“That was back in the sixties. This happened only two years ago.”

Two years ago? Again Henry has stunned me. I look down at the photo of my father in the boat with Brody Royal. “Do you have anything stronger than coffee?”

He opens a drawer and takes out a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey. Unscrewing the top, he pours double shots into paper cups.

“Confusion to the enemy,” he says, raising his cup.

CHAPTER 20

SONNY THORNFIELD STOOD in the hallway of Wilma Deen’s house, peering through a crack in the door of the room where Glenn Morehouse lay on a motorized hospital bed, his torso raised at a thirty-degree angle. The flickering blue light of a television washed over his shockingly skeletal form. His sister had carried in a cup of ice chips, and Wilma alternated between placing these on his tongue and sponging off his sweating forehead. Glenn’s head was to Sonny’s left. Wilma had placed herself on the far side of the bed. Sonny couldn’t see any pistol from where he stood, but he believed it was there. Glenn might have it in his left hand, under the covers. It would be a damned .45, Sonny thought, recalling men he’d seen knocked down by the Colt cannon.

“Jesus,” Snake whispered from behind Sonny. “Ain’t been but a month since I last saw him, and he done shrunk to half of what he was.”

Sonny nodded. It was hard to believe that anything, even cancer, could change a man so much. Like a half-drowned man, Morehouse sucked in a deep breath. Then his eyes opened wide, as if something had frightened him.

“Take it easy,” Wilma half sang, like a doting grandmother. “Everything’s fine. You were almost asleep. You fell off that sleep cliff.”

“Something’s wrong,” Glenn said. “I can feel it.”

“No, everything’s fine. You remember what the doctor said. Everybody gets that feeling when they get this poorly.”

Morehouse strained upward, squinted around the room, then finally settled back against the mattress. Wilma fed him another ice chip. After a minute or so, his eyelids began to fall again. Sonny wondered whether she meant to wait until he was completely unconscious to go for the gun.

Ten seconds later, she laid her left hand on her brother’s arm and began to stroke it. She sponged his forehead with her right hand, then moved it away as if to dip the rag again. But this time her hand disappeared behind his leg, and a moment later Morehouse cried out in terror.

Wilma backed away from the bed, a Colt .45 automatic in her hand.

While her brother gaped at her, Snake shoved Sonny into the room and moved quickly around him the bedside.

Morehouse turned his skull, his eyes going wide in recognition. “Snake! Sonny!”

Snake smiled with a cobra-like expression suited to his namesake. “Surprised, pardner?”

“What are ya’ll doin’ here?”