I could hear her, but she seemed to be several miles away. And I wasn’t much interested anyway.

“Water,” I mumbled.

“Fuck water,” she said, her voice as harsh as the light that was breaking through my eyelids. “Listen to me. We drove up last night, just to get some ribs. We left the car by the waterfront and wandered down some alleys, looking for a rib joint in a basement. We got lost, and we got mugged. You tried to fight three guys. White guys. Long hair. One of them broke his glasses

You got that? I ran.”

“Water.”

“Fuck water, Kidd. Listen to what I’m telling you

“

The Memphis cops came by but, after hearing my story, decided there wasn’t much to go on. They were apologetic, but I told them I figured I’d screwed up, it wasn’t their fault. They said no, no, people ought to be able to walk in the streets, but I could see they agreed with my assessment. The dumb Yankee fucked up

I stayed in the hospital for two weeks. When I got out, LuEllen drove me south to New Orleans. It was a painful trip. When we arrived, I was generally confined to my apartment for the best part of a month. An invalid, I was, afraid to laugh or sneeze or cough or sit up too quickly, afraid of the tearing pain in my chest and sides.

Hill had done a good job on me: eight broken or cracked ribs and a punctured lung, bruised kidneys, broken arm, massive bruising down my arms and legs, broken nose, cracked cheekbone, a concussion. I’d never gone back to Longstreet. John had come to see me at the hospital, and Marvel.

“We’ve got the town,” Marvel said. “It’s ours. They’ll never get it back.”

There wasn’t much more to say.

Bobby called when I got a laptop set up, and we went back and forth for quite a while. Mostly about loyalties.

It worked.

Barely.

Good enough. Thanx.

Most of a year had passed since then. I was more or less back to normal, returning to St. Paul in time for the Minnesota fishing opener. LuEllen, last I heard, was in Singapore.

LuEllen had picked up St. Thomas’s new gun, left the old one beside him, turned out the lights, and locked the animal control building. Then she drove me straight out of Longstreet to Memphis.

“Just praying you’d stay alive,” she said. “I kept asking, ‘You OK, Kidd?’ and you kept saying, ‘Jes fine,’ and I figured you were dying.”

At the hospital she told them the rib story.

” ‘Crank,’ one of the docs said. ‘He must have run into a pack of speed freaks.’ That’s what they told me,” LuEllen said.