“Where’s he buried?” Luther said.

Uncle Hollis shook his head. “Wasn’t nothing to bury, son. They got done shooting him, they picked him up, one on each end, and they tossed him back into his own store.”

Luther got up from the table and went over to a small sink and got sick. It went on for some time, and he felt as if he were puking up soot and yellow fire and ash. His head eddied with flashes of white women swinging rolling pins onto black heads and white faces shrieking with joy and fury and then the Deacon singing in his wheelchair-rocker and his father trying to kneel in the street and Aunt Marta and the Honorable Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, clapping their hands and beaming big smiles and someone chanting, “Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!” and the whole world burning with fire as far as the eye could see until the blue skies were painted half black and the white sun vanished behind the smoke.

When he finished, he rinsed his mouth and Hollis gave him a small towel and he dried his lips on it and wiped the sweat from his brow.

“You hot, boy.”

“No, I’m okay now.”

Uncle Hollis gave him another slow shake of the head and poured him another drink. “No, I said you are hot. There’s people looking for you, sending word up and down and across this here Midwest. You kill a bunch of coloreds in a Tulsa joint? You kill Deacon Broscious? You fucking out your mind?”

“How’d you hear?”

“Shit. It’s burning up the wires, boy.”

“Police?”

Uncle Hollis shook his head. “Police think some other fool did it. Clarence Somebody.”

“Tell,” Luther said. “Clarence Tell.”

“That’s the name.” Uncle Hollis stared across the table at him, breathing heavy through his flat nose. “’Parently you left one of them alive. One they call Smoke?”

Luther nodded.

“He in a hospital. Ain’t nobody sure if he gone get well or not, but he told people. He fingered you. Gunners from here to New York looking for your head.”

“What’s the price on it?”

“This Smoke say he pay five hundred dollars for a photograph of your corpse.”

“What if Smoke dies?”

Uncle Hollis shrugged. “Whoever take over the Deacon’s business, he going to have to make sure you dead.”

Luther said, “I ain’t got no place to go.”

“You got to go east, boy. ’Cause you can’t stay here. And stay the fuck out of Harlem, that’s for sure. Look, I know a boy up in Boston can take you in.”

“Boston?”

Luther gave that some thought and quickly realized that thinking about it was a waste of time because there wasn’t any choice in the matter. If Boston was all that was left of “safe” in this country, then Boston it would have to be.

“What about you?” he asked. “You staying here?”

“Me?” Uncle Hollis said. “I didn’t shoot nobody.”

“Yeah, but what’s here anymore? Place been burned to nothing. I hear all the coloreds are leaving or trying to.”