Rabbit gets in and sits in the driver’s seat, listening without turning his head, trying to talk without moving his mouth. Penn Villas is coming to life; a car just passed. “You ought to know,” he says, “they’re looking for you. They think you set it.”

“Count on the fuzz to fuck up. Why would I go burn my own pad?”

“To destroy evidence. Maybe Jill—what do you call it?—O.D.’d.”

“Not on the scag she was getting from me, that stuff was so cut sugar water has more flash. Look, Chuck, that up at your house was honky action. Will you believe the truth, or shall I save my breath for the pigpen?”

“Let’s hear it.”

Skeeter’s voice, unattached to his face, is deeper than Harry remembers, with a hypnotic rasping lilt that reminds him of childhood radio. “Jill sacked out early and I made do with the sofa, right? Since getting back on the stuff she wasn’t putting out any of her own, and anyway I was pretty spaced and beat, we went twice around the county unloading that bullshit car. Right? So I wake up. There was this rattling around. I placed it coming from the kitchen, right? I was thinkin’ it was Jill coming to bug me to shoot her up again, instead there was this whoosh and soft woomp, reminded me of an APM hitting in the bush up the road, only it wasn’t up any road, I say to myself The war is come home. Next thing there’s this slam of a door, garage door from the rumble of it, and I flip to the window and see these two honky cats makin’ tail across the lawn, across the street, into between those houses there, and disappear, right? They had no car I could see. Next thing, I smell smoke.”

“How do you know these were white men?”

“Shit, you know how honkies run, like with sticks up their ass, right?”

“Could you identify them if you saw them again?”

“I ain’t identifying Moses around here. My skin is fried in this county, right?”

“Yeah,” Rabbit says. “Something else you should know. Jill is dead.”

The silence from the back seat is not long. “Poor bitch, doubt if she knows the difference.”

“Why didn’t you get her out?”

“Hell, man, there was heat, right? I thought lynching time had come, I didn’t know there wasn’t twelve hundred crackers out there, I was in no shape to take care of some whitey woman, let Whitey take care of his own.”

“But nobody stopped you.”

“Basic training, right? I eluded as they say my pursuers.”

“They didn’t want to hurt you. It was me, they were trying to tell me something. People around here don’t lynch, don’t be crazy.”

“Crazy, you’ve been watching the wrong TV channel. How about those cats in Detroit?”

“How about those dead cops in California? How about all this Off the Pigs crap you brothers have been pushing? I should take you in. The Brewer cops would love to see you, they love to re-educate crazy coons.”