“It’s all like TV at first,” she said to an unspecified audience. “There you are still in high school an’ just about everything he do drive you crazy. From the money in his pocket to him kissin’ you with his teeth, from all night long to knowin’ you ain’t never had real love in your life before. An’ if anybody come up on you he got his gun and his switchblade, his troops too. Make you feel like a goddamned queen.

“Then you marry him an’ find out that he been doin’ that stuff with about a dozen other girls; that he got three kids and he’s still married to some woman down in Mississippi. One day you wake up and you want to change the channel.”

“Why not leave him?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“Why? We know all the same people. Where I’m’a go nobody know me and Dennis too?”

“You afraid of him?”

“Not like you might think. Whenever I see him I’m that fifteen-year-old girl. I remember them kisses like they was yesterday. I need to take my babies and go somewhere where he cain’t talk to me no more.”

It was a little too much truth for the young mother. She put her chin down and turned her head away, trying to hold back despair.

“What you say about Ketch?” she asked a far wall.

“Somebody stabbed him in the chest and he died. And here this happens about the same time Alonzo got killed.”

“Alonzo?” That turned her attention back to me. “He’s dead too?”

“Shot in his own cot.”

“An’ so why you here?”

“I’m Lily Dasher’s cousin. She told me to come here to warn Dennis.”

“An’ how do you know Dennis?”

“Just from around. When I went to the hospital, Tremolo, that’s Ketch’s brother, Tremolo told me that Ketch told him that Alonzo was shot and killed. Lily said to tell Dennis because she knew the three of them ran together. She also told me that he had a wife and children and they should know if there was danger out here.”

“An’ what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it?” she challenged.

That was my entrée; time for me to shine—darkly.

“I had heard around that Dennis and them had a big score not that long ago,” I said. “They say that the money got hid. That sounds like a payday for somebody willin’ to take some risks.”

“And that somebody is you?”

“I could tussle when I need to.”

Corrine looked at me with new eyes; eyes she might have used on Dennis when she was in high school.

“What you askin’ me, Mr. Fredericks?”