. More puzzle for the cops to solve, maybe. But, for sure, plenty enough to start lots of other tongues wagging.

I’m not spiritual. But I know Miss Jayne Dyson watched every move I made.

“Thank you,” I told her. “Thank you for everything. I swear on my brother, if I had known what was in his mind, I would have done this before he ever had a chance to hurt you.”

ll Tory-boy knew was that he drove me to where I told him, and waited by the van for me to come back. He didn’t know who I was meeting up with, much less why.

I guess someone might be able to trick things out of Tory-boy, if they asked the right questions. That’s why I’d always made sure to keep that kind of distance between what I did and what he knew. How was anyone going to make him tell what he didn’t know?

’d attended to Judakowski no more than a few weeks before when I was snatched up for atomizing those skinheads, or Nazis, or whatever they were calling themselves now.

Maybe I’m rambling now. Not being precise, the way I like to be. All of this is a lot of stuff to put down on paper. And, like I said, things around here never seem to happen in a straight line.

I guess it’s obvious by now that I killed Judakowski for my own reasons. And it’s even obvious that Lansdale had known that telling me how Miss Jayne Dyson had been raped to death had been signing Judakowski’s death warrant.

So now it’s time to tell the Why of that.

I once thought about my body and my mind as a single unit. That sounds strange, maybe—my mind can do all kinds of things, and my body can’t even carry me across a room. But what I’d been thinking about was the frozen part. My conscience should have stopped me from doing some things, so I told myself that it had just stopped working, as atrophied as my body.

“Atrophied.” I hated that word as much as I loved “inertia.” Once you start rolling, you stay rolling, true enough. But if you never use something, it just … rots. Only Tory-boy wouldn’t let my legs rot. He’d grab my ankles and just work my legs. It hurt a bit, but I remember it like a treat. A treat I’ll never have again now.

I’m just dancing around the perimeter, and I know it. So here’s how it happened. I was over to Miss Jayne Dyson’s one afternoon. That was the way we worked it; if Tory-boy had a question that a woman should be answering for him, I’d call Miss Dyson and make an appointment. Then we’d drive over there.

I always left them alone. I knew it would be easier for Tory-boy that way.

He was in her little parlor a good half-hour that time. It takes Tory-boy a while to get something down. But once he gets it, he keeps it.

I just waited on Miss Dyson’s porch. I knew people could see me out there, but it didn’t bother me a bit. None of those spike-tongued women would ever be talking about me to Miss Webb. And I didn’t care who else they told. Or what they told them.

When Tory-boy finally came out, he really wanted to go see someone. Some girl, I guess.

“Esau, I swear I won’t be but an hour. That’s if I go now. But if I have to drive you back home first—”

“You think Miss Dyson is going to want me sitting out here for an hour, Tory-boy?”

“No. No, Esau. I didn’t even ask her. I mean, she knew where I was going, and she asked if you wouldn’t like to take some tea with her. I said I’d ask you. So I am.”

I was about to tell Tory-boy I’d have to check for myself when Miss Jayne Dyson came to the screen door.

“That is exactly what I asked Tory,” she said, like she was reading my thoughts. “I could use some company. That’s why I always like seeing Tory. He’s a real gentleman, and I know who taught him that.”

“I …” That was as far as I got—I guess I ran out of words. Miss Dyson held the screen door open, and Tory-boy wheeled me right inside. I swear our van was moving before Miss Dyson even got a chance to sit herself down.

n the fall, darkness drops down quick. But I couldn’t really tell what time it was by the light—Miss Dyson had her parlor fixed so that it was always in some kind of soft shadow.

I probably pay more attention to couches and chairs and such because I don’t know what it would be like to sit in them. Hers were old-style: built of a heavy, dark wood; the cushions covered with a kind of a velvety material as dark as dried blood.

Every other time I’d been there, Miss Dyson would always seat herself on the divan, so there could be a long, low table between us. For putting cups and saucers on without making it awkward for me. But this time, she put herself in a high-backed straight chair near the corner. When she beckoned with her hand, I rolled my chair over to her. Fussing a little to myself about the wheels making marks on her carpet, but I could see she wasn’t paying attention. Or didn’t care about such things.

“You just wait here a minute,” she told me.

I don’t know how long she was gone. I was—I don’t know how to say it, exactly—maybe feeling the parlor. My eyes closed, and I was breathing through my nose.…

“You take honey?”

I had to come back from wherever I’d gone to, and I wasn’t sure I heard her last word right, so I just nodded.

“Lemon?”

“Yes, I do,” I answered, feeling better now that I was back all the way.

“Not sugar, though?”

“With that honey? No, ma’am.”

“I thought I told you—”

“I didn’t mean it like it came out,” I told her. “I was just trying to be … emphatic.”

“Clear.”

“Clear,” I agreed.

e sipped our tea, polite as a church social. Then she put her cup and saucer down on the little table and leaned toward me, dropping her voice just a little. Miss Dyson never spoke loudly, but this was … not so much quieter as it was softer.

“I know what you do, Esau,” she half-whispered. It didn’t feel like an accusation. More like it was something I should be proud of.

I wouldn’t disrespect her by making a joke. And I couldn’t well deny what hadn’t been said. So I just put down my own cup and saucer and folded my hands, like I was expecting her to go on.

“I don’t judge you for it,” she said. “I’ve been judged, and I know how that kind of meanness feels when you’re on the receiving end of it.”

“Miss Dyson, I would never—”

“Lord, did you think I was talking about you when I said that, Esau?”

“Well … no, I suppose you wouldn’t do that. But I just wanted to make certain you knew—”

“Esau Till, you can stop all that. Right this minute. It was me telling you, not the other way around.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. Not exactly. So I was grateful when she broke the silence. “Does cigarette smoke bother you?”

“Not at all,” I lied, but it felt right to do it then.

She jumped up and ran off. Back almost before I knew it. But she wasn’t in her chair; she was on her knees, next to me.

“It’s easier this way,” she said, handing me a lighter.

I knew what to do with that—just part of good manners. I fired up the lighter, and held the flame until she got her cigarette going. Then I watched as she put the ashtray on the table with the cups and saucers.

I couldn’t help looking down her dress when she did that. When I realized what that would make me look like, I straightened up quick.

She took a short little puff on her cigarette. Ladylike, I guess it was. Then she said, “I was close to twelve. I remember because my twelfth birthday was coming, and I was hoping for … Well, it doesn’t matter. That’s how old I was when a terrible thing happened to me.”

“What was—?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she shushed me. “Not anymore, it doesn’t. By the ninth grade, people were talking about me. Behind their hands, but I could see it in their eyes. And the boys, they made it impossible for me to stay here.”

“You went away?”

“For a time I did, yes. But I came back. Maybe ten years later it was, but it might as well have been the day I left. Only, by then, I knew how to turn their meanness into money.”

I didn’t say anything. Just watched her puff on her cigarette a couple more times.

“Some of us, we get marked,” Miss Dyson said. “Me, not even twelve. And you, from the moment you were born. But those kind of marks aren’t any stupid 666 brand, like some wish they were. What they really are is trail markers. And we, all of us with those kind of marks, we’re bound to follow them.”

“You didn’t have to come home.”

“Home?” She kind of laughed. “No, Esau. I didn’t have to come back here. Any more than you didn’t have to stay.”

I opened my mouth to tell her about Tory-boy, but then I snapped it shut when it came to me that she knew all about that. Wasn’t I the one who’d brought him to her in the first place?

“Are you familiar with what they call the Bernoulli effect?” I asked her instead.

“No. No, I surely never heard of anything like that. Why do you ask?”

“If you force smoke through a pipe, the more narrow the pipe, the faster the smoke will move. Think of it as if you blew your cigarette smoke through a soda straw.”

“Ah! So, if you only have one road to go down, a real narrow one …”

“You’ll move faster than the others. Be ahead of the field by the first lap. That’s a scientific truth. And that’s how I always saw you, myself.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Esau. Not one damn thing.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t see how she could say such things to a man in a wheelchair.

“If you’ll trust me, I can give you something,” she said, so soft I could feel the words brush against my cheek. “I can give you something you thought you could never have.”

“What could you—?”

“Do you trust me, Esau?”

Her eyes only left me but one answer. “Yes” is all I said.