Sonny Thornfield eased off the gas as he approached the shore of Old River, where he maintained a fishing camp that almost no one in the world knew he owned. Though it stood only a few miles from where Glenn Morehouse had died, no one could find them here in ten years of searching.

The clammy sweat of panic still soaked Sonny’s shirt, which made it miserable inside his coat. He and Snake had been only halfway to the tree line behind Wilma’s house when the ambulance came barreling up the gravel road, red lights flashing. Sonny worried that in the chaos of the death scene, Wilma might break down and tell the paramedics everything. Snake disagreed.

“She handled it pretty good, I thought,” he said. “Wilma’s a tough old girl. You wouldn’t think it to look at her now, but she was a fine-lookin’ thing back in her day.”

“I remember,” Sonny said dully. “I can still see her in her bathing suit out by Lake Bruin.”

Snake grunted. “She was a decent piece of ass, in a pinch.”

“I never got to find out.”

“You’re about the only one.” Snake stuffed his hands into his pockets and sucked at the cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“I wish I hadn’t seen Glenn that way,” Sonny said, peering into the darkness to the left of his headlights. All the camp houses here were built on thirty-foot stilts to escape the perennial flooding from the backwaters of the Mississippi.

“Yeah,” Snake said, toying with his heater vent. “But damn, he fought like a demon at the end, didn’t he? Sumbitch picked me right up off the floor!”

Sonny tried to suppress the awful memory. “Remember back in the summer of sixty-four, when we tested that C-4 during those family picnics?”

Snake laughed. “Hell, yeah! I’d wrap that Primacord around a stump and cut the top right off, like slicing sausage for jambalaya. The kids loved it.”

“Glenn loved that even more than they did. He was like a kid himself.”

Snake nodded in the dashboard light. “He always was the weakest of us, though. But he’s gone now. Best forgotten.”

Sonny wished this were possible. All he could see was his old friend’s last moments on earth. After his sister injected the PICC line’s port with fentanyl, Snake and Sonny had held the emaciated giant down for another twenty seconds. Then his arms had gone limp, and he’d sagged back against the mattress, breathing only once every fifteen seconds or so.

“Can he hear me?” Wilma had asked in a cracked voice.

Snake leaned over their old comrade, then stuck a finger under his jaw. “If you’ve got anything to tell him, you better say it quick.”