“The guy with the black watch cap is Roland Olms, and the third guy—”
“Wally Rooney,” Virgil said. Outside, Rooney had pulled off his baseball cap to scrub at his hair, and then replaced it. “Excellent.”
He turned and repeated the information to Gordon, and she repeated it, “Cowboy hat is Junior, the other guy is Wally Rooney, and I know Roland. . . .”
She was almost hyperventilating, and Virgil grinned at her and said, “Take it easy. This isn’t as hard as it looks, and it’s gonna be interesting. They didn’t bring their shooter with them, so I don’t think we have to worry about that. You just get out there and argue with them.”
“They brought this Rooney man you told me about—do you want me to tell them that you think he’s messing with Flood’s daughters?”
“Keep it in mind, and if it comes up, mention it. Don’t force anything,” Virgil said. “Okay, they’re coming up the walk. When the doorbell rings—”
“Count to five.”
“Jenkins is right at the bottom of the basement stairs, I’ll be right here. . . . Leave the bedroom door open.” He was looking out through the blind. “Okay, they’re on the porch. Here we go.”
He put the radio to his face and said, “Shrake, as soon as they’re inside, and talking, I’ll double-click, and you get up by the side door.”
“Got that,” Shrake said.
The doorbell rang, and Virgil stepped over to the bedroom closet and said, “Break a leg,” and stepped inside and plugged in the radio earpiece and turned off the speaker. Gordon was headed toward the door and he said into the radio, “Showtime.”
GORDON PULLED the inside door open and looked through the storm door. Roland Olms was there, and she looked at him and said, aloud, “Oh, no. Go away.”
Olms pulled at the storm door handle, got it open, and said, “We need to talk to you, Birdy.”
“I said everything I was going to say. What if the police are watching? Go away, go away,” Gordon said.
Olms was just under six feet tall, and thick through the chest. He stepped directly at her and said, at the same time, “We can’t do that. We need to talk,” and his momentum pushed her back without touching her. She backed into the living room, and Junior Einstadt followed, with Rooney right behind. He pushed the inner door shut with a solid thunk, and they were all standing in a circle.
Roland Olms asked, “You been here the whole time?” and, “You spend all my money?”
“If this Flowers gets on to you, you won’t need any money,” Gordon said. “He says you all killed some girl and left her body in a cemetery. Some underage girl, and he’s like death on that. He says somebody beat her with a whip, and more than once, more than the time she was killed. He says she was gang-raped—”
“Wasn’t no rape,” Einstadt said. “She was glad to get it any way she could.”
“You were there?” Gordon asked, and her hand went to her mouth.
“Didn’t say that,” Einstadt said. “But it wasn’t no rape. She was friendly, and she liked it. She’d get in a pool, and she could get seven or eight of us in one night. More the merrier.”
Rooney said, uneasily, “That’s not something we ought to talk about.”
“Why not?” Einstadt said. “Old Birdy here was the same way, hot to get it on.”
“Was not,” Gordon said. “That’s why I ran away, you sonofabitch.”
They were still standing and she began backing away from them.
Olms said, “I oughta take my money’s worth right now.”
Rooney said, “Shut up, Roll. We’re not here to fuck around.” He looked at Gordon. “What all did Flowers ask you? We want to know all of it.”
“He said that this dead girl got raped by a bunch of you,” Gordon said. “He said that you were all church members, and he wanted to know if the church, you know, made little girls do it.”
“He mention anybody?” Rooney asked. Gordon’s mouth flapped for a moment, as she tried to decide whether to mention Rouse, and it looked to the three men as though she was trying to avoid saying something, and Rooney pressed: “Did he mention me?”
“Well . . . he sorta wanted to know about you and the Flood girls. The girls were just little bitty kids before, I couldn’t even remember them, hardly.”
“Sonofabuck,” Rooney said to Einstadt. “He knows.”
Gordon said, “He was asking about some other people . . . the Bakers, a boy named