He watches how the jingle train operates. Up pulls a work truck, a foreman looking for a roofer, a landscaper, a flagman for a paving crew. The deal takes place out the window. A door opens and a man has a job. The line moves. Or up pulls an SUV, minivan, or sedan, a homeowner needing a lawn mowed, gutters cleaned, furniture moved. The cops roll by and seem to be searching. Ninety-plus degrees and climbing fast, someone says. The cops roll by again.

“Hot Dog, how old you is?”

He lies with ten fingers twice.

Abraham cracks up.

“Oh, hell, no. I give you sixteen, best. Child, them cops out feeding today. They catch you, they be sending you back to wherever you didn’t want to be.”

Somebody calls, “Hey, Abe.”

Abraham looks across the street at a young man in cargo shorts and socks-and-sandals taking cell phone pictures. “That man gonna mess with you too,” Abraham tells Sammy Hot Dog. “That’s a good man, but his mission bigger than yours. Drift back a little. You ain’t wanna get your picture taken.”

Minutes later, trouble starts on the jingle train, shouting, shoving, and threatening, then two weary black men dancing in the street, shrieking and throwing fists. The cops are back like blowflies, four cars this time, lights and sirens, officers vaulting from their squads as if to stop a war. In a flash the two men are facedown on the scalding pavement, getting cuffed. The young man taking cell phone pictures confronts the cops.

“Fighting with each other is a crime? But not when they disappear? Five of these men have disappeared. I told you someone is hunting them. And you do nothing!”

Two officers attack the man, one swiping his phone to the ground, one drawing a club. “Go ahead,” he defies them. He points to cars stopping, drivers with their phones out.

“Get on, now, Hot Dog,” Abraham tells him in a hushed voice. “Don’t run. Don’t get yourself chased. But this gone bad and you better get back to the camp.”

A block away, drifting numbly with no idea where the camp is, he hears the voice.

Cassie wouldn’t stand for that shit.

A heavy woman in a blue smock watches the commotion through a drugstore window, her hands at work lifting boxes of vape cartridges from a box with a label he can partly read: WARNING: According to the Surgeon General, women should not… And she gives him a disgusted look through the glass.

Use the rock.

Smash it.

Use the fork.

Stop her. Kill that look.

No? Then you’re the one who should have burned.

CHAPTER 21

At just after six A.M., Sheriff Kick lied to her husband. She whispered into Harley’s ear, “Let’s surprise the boys with milkshakes for breakfast.”

“Mmmm?”