“Thanks for allowing me to pay for my orders in February. And you know we’ll be glad to get them fifty bucks from you next week.” I suddenly had a change of heart. “Uh . . . Yvonne don’t need to know about them fifty dollars you going to give me. After you, she is my other right hand. But she is a woman. It’s her nature to get greedy and try and get me to get even more from you.”

“No problem. I believe that the ‘other right hand’ don’t never need to know what the left hand is doing.”

“I’ll decide later if we want to borrow from Mr. Cunningham and Dr. Patterson. Hold off on Aunt Mattie for the time being, too. We don’t need to eat all our apples at the same time. We’ll let them be our back-up plan, in case we need one. But this money from Odell don’t change nothing. We still need to punish him. Me and Yvonne is trying to decide what’s the best punishment for him. As soon as we do, we’ll let you know that, too.”

“I done told you before, don’t put it off too long. He could be brewing up something else.”

I had to come up with something to stall Willie Frank until after I got that five hundred dollars from Odell. Since I was such a fast thinker, I came up with what sounded like the perfect plan right away. “Okay. We’ll take care of him next Sunday.”

“Why then and not before?”

“Well, we can’t do nothing until after me and Yvonne take Joyce to that supper we promised her. She said she can’t go until next Friday. Odell will be at his daddy’s house that whole weekend. We’ll get him on his way home on Sunday. Bring your shotgun.”

Willie Frank looked at me with his eyes stretched wide-open. “So, you want to kill him after all, for sure, huh? You don’t want to do none of them other things we talked about?”

“Naw. Sinking his car in the quicksand, and all that other stuff we talked about won’t be enough. We definitely need to kill him. And I don’t think we need to worry no more about none of them agitating politicians making a fuss about somebody killing a prominent man like Odell.” The murder plan I came up with at the spur of the moment seemed reasonable enough to me. “We’ll run him off the road and force him into the woods on foot. We’ll do him there and take all his money. It’ll look like a robbery, and ain’t nobody got a reason to suspect us. There is a heap of ex-cons and other lowlifes operating on them roads near Odell’s daddy’s house.”