“You know.” Snake’s eyes glittered in the television light.

“What do you mean? What do I know?”

“You’ve been jawin’ to people you shouldn’t. Tryin’ to get your name in the papers.”

Morehouse’s mouth opened, but he did not speak. He raised his hands and covered his eyes like a child trying to pretend that the horror in front of him wasn’t real. “I ain’t done nothin’!” he cried.

“That’s a lie.”

The big hands slowly fell from the anguished face. “Oh Lord,” Glenn said in a slurred voice. “Ya’ll done come to cut my throat, ain’t you?”

“We damn sure ought to.”

“Wilma!” Morehouse cried. “Call the sheriff! They’ve come to kill me!”

Snake laughed. “Wilma ain’t callin’ nobody ’cept the coroner.”

Glenn froze, his eyes on the doorway. His sister stood there like an avenging angel, as silent as a witness to an execution. Morehouse started to speak, but she held up a warning finger, and he began to sob.

“We know you’ve been talking to Henry Sexton,” Sonny said. “We need to know what got said, Glenn.”

“I ain’t told that bastard nothing! He ambushed me. How was I supposed to stop him?”

“Come on,” muttered Snake. “At least you can be a man and admit what you done. The question is why. Did you get to thinking ’bout hellfire or some such nonsense? You scared of that Baptist Hay-des that Preacher Gibbons was always rantin’ about?”

Morehouse shuddered in his bed.

“Remember the oath you swore? Same one we all did.”

“I was just a kid,” Morehouse said, almost crying. “Just a stupid kid without sense to know right from wrong.”

“Bullshit! You were thirty-five and proud to swear it. And if it was up to me, I’d do just what the oath says to do. But lucky for you, it ain’t.”

Glenn cut his eyes at the phone on the table beside his bed. “Who’s it up to?”

“You know.” Sonny lifted the cordless phone from the bedside table and tossed it onto a chair across the room. “Billy said give you a choice.”

Glenn’s eyes ping-ponged from Snake to Sonny and back again. “What kind of choice?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Snake, smiling again. He drew a deer-skinning knife from a scabbard on the side of his belt. “On one hand, I’ve got this blade, which’ll take off your nuts before you even feel the sting. You know a man can bleed to death after that, ’cause you’ve seen it.”

Morehouse shut his eyes.

“But in Sonny’s backpack, there’s a vial of fentanyl that’ll send you off to fairyland as sweet and easy as Rip van Winkle.”

Snake had chosen fentanyl because Glenn’s doctor had prescribed the fentanyl patch once his pain became intractable.

Morehouse was praying, Sonny realized, a droning murmur of indistinct words.