curious, like someone studying a gerbil in a wire cage. Nick’s hand brushed the stiff outline of the .25 auto in his side pocket.

Preacher knocked on his cast with his knuckles. “I got careless,” he said.

“Yeah?” Nick said. “Careless about what?”

“I underestimated a young woman. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she taught me a lesson in humility,” Preacher said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”

“Y’all are trying to take over my businesses.”

“I look like a restaurateur or the operator of a strip joint?”

“There’s worse things.”

Preacher watched the countryside sweeping by. He closed his eyes as though temporarily resting them. A moment later, he reopened them and leaned forward, perhaps studying a landmark. He scratched his cheek with one finger and studied Nick again. Then he seemed to make a decision about something and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “The road on the left,” he said. “Go through the cattle guard and follow the dirt track. You’ll see a barn and a pond and a clapboard house. The house will be empty. If you see a car or any lights on, turn around.”

“You got it, Jack,” the driver said.

“What’s going on?” Nick said.

“You wanted a sit-down, you got your sit-down,” Hugo said from the front passenger seat.

“Take the pistol out of your pocket with two fingers and put it on the seat,” Preacher said. Half of his right hand remained inside the fold of the newspaper on his lap. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes unblinking, his nose tilted down.

“I don’t have a gun. But if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

“You’re not a listener?” Preacher said.

“Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“You were planning to shoot both me and Hugo if you could catch us unawares. You treated me with disrespect. You treated me as though I’m an ignorant man.”

“I never saw you before. How could I disrespect you?” Nick replied, avoiding Preacher’s initial premise.

Preacher sucked on a tooth. “You attached to your family, Mr. Dolan?”

“What do you think?”

“Answer my question.”

“I have a good family. I work hard to provide for them. That’s why I don’t need this kind of shit.”

“You true to your vows?”

“This is nuts.”

“I believe you’re a family man. I believe you planned to take out me and Hugo even if you had to eat a bullet. You’d eat a bullet for your family, wouldn’t you?”

Nick felt he was being led into a trap, but he didn’t know how. Preacher saw the confusion in his face.

“That makes you a dangerous man,” Preacher said. “You’ve put me in a bad spot. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have patronized me, either.”

Nick, with his heart sinking, saw the driver’s eyes look at him in the rearview mirror. The tips of his fingers inched away from the outline of the .25 to the edge of his pocket. He glanced at Preacher’s right hand, partially inserted inside the folded newspaper. The paper was turned at an angle, pointed directly at Nick’s rib cage.

The SUV turned off the service road and passed through a break in a row of slash pines and thumped across a cattle guard onto farmland spiked with weeds and cedar fence posts that had no wire on them. Nick could see moonlight glowing on a pond, and beyond the pond, a darkened house with cattle standing in the yard. He folded his arms on his chest, burying his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. The driver, Bobby Lee, looked at Nick in the mirror again, a dent in each of his cheeks, as though he were sucking the saliva out of his mouth.

“I knew it’d come to this,” Nick said.

“I don’t follow you,” Preacher said.

“I knew one of you bastards would eventually blindside me. You’re all the same—black pukes from the Desire, Italian punks from Uptown. Now it’s an Irish psychopath who’s a hump for Hugo Cistranos. None of y’all got talent or brains of your own. Every one of you is a pack animal, always figuring out a way to steal what another man has worked for.”

“Do you believe this guy?” the driver said to Hugo.

“I don’t steal, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said. “But you do. You steal and market the innocence of young women. You create a venue that makes money off the lust of depraved men. You’re a festering sore in the eyes of God, did you know that, Mr. Dolan? For that matter, you’re an abomination in the eyes of your own race.”

“Judaism