“Twice you saved my life.”

“Sssh.”

Nora came running up the alley, her shoes clicking on the stones. She dropped to her knees over her husband.

“Compress, honey,” Danny said. “Your scarf. Forget the leg. The chest, the chest, the chest.”

She used her scarf on the left hole in his chest and Luther took off his jacket and applied it to the bigger hole in his leg. They knelt over him pressing all their weight into his chest.

“Danny, don’t leave me.”

“Not leaving,” Danny said. “Strong. Love you.”

Nora’s tears poured down into his face. “Yes, yes, you’re strong.”

“Luther.”

“Yeah?”

A siren bleated in the night, followed by another.

“Hell of a throw.”

“Sssh.”

“You should…”—Danny smiled and blood bubbled over his lips—“…be a baseball player or something.”

The BABE GOES SOUTH

CHAPTER forty

Luther arrived back in Tulsa in late September during a dogged heat wave and a humid breeze that kicked the dust up and caked the city tan. He’d spent some time in East St. Louis with his Uncle Hollis, enough time in which to grow a beard. He stopped grooming his hair as well and traded his bowler for a broke-down cavalryman’s hat with a sloopy brim and a crown that the moths had gotten to. He even allowed Uncle Hollis to overfeed him so that for the first time in his life he had a little belly on him and some extra flesh beneath his jaw. By the time he got off the freight car in Tulsa, he looked like a tramp. Which was the point. A tramp with a duffel bag.

Most times he looked at the bag, he’d start laughing. Couldn’t help it. Bundled-up stacks of money sat at the bottom, product of another man’s greed, another man’s graft. Years of corruption all stacked and tied up and smelling now of someone else’s future.

He took the bag to a field of weeds north of the tracks and buried it with a spade he’d brought along from East St. Louis. Then he crossed back over the Santa Fe tracks into Greenwood and went down to Admiral, where the rough trade spent their time. It was four hours before he spotted Smoke coming out of a billiards parlor that hadn’t been there when Luther left last year. Place was called Poulson’s and it took Luther a moment to remember that this was Smoke’s given surname. If he’d thought of that before, maybe he wouldn’t have lost four hours wandering up and down Admiral.

Smoke had three men with him, and they surrounded him until they reached a cherry red Maxwell. One of them opened the back door and Smoke hopped in and they drove off. Luther went back to the field of weeds, dug the bag back up, took what he needed, and buried it again. He walked back into Greenwood and kept going till he’d reached the outskirts and found the place he’d been looking for—Deval’s Junkyard, run by an old fella, Latimer Deval, who’d occasionally done side work for Uncle James. Luther had never met old Deval in the flesh, but he’d passed his place enough back when he’d lived here to know Deval always kept a few heaps for sale on his front lawn.