ninety large, Nicholas, ten grand for each unit I had to take off Artie’s hands and dispose of. You also owe me seven grand for transportation costs. You owe me another five large for employee expenses. The vig is a point and a half a week.”

“Vig? What vig? Are you out of your mind?”

“Then there’s this other issue, a kid I hired out of a wino bar.”

“What kid?”

“Pete Rumdum. What difference does it make? He got off the leash.”

“No, I’m not part of this. Let me by.”

“It gets a little more complicated. I’ve been to the rathole he lives in. A girl was there. She saw me. So now she’s a factor. Do I have your attention?”

Nick was stepping backward, shaking his head, trying to remove himself from the closed space that seemed to be crushing the light out of his eyes. “I’m going home. I’ve known Artie Rooney for years. I can work this out. He’s a businessman.”

Hugo took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair with one hand. “Artie Rooney offered me his old Caddy to put you on a crash diet. Enforced total abstinence. Fifteen to twenty pounds a day weight loss guaranteed. Inside your own box, get it? Know why he doesn’t like you, Nicholas? Because he’s a real mick and not a fraud who changes his name from Dolinski to Dolan. I’ll drop by tomorrow to get my cash. I want it in fifties, no consecutive numbers on the bills.”

The words were going too fast. “Why’d you turn Artie Rooney down on the hit?” Nick said, because he had to say something.

“I already got a Caddy.”

Two minutes later, when Nick walked back into his nightclub, the pounding music of the four-piece band was not nearly as loud as the thundering of Nick’s heart and the rasping of his lungs as he tried to suck oxygen past the cigarette he held in his mouth.

“Nick, your face is white. You get some bad news?” the bartender said.

“Everything is great,” Nick replied.

When he sat on the bar stool, his head reeling, his duck feet were so swollen with hypertension that he thought his shoes would burst their laces.

BEFORE HE FINALLY went to bed, Hackberry Holland had gone into the shower stall as his only salutary refuge from his experience behind the church, washing his hair, scrubbing his skin until it was red, holding his face in the hot water as long as he could stand it. But the odor of disinterred bodies had followed him into his sleep, trailing with him through the next day into the following twilight, into the onset of darkness, the hills flickering with electricity, the horn of an eighteen-wheeler blowing far down the highway like a bugle from a forgotten war.

Federal agents had done most of the work at the murder scene, setting up a field mortuary and flood lamps and satellite communications that probably involved Mexican authorities as well as their own departmental supervisors in D.C. They were polite to him, respectful in their perfunctory fashion, but it was obvious they thought of him as a curiosity if not simply a bystander or witness. At dawn, when all the exhumed bodies had been bagged and removed and the agents were wrapping up the site, a man in a suit, with white hair and threadlike blue and red capillaries in his cheeks, approached Hackberry and shook hands in farewell, his smile forced, as though he was preparing to ask a question that was not intended to offend.

“I understand you were an attorney for the ACLU,” he said.

“At one time, many years ago.”

“Quite a change in career choices.”

“Not really.”

“I didn’t tell you something. One of our agents found some bones that have been in the ground a long time.”

“Maybe they’re Indian,” Hack said.

“They’re not that old.”

“Maybe the shooter has used this site before. The dozer was brought in on a truck. It went out the same way. Maybe this is a very organized guy.”

But the FBI agent in charge of the exhumation, whose name was Ethan Riser, was not listening. “Why did you stay out here digging up all these bodies by yourself? Why didn’t you call in sooner?” he said.

“I was a POW during the Korean War. I was at Pak’s Palace, plus a couple of other places.”

The agent nodded, then said, “Forgive me if I don’t make the connection.”

“There were miles of refugees on the roadways, almost all of them headed south. The columns were infiltrated by North Korean