Feeling more than a little angry himself, Jake shot back, “You don’t realize what he told us, do you?”

“He told us to stop bothering him and you walked away.”

“Before we got ourselves killed,” Jake muttered.

“You don’t believe—”

“Do you want to end up in some whorehouse in Mexico?” Jake snapped. “Bombed out on cocaine or heroin or whatever they pump into you?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Well, you should be. You don’t understand what he was telling us.”

An eighteen-wheeler roared past them, well above the speed limit, making the Mustang shudder in its slipstream.

“He told us that the Mafia would kill us,” Glynis said, sounding sullen about it, reluctant to admit it.

Jake shook his head. “He told us that this is all about drugs. Narcotics. Those big boys he talked about aren’t just into gambling. They’re bringing narcotics into the state and Leeds and god knows who else in the state government is in with them.”

Glynis was silent for several minutes. Another semi rig whooshed past them. On the median between the sections of the divided highway Jake saw the lighted sign of a gas station. He glanced at his fuel gauge and decided they could get back to the city without filling up.

“Do you think Mrs. Sinclair was hooked on drugs?” Glynis asked.

“Maybe. I don’t think they’d kill her because she was a gambling addict.”

“And the state police, the district attorney’s office, the whole government…” Glynis sounded lost, bewildered as she began to recognize the size of the problem.

“Not everybody,” Jake said. “But enough. They’ve got the state in their control and Leeds is part of it.”

“I know that!” Glynis snapped. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Me?”

“You. Us. Whoever.”

“Nacho wants us to drop the whole business. That would be the safest thing for us to do.”

No reply. She sat beside Jake, her face profiled by the dim dashboard lighting. She looked tense, rigid—but filled with anger, not fear.

Jake gripped the steering wheel tightly, peering ahead into the darkness, and heard himself say, “I’m not going to drop it, Glyn.”

“You’re not?”

“All my life those wiseguys have pushed me around and I’ve let them do it. I ran away from them, tried to hide myself, buried myself in astronomy, as far away from them as I could go. And they’ve followed me. They’re here, still pushing me, still telling me what I can and can’t do.” He felt resentment boiling up inside him, a hot unreasoning anger that he had kept bottled inside himself since childhood. “Guys like Nacho and Monster, they think they can get whatever they want. Just crack a few heads and everybody lays down for them. Well, fuck that! I’m not letting them walk over me anymore.”