The only thing left was nutritious crap like hamburger and noodles that they had to cook themselves, and if they hadn’t found a convenience store that would take their SNAP card in return for nothing, giving them half back in cash, they’d probably all be kicking the nicotine habit right now.

Button lit up one of his last five Marlboros and put on his thinking cap, and as the tattoo lady was finishing up with Marie, and he finished up a half sack of Cheez-Its, he went back in the kitchen, and said, “I’ve had my thinking cap on.”

The tattoo lady said, “That can’t be good.”

“Listen, that state cop Flowers is still here, and he hasn’t figured out a goddamn thing. There’s three people dead and two more shot. They gotta be desperate. The other thing is, Skinner and Holland were making a fortune in that store until the priest closed the church, right? Am I right about that?”

The tattoo lady said to Marie, “Put that Neosporin on your lobes every two hours, and keep doing it until you run out. I’m gonna get out of here before Jim tells you his plan. I want nothing to do with it.”

“You don’t even know what it is,” Button said.

“And I plan to keep it that way,” the tattoo lady said. “I don’t want to be no accomplice.”

—

She left, and Marie asked, “You want Sylvia to hear this, whatever it is?”

“Yeah, because she knows how to write good. We’ll have to tell Raleigh, too, because it could get complicated, and I might need his help. But it’s gonna bail us out, babe. We’ll be in tall fuckin’ clover when we pull this off, and there’s not a fuckin’ thing illegal about it.”

“That’s a change,” Marie said. “Am I right thinking that even if it’s legal, it’s still stupid?”

Button bared his teeth at her. “We don’t need that kind of defeatist thinking.”

“Ah, fuck it, I should’ve joined the SHARPs.”

“Never! They’re not even real skinheads . . .”

“They’re better skinheads, Jim . . . You know, you’re making me tired,” Marie said.

Button took the chair vacated by the tattoo lady and leaned toward Marie, who was dabbing the ointment on her earlobes. “You’re not listening, Marie. If we pull this off, we could all move to Texas, where, you know, they’d treat us right.”

“So tell me what you thought up,” she said. And then: “Hey! Hey! Did you eat all the Cheez-Its? Goddamnit, those were mine. I was saving them . . .”

The sound of wheels coming off.

—

Twelve hours later, Wardell Holland pushed through the curtain into the back room at Skinner & Holland, where he found Virgil, Jenkins, and Skinner sitting around the card table, Virgil and Jenkins finishing off potpies.

He held up the letter, and said, “You guys won’t believe this.”