There was a hand on the hilt, a woman’s hand. She was black and beautiful: someone I had searched for my entire life. Her eyes were full of questions and, I knew, her mouth would be full of the answers I needed if only I could get her to talk.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“About what?” I gasped.

“This,” she said, looking down at the dagger and the blood across her brown knuckles.

“Is this love?” I asked, feeling foolish even using the word.

That’s when she pulled the blade from the wound. Blood gushed from my chest and I was more afraid than I’d ever been. Lurching forward, I reached for her as she backed away. I tried to yell for help but my breath was gone.

I sat up in the bed in violent genuflection. I was still gasping and my chest actually hurt. I hadn’t moved in my sleep. For long moments I sat at the edge of the bed trying to glean meaning from the dream.

After failing at that I showered and shaved, put on my own dark clothes, and took a pistol from a locked drawer.

Ray’s bed was empty and made.

I found him downstairs sitting next to the koi pond—reading a book!

“Ray?”

When Mouse looked up, the second surprise was that he was wearing glasses. He took off the rimless spectacles and smiled in a way that I’d never seen. It was the glasses that shocked me most; the fact that he bought them, that he wore them in spite of his fierce vanity.

“Bettah close your mouth or the flies’ll get in,” he said. It was this old familiar phrase that calmed me a bit.

“What are you reading?”

“The Souls of Black Folk,” he said.

“W. E. B. DuBois?”

“Is it so amazin’ that I’d be readin’ a book?”

“Yes. It is. I’ve known you more’n forty years and I have never seen you read anything but a racing form. I didn’t even know you could read. You never went to school. And why would you be reading DuBois? That’s a book most people got to build up to.”

“Not just that,” he said. He gestured at the rucksack sitting next to him. “I got Up from Slavery in there too. Booker T. Washington wrote that one. He a southern boy down to his nuts and Boisy from New England. You know them two mothahfuckahs like oil an’ water.”

“I don’t get it, Ray. What’s come over you?”

“Well,” he said. “I told you how I started runnin’ jobs, right?”

“Yeah?”