A half hour later, in the Winnebago, he shut the interior lights out and studied the RV campgrounds. He didn’t see any surveillance. He locked the door, showered and went to bed. His Glock on the table beside him.

Before he fell asleep, his phone hummed.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Shaw.” The man’s voice was urgent. “It’s Arnie Sterling. There was a fight. He got stabbed, Jude. One of the prisoners—a friend of Daryl Williams.”

“How is he?”

“They won’t tell me! Just that it was bad. He’s in the prison hospital. I asked if he could go to the city ER, but they won’t do it.” The man was near tears. “What’ve you found?”

“I have one lead. I can’t say that it’ll pay off. If it doesn’t then I don’t have much else that’ll help him.”

“The prisoner who stabbed him is in solitary but there’ll be somebody else. Maybe they can get into the hospital and finish what they started.”

“I should know by tomorrow.”

A pause. “If it’s not too late.”

7.

The next day, in a brown leather baseball cap and sunglasses, Shaw followed Trimbeaux, again on foot, from his house to a dive of a pizzeria, where the dealer met once again with the Latino from the night before.

Even in new clothes and the shades, Shaw didn’t want to risk getting made as the suspicious man in the bar last night, so he waited across the street, sipping coffee in an outdoor café, from where he could watch the men through the pizza place’s large, smeared plate-glass windows. They split a large pie and halfway through the meal, when the counterman and other patrons weren’t looking their way, Trimbeaux slid the Latino a thick envelope and received in return a slip of paper, which the dealer pocketed without glancing at.

Shaw knew transactions like this. The supplier—the Latino—had received cash in the envelope and, in return, he had given Trimbeaux the address of where the product he’d just purchased was hidden and ready for pickup. Maybe a safe deposit box or a locker at a local bus station.

The two men left. Shaw didn’t follow them. As soon as they turned the corner on a side street, he entered the pizzeria and sat on an unsteady chair at the table next to where the two men had been seated.

The counterman moved in with a gray bin to bus the dishes.

“Hold on there a minute, will you?” Shaw stopped the sweaty, heavyset man, who blinked in surprise.

“Yeah?”

Shaw said in a low voice, “You have two options.”

“I’m sorry?”

“One, call your lawyer and tell him you’re about to be arrested on a conspiracy and RICO charge for using your place of business for illegal organized crime transactions.”

He blustered, “The hell you talking about? I—”