Worse yet, he’d received a report from someone attending the trial that Quentin Avery had got up on his hind legs and shocked the court with his opening statement. That meant that Tom Cage might mean to make a fight of it after all. Snake had been trying to figure out why Cage would do that, and he couldn’t. He’d put out all the feelers he safely could, and as yet no answer had come back to him.

As the upper rim of the flaming sun sank below the horizon, Snake turned to go, but before he took two steps, his burner phone rang.

“Yeah?” he said.

“This is BB,” said a voice Snake recognized as coming from a mouth stuffed with chewing tobacco. He also heard wind roaring in the phone. He could picture Sheriff Billy Byrd driving down the highway in his cruiser, sticking his big head and Stetson out the window to spit.

“About fuckin’ time,” Snake said. “What you got?”

“It ain’t good.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“That nigger girl those VK boys thought must be FBI?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s a friend of the mayor’s. Another writer, believe it or not.”

Snake had already learned that Cleotha Booker had been visited by Penn Cage and a young black woman, but he’d assumed the girl was one of Kaiser’s FBI agents. “A writer? You’re telling me this gal going around bending her pistol over bikers’ heads is a writer?”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, man. She apparently served in Desert Storm. Army.”

“I’ll be goddamned. What about the older woman? Dolores?”

“I sent patrols up Washington Street as many times as I could today”—Byrd spat loudly in the rushing wind—“helping out with security, don’t you know. Turns out Kaiser and four of his agents went crashing into Cage’s house after lunch yesterday and got the St. Denis woman out of there. One of my deputies talked to a neighbor who saw it happen. So the St. Denis woman had probably been staying in Cage’s house since Monday night.”

“Son of a bitch, Billy. Any idea where they took her?”

“None yet.”

Snake sighed and looked out over the darkening water. Dolores St. Denis could put him on death row at Angola, and he had no desire to test the ability of the Aryan Brotherhood to protect him from the most violent niggers in America.

“Billy, I got to know where that high-yellow bitch is being hid.”

“I know it, bud. But I don’t know how I can help you. John Kaiser ain’t gonna tell me shit about that kind of thing. She’s in the hands of Uncle Sam now.”

Snake made a fist and squeezed it tight. As much as he’d wanted to cut the cord with the VK, he was going to need them still. “Okay. Tell me about Tom Cage, then.”

“What about him?”