Luther reached into his coat pocket and came out with a brown paper bag that he placed on the table. He watched Smoke stare at it, let him wonder what it was.

“What’d you think about Chicago?” Luther said.

Smoke cocked his head. “The riots?”

Luther nodded.

“Thought it was a damn shame we only killed fifteen whites.”

“Washington?”

“Where you going with this?”

“Humor me, Mr. Poulson.”

Smoke raised another eyebrow at that. “Washington? Same thing. Wished them niggers had fought back, though. Chicago ones had some spirit.”

“I passed through East St. Louis on my travels. Twice.”

“Yeah? What it look like?”

“Ash,” Luther said.

Smoke tapped his fingers lightly on the tabletop. “You didn’t come here to kill me, did you?”

“Nope.” Luther tipped the bag and a sheaf of money fell out, wrapped tightly in a red rubber band. “That’s a thousand dollars. That’s half what I feel I owe you.”

“For not killing me?”

Luther shook his head. He lowered the gun, placed it on the table, and slid it across the tablecloth. He took his hand off it. He sat back in his chair. “For you not killing me.”

Smoke didn’t lift the pistol right away. He cocked his head at it, then tilted it the other way to consider Luther.

“I’m done with our kind killing our kind,” Luther said. “White folk do enough of it. I won’t be a party to any more of it. You want to still be part of it, then you kill me and you’ll get that thousand. You don’t, you’ll get two thousand. You want me dead, I’m sitting across from you saying pull the fucking trigger.”

Smoke had the gun in his hand. Luther had never seen him so much as flinch, but there was the gun pointed directly at Luther’s right eye. Smoke thumbed back the hammer.

“You might be confusing me with somebody has a soul,” he said.

“I might.”

“And you might not think I’m the kind of man would shoot you right through that eye of yours and then go up the road and fuck your woman up the ass, cut her throat when I come, and then cook me a soup out of your baby boy.”

Luther said nothing.

Smoke ran the muzzle over Luther’s cheek. He turned the pistol to his right and drew the target sight down the side of Luther’s face, opening the flesh.

“You,” he said, “will not associate with any gamblers, any drinkers, any dope fiends. You will stay out of the Greenwood nightlife. All the way out. You will never enter a place where I could run into you. And if you ever leave that son of yours because the simple life is too fucking simple for you? I will take you apart, piece by piece, in a grain silo for a week before I let your ass die. Is there any part of this deal you have issue with, Mr. Laurence?”

“None,” Luther said.