"How's it goin', man?" said Thomas Wilson, nodding at Otis.

He saw that Otis was still dressing sharp. Still doin' that Nick Ashford thing with his hair, too.

"I'm makin' it," said Otis, smiling amiably, reaching over and shaking Wilson's hand.

Wilson did not let the handshake linger. You could mistake Otis's easy manner for weakness. He had seen a couple of men make that mistake up in Lewisburg. Roman Otis wasn't nothin' much more than Frank Farrow with a smile.

"Say h.e.l.lo to Gus Lavonicus," said Farrow.

"Gus," said Wilson. He saw an ugly white giant sitting at what looked like a child's desk. The giant waved awkwardly and turned his attention back to the sheet of paper before him.

"And this here's Booker Kendricks," said Farrow.

Wilson looked at the skinny, greasy-lookin' hustler with the yellow eyes, slouched in the chair. A pistol hung limply in his clawlike hand. Kendricks did not acknowledge Wilson. Wilson felt it was just as well.

"Beer?" said Farrow.

"Yeah, okay."

"Get T. W. a beer, Booker," said Otis.

"d.a.m.n, can't y'all see I'm watchin' this s.h.i.t?" said Kendricks. "Starks is getting ready to light it up, too!"

"Get it," said Farrow.

Kendricks went to the kitchen as Wilson took a seat on the couch next to Otis. Farrow stayed on his feet. He leaned forward and rustled his pack of Kools in Wilson's face.

"Cigarette?" said Farrow.

"Nah," said Wilson. "Thanks."

"This used to be your brand in the joint, I remember right."

"I gave them up a long time ago."

Charles convinced me to throw them away for good.

Kendricks returned, placed an open bottle of beer on the cable-spool table in front of Wilson. Kendricks went back to the oversize chair and had a seat.

Wilson sipped his beer, fumbled it as he placed it back on the table.

"You seem a little uptight," said Farrow, catching Otis's eye.

"I'm tired is all it is," said Wilson. "Took me over an hour to get down here from D.C."

Farrow slowly paced the room. "How is it up in town? Any heat that you can make out?"

"None."

"Good. Me and Roman were thinking you could set us up again with some kind of thing. Something cleaner than the last time. Less risk."

"I'm working on it. Been out in the bars at night, listenin' to people talk. Trying to find out where the after-hours action is these days. I'm thinkin' a bag rip-off, or a high-stakes game. Somethin' y'all could take off quiet."

"I like the way you're thinking."

"Get you in and out of town real quick."

"That's our intent. We need a substantial payday this time. Roman and Gus here have run into a financial setback. Your cut will be the usual - ten percent. That okay with you, T. W.?"

Wilson nodded.

"Tomorrow we'll see Manuel and Jaime. You've called them, right?"

"Yes."

"What'd they have to say?"

They said you killed a minister in cold blood down on the Eastern Sh.o.r.e.

"They said to come on by," said Wilson. "They'll have a car for you on Monday."

"I need something with a little muscle. I've been driving this piece-of-s.h.i.t truck -"

"They're on it," said Wilson.

"d.a.m.n, boy!" shouted Kendricks, jumping up from his chair and shutting off the set. "Can't n.o.body in this league f.u.c.k with the Bulls?"

"Hey, Booker," said Otis. "Keep your voice down, man."

Kendricks dismissed them all with a wave of his hand. "Y'all are just way too serious for a Sat.u.r.day night. I'm gonna take a walk, catch some air."

Kendricks slipped the pistol into the pocket of his baggy slacks and put on a jacket. "See ya later, Tall Tree," he said, smiling at Lavonicus before leaving the house.

Lavonicus blinked his eyes hard, but he did not raise his head.

When the door closed, Otis said, "Hard to believe that man shares a drop of my blood."

Farrow said, "Where's he goin', anyway, in this cold?"

"I don't know," said Otis. "But if I owned one of these farms around here, right about now I'd be putting a lock on the barn door."

"Likes those kickin' mules, huh?" said Farrow.

"I don't even think they have to kick to get his fancy. All he needs is the right texture to get him started. You want to know the truth, I wouldn't even trust my cousin around a rare steak."

Wilson cleared his throat. "That about it? 'Cause I got to make the drive back into town."

"Wait a minute," said Farrow, turning to Lavonicus. "Gus, give us a couple of minutes alone here, will you?"

"Sure." Lavonicus stood and ducked an arched frame as he entered the hall to the back bedrooms.

"Gus don't know much about the details of our history," said Otis. "He don't need need to know, is what I'm sayin'." to know, is what I'm sayin'."

Farrow stopped pacing and looked down at Wilson. "You find out where that cop lives?"

"No," said Wilson. "Not yet."

"What about his sons?"

"His sons live with him. That much I got from the papers."

"Find his address," said Farrow. "I owe him a visit."

Wilson nodded and said, "That it?"

"One more thing," said Farrow. "Want to get this out on the table once and for all, and then bury it."

"Go ahead."

"Your pizza chef friend. I want to make sure you're not carrying a grudge over what happened."

"I'm not. I told you as much on the phone."

"Look at me, T. W., not at the floor."

Wilson locked eyes with Farrow.

"What happened in that pizza parlor was a necessity," said Farrow. "In a situation like that, when you pull the trigger one time you have to keep pulling it until n.o.body's left alive. Charles might have been the most stand-up guy who ever walked down the block, but the cops would've broken him, and he would've fingered us all to make a deal. Anybody would have. What we did to him was just business and self-preservation. Ours and and yours. So I want you to tell me now that you don't have a problem with what went down." yours. So I want you to tell me now that you don't have a problem with what went down."

Wilson's mouth twitched.

"Do you have a problem, T. W.?"

I'd kill you now if I was man enough. But I am not man enough. G.o.d help me, I'm as weak as they come.

"No," said Wilson. "I don't have a problem."

"Good," said Farrow. "I'll see you Monday at the garage."

"Right."

Wilson killed his beer. He stood from the couch and walked from the house.

"Man's still got that tired a.r.s.enio fade," said Otis, pushing his own hair back behind his ears. "Needs to get himself to a shop where they're doin' that new thing."

Farrow listened to Wilson's Dodge pull away. "What do you think of him?"

"The man is troubled, that much is plain. But troubled don't mean dangerous."

"No, it doesn't. Wilson's weak and afraid. He always was someone you could push around."

"So we got nothin' to worry about, right?"

"He's paralyzed," said Farrow. "He'll never make a play."

Thomas Wilson gripped the steering wheel tightly to stop the shake in his hands. Anger was making his hands shake, but there was something else, too: fear. The fear was stronger than the anger. And the knowledge of this made him ashamed.

Wilson turned left off the two-lane and drove north on 301.

How had he come to be with these kinds of men? Looking back on it, it was an obvious path that had brought him to where he was now.

His life had turned with his c.o.ke addiction. He understood completely what Dimitri Karras was riffing on at those meetings, though of course he could never admit to Dimitri or the rest of them that he was a member of that same NA club. By way of explaining the hole in his personal time line, he had only told them that he had gone away for a few years to find his calling. Gone away, h.e.l.l. Put away was more like it.

It had started as a casual thing for Wilson, back in the late seventies. That's the way it always started with this s.h.i.t; cocaine was the drug that always drove the car and never gave up the keys. By the time you knew it, it was too late.

Wilson had started dealing to support his habit. He was arrested and charged twice, but the judges were right, the jails were full, and he did no time.

After a while Wilson figured, if you're gonna be into it, why not step it up, make some bigger money, get into it for real? So he hooked up with a dealer who controlled the action down around the dwellings at 7th and M in Northwest, and he became this dealer's mule. Wilson began to make the regular Amtrak run from Union Station to Penn Station and back again. It was safer than being out on the corner, and it seemed to be risk free.

But Wilson had misjudged the stealth of his dealer's rivals, who'd gotten the time of his run from a nose-fiend on the street. The cops pulled Wilson and his black leather suitcase off the Metroliner at the 30th Street station in Philly, busted his dumb a.s.s right there on the platform. With Wilson's priors and the quant.i.ty confiscated, he took the big fall. They sent him up to Lewisburg, the federal joint in PA.

In prison, Wilson got free of his c.o.ke jones but collected fateful relationships with many men: Frank Farrow, Roman Otis, Lee Toomey, Manuel Ruiz, and Jaime Gutierrez among them. On the last day of his bit, he promised Farrow and Otis he'd stay in touch.

When Wilson got out, he vowed to stay straight. But from his muling days he remembered how it felt to have money, real money, in his pocket all the time. His mother had died when he was in Lewisburg, and his uncle Lindo was good enough to hook him up with the hauling job. Lindo was all right to talk to during the day, but Lindo was old-time, and Lindo wasn't his boy. That distinction would always go to his lifelong friend, Charles Greene.

One night he and Charles had a couple of drinks and Charles got loose with his tongue. He began to tell Wilson about the pizza parlor where he had been working for some time. How the place was more or less a front for a large gaming operation, numbers and book and the like. How the man who co-owned the joint, Carl Lewin, was his own bagman. How Lewin made May's the last stop on his run, the same day, same time, every week.

Wilson thought of the money, then thought of his old acquaintances from Lewisburg, Farrow and Otis. Tough guys, professionals, who made it their specialty to take off other criminals. He had the idea that he could contact Farrow and set this thing up. Get Manuel and Jaime, who had gone into the chop business at a garage in Silver Spring, involved as well. He talked himself into it, and then he talked Charles into it, too. Convinced Charles that this was ill-gotten money anyway, it would just be going from one set of dirty hands to another. His employer would never, ever know. And no one would get hurt.

After the bloodbath in the kitchen, Wilson did not go to the law and confess his involvement. The atmosphere was lynch-mob heavy in town in the weeks following the murders, and Wilson was... well, Wilson was scared. Much as he had loved Charles, he couldn't bring Charles back. He didn't want to go to prison again, and if he did go, Farrow would find a way to reach him on the inside. No, there wasn't any kind of good that could come out of going to the law. That's what he thought at the time. And then he went to the meetings, thinking that hearing the stories of the others might ease his pain. There, he became friends with the victims' relatives, and their pain became his. He hadn't figured on that. It was like there was a nest of angry spiders now, all the time, crawling around in his head.

Now Farrow wanted him to set up the cop in the wheelchair, and maybe his sons.

Wilson approached the lights of the strip shopping centers along the highway side of La Plata. He cracked the window to let in some air. It felt kind of stuffy in the car, and there was a tightness in his chest.

He knew he was a coward. It was because of his cowardice that things had come this far.

Once you were in with Farrow and Otis, you were in with them for good. He could follow them or kill them or run. Those were his choices.

He prayed that when the time came, the Lord would let him be a man.

TWENTY-SIX.