“Let me fuck him up, Earl,” says the blond kid. “Let me cut him.”

Suppressing the urge to smash the heavy Springfield against the kid’s skull, I stand and back slowly to the door. The siren is louder now.

“Remember what I said about my little girl. And make sure Snake gets the message.”

My last image is Will Devine’s face, white with fear, and behind it, the tall man in the leather jacket speaking into a cell phone. Reaching behind me, I open the door and walk swiftly to my car, then drive back up to the bridge over the Mississippi, the cello slowly pulling me earthward, stemming the tide of endorphins rushing through my blood and brain.

The man I was six months ago would never have done what I just did.

That man is dead now.

Maybe this is what it means to be born again.

Chapter 8

Two hundred miles from Natchez, just north of Sulphur, Louisiana, lay a thriving sod farm that ten years earlier had been a struggling horse farm. Being that Sulphur was one of the most polluted places in America, with twelve chemical plants pumping out toxic by-products twenty-four hours a day, the horses hadn’t done too well, so the owners had sold out to a nice fellow with a ponytail from Beaumont, Texas. That fellow was Lars Dempsey, founder of the VK motorcycle club.

Dempsey rarely brought club members to the sod farm, which he operated as a legitimate front business. When he did bring them, they weren’t allowed to ride their hogs in, or even to wear their jackets. This was because the fifty-nine-acre complex sometimes served as a storage and distribution depot for the VK’s meth and gun-running operations.

What had drawn Snake Knox to the sod farm was not only its relative isolation, but the fact that it had an airstrip. Parked out on that airstrip now was an Air Tractor crop duster, probably the least suspicious aircraft in the American South. Its tiny cockpit could hold only a pilot, which suited Snake down to the ground. If he had to make a quick getaway, he didn’t have to worry about taking anybody with him. And anywhere he flew between Texas and South Carolina—or even to Mexico—cops would assume he was only a crop duster ferrying his plane to a job.

Just now, though, Snake didn’t plan on flying anywhere.