When he stopped thrashing, they hauled the corpse out of the tub. Two of them took him outside to the woodshed, where, later, he would be fed into the chipper. As usual, they would bicker over who would have the honor; Preach would let them. A bit of spirited competitiveness was healthy.

When they returned, they slid back into the water as if it was their natural element. Preach smiled at them and they smiled back. Their long, strong fingers recommenced their caressing of his nipples, scrotum, and phallus.

Preach closed his eyes and sighed deeply, his thoughts running his long life backwards. He had many talents, but making money wasn’t one of them; he lacked the patience to work for other people; he lacked the temperament to start at the bottom and work his way up a corporate ladder. He was a ferocious autodidact, unschooled in any traditional manner. His worldview was diametrically opposite of those in the world’s corporate suites. He had learned this early on in life, so he used other people to make money for him. He was good at influencing people—better than good, actually. Nobody did it better.

His parents were dirt-poor. They had nothing; they wanted nothing. Unlike them, Preach wanted everything—everything except fame. He shied away from fame, the limelight, being known. He lived in the shadows at the edge of the world, and he was smart enough to understand that that was where he belonged. He was out of his element walking among the hordes of men and women who teemed across the continents.

But he could select a precious few, draw them to him, indoctrinate them, work through them while deluding them into believing they were making decisions of their own free will. Life was filled with forks in the road, decisions to be made that led to one future or another. His will was done by taking away certain forks. Editing their lives. As a pack of baying hounds will cut off the fox’s myriad escape routes until it had only one way to go, with the foreknowledge that Crow gave him, Preach manipulated people into moving inexorably toward a future he had devised like a sculptor exploring a block of marble, seeing, as only he can, the end result.