Wilma shivers at this sound of what must be a pet name between them. Lincoln and I share another glance. I know what he’s thinking: Right now she’s dying to confess, but let her get out of this shack and lawyer up, and we’ll never get another word out of her—

Wilma’s truncated scream brings both our gazes back to her, but too late.

True to his namesake, Snake has pulled a knife from somewhere and he has the blade to her throat, with most of his body concealed behind hers.

“All right, now,” he says, getting his legs under him and lifting Wilma to her feet.

The guy’s survival instincts are breathtaking. Even before Wilma finished speaking, Snake realized that she had taken on value to us—and in that instant she became his ticket out of here.

As Snake moves laterally toward the door, Alois’s eyes flick from Lincoln to me and back again, alert for any chance to make a move to help his father.

“You’re not going out that door,” Lincoln says to Snake. “I’ll shoot right through her to kill you.”

“No, you won’t,” Snake says, edging sideways. “The mayor’s not gonna let you. He wants this dried-up hag on the witness stand, saying what she just said. He’ll do everything he can to keep telling himself that his old man’s innocent. But now you know the truth.”

“Don’t kill her,” I tell Lincoln. “And don’t listen to that bastard. He’s poison.”

“I’m the only truth teller in here,” Snake says, nearly to the door now. In one sinuous motion, the old man shifts the knife into the hand of the arm locked around her throat, while his free hand searches blindly for the doorknob.

“Don’t let him take me!” Wilma screeches. “Now that I said what I did, he’ll kill me for sure!”

As my eyes dart from Snake’s hand to the knob, Alois lunges off the sofa onto his dead comrade, grabbing for the pistol that the dead man never reached.

“Shoot him!” Lincoln shouts, but I can’t bring myself to do it while the kid is vainly scrabbling beneath his friend’s corpse.

Fixing my aim on Alois’s back, I yell for Alois to stop, but he doesn’t.

Lincoln’s pistol bucks with a deafening blast, and a bullet punches into the corpse only inches from Alois’s head.

“Goddamn it!” Lincoln bellows, and a split-second shift of focus tells me Snake and Wilma have vanished through the door.

Lincoln fires two rounds after them, then charges outside, leaving me to deal with Alois, who has finally got his hands on the butt of his friend’s pistol.

“Don’t do it!” I scream, but he doesn’t listen.