Snake picked up the piano bench and tossed it through Albert’s plate glass window. The shards tinkled in the street like a shattering dream. Snake leaped through the window after the bench, and Albert saw a man nearly twice his size join him in the street. Brody Royal scrambled out onto the porch, then jumped down to the sidewalk. Instinct told Albert to follow them, but before he could move, the giant figure stepped from the shadows and stared at him with unalloyed hatred. The huge shape was no astronaut; it was Frank Knox, wearing an asbestos suit and some kind of pack on his back.

“You should have talked,” he said. “Now you get the Guadalcanal barbecue.”

Albert backpedaled in terror, but the roaring jet of flame reached toward him like the finger of Satan, and Knox’s eyes flashed with fascination.

The display room exploded into fire.

Facedown in a roaring fog of pain, Albert slowly picked himself up from the floor, then ran blindly from the inferno raging in the front of his store. When he crashed through the back door, arms flailing, he saw that his clothes had already burned away. Like a deer fleeing a forest fire, he bounded toward a bright opening at the end of the alley. There was a service station there—a white-owned station, but he knew the attendant. Maybe somebody would take him to the hospital.

As Albert windmilled down the alley, a big car pulled across the open space, blocking it. The gumball light on its roof came to life, spilling red glare onto the walls of the buildings. A huge shape rose from beside the car. Big John DeLillo.

“Help me, Mr. John!” Albert screamed, running toward the deputy. “Lord, they done burned me out!”

As he ran, Albert saw that his hands were on fire.

CHAPTER 2

Twenty-three days later
Natchez, Mississippi

“IF THEY’D HAVE left them two Jews alone and just shot the nigger,” said Frank Knox, “none of this would even be happening. New Yorkers don’t give no more of a damn than we do about one less nigger in the world. But you kill a couple of Jewboys, and they’re ready to call out the Marines.”

“You talking about that Neshoba County business?” asked Glenn Morehouse, a mountain of a man with half the intellectual wattage of his old sergeant.

“What else?” said Frank, flipping a slab of alligator meat on the sizzling grill.