He lifted a hand, waved it back and forth before allowing it to settle back on top of the other. “Anyway, when he was released, you’d think he would have been a changed man. Not a bit of it. He was the same unrepentant sonuvabitch I’d known all my life. I mean, he was always good to me, but in business, Jesus, he didn’t care who he cut off at the knees.”

Kinkaid’s gaze wandered off Bluto’s face for a moment, as if lost in memories. All at once, his gaze snapped back sharper than before. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. When my father got out of prison he had me meet him somewhere out in a vacant lot in some godforsaken part of the city, never mind which one. At three in the morning, can you imagine? Huh!” Kinkaid sounded as if even at this late date he had trouble believing it himself. “‘Son,’ he said to me, ‘I have money stashed. A boatload of it. Some I’m gonna use to make a new start for myself in another part of the country or maybe overseas, who knows? But the bulk of it is yours.’ When I told him I didn’t want it, he looked more surprised than when the feds came for him three years before. ‘But you gotta take it. It’s my legacy, to make sure you’ll be okay, no matter what should befall you.’ So I told him again because I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me the first time. ‘But why?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it.’ ‘That money isn’t yours to give me,’ I told him. ‘You stole it from people—’ ‘Stupid people,’ he interrupted. Typical of someone who knew—knew—he was always right. ‘People who should have known better if only they’d done their due diligence,’ he said. ‘Son, don’t you get it, it’s like finding a pot of money at the end of the rainbow.’

“I asked him how he could break the law, keep on breaking it until people he didn’t know, people he’d never even met, died, and d’you what he said, Bluto? He said, ‘The law doesn’t apply to me.’ Then he laughed. ‘I keep getting away with murder, son. It’s a beautiful fucking world, isn’t it?’