Mouse found the light chain and a cluster of five or six two-hundred-watt bulbs flooded the squalid room, giving off a concentrated yellow glare. The space was larger than it seemed from the outside because the occupant had broken through the wall of the larger building.

There were crowded workbenches and junk piled on the floor. Nothing was painted, papered, or tiled. You could see motes of dust rising and falling on the air, illuminated by the garish light.

There was a bunk in the farthest corner.

That’s where the dead man lay.

“Shit,” Mouse muttered upon seeing the naked black corpse. “I guess the story about his dick was true.”

He was well endowed.

Other than the single maroon sock on the left foot, he was naked. There was a hole in his chest a little to the right of where his heart should have been. The grin on his lips was insincere. Maybe, I thought, it was a grimace he made trying to stay alive. His right eye was shut, as if he was winking at one last joke, but he didn’t die laughing. It was a fact that he tried to live. I could tell of his struggle by the fallen, wadded-up pillow he’d used to try to stem the flow of blood. There were pints of the vital fluid on the thin mattress and down on the concrete floor below.

“He a stupid mothahfuckah.” Mouse shook his head, sneering at the dead man.

“Why you say that?”

“He in the business like me, you know? But he do all this cowboy shit without information or any real kinda plan. You know a clean job should have no gunplay at all and at least enough for a year’s salary for every man in the crew. Griggs and his boys’d knock over a bank for twenty thousand dollars. Less.”

“He was a bank robber?”

“Not only banks.”

“Raymond, why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

“You said it was about a fight. I didn’t wanna put a live man’s business in the street. You know I’d kill somebody did that to me.”

I tried to think of something to say, some criticism, but he hadn’t failed to tell me anything that I could complain about. I wasn’t looking for a heist man.

On a rough pine wall above his death cot were tacked dozens of pictures of him being entertained by many, many naked women. Nine or so feet from the dead man was a thirty-five-millimeter Nikon camera on a tripod. A wire led from the camera to a place very near the dead man’s blood.

“Damn,” Mouse said. “I guess after fuckin’ all them women all he had to do was look at a picture and bust a nut.”

My friend was the kind of man who cracked jokes with the noose around his neck.