“Sir,” Jessie said, “that grippe be killing people in one day.”

“That’s true,” the Deacon said. “So, if you catch it, you surely could be dead this time tomorrow. But if you don’t get my money? Nigger, you surely will be dead tonight.”

The Deacon gave them the name of a doctor to see in the back room of a shooting gallery off Second and they went there after they got sick in the alley behind the Deacon’s club. The doctor, a drunken old high-yellow with his hair dyed rust-colored, stitched Jessie’s jaw as Jessie sucked air and the tears ran quietly down his face.

In the street, Jessie said, “I need something for the pain.”

Luther said, “You even think about the spike, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Fine,” Jessie said. “But I can’t think with this pain, so what you suggest?”

They went up into the back of a drugstore on Second, and Luther got them a bag of cocaine. He cut two lines for himself to keep his nerve up and four for Jessie. Jessie snorted his lines one after the other and took a shot of whiskey.

Luther said, “We going to need some guns.”

“I got guns,” Jessie said. “Shit.”

They went back to his apartment and he handed the long-barreled .38 to Luther and slid the .45 Colt behind his back and said, “You know how to use that?”

Luther shook his head. “I know if some nigger try to beat me out his house I’ll point this in his face.”

“What if that ain’t enough to stop him?”

“I ain’t dying today,” Luther said.

“Then let me hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“If it ain’t enough to stop him, you going to do what?”

Luther put the .38 in his coat pocket. “I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch.”

“Then shit, Negro,” Jessie said, still talking through gritted teeth, although now it was probably more from the cocaine than the pain, “let’s get working.”

They were a scary sight. Luther would admit that much as he caught their reflection in the window of Arthur Smalley’s living room as they walked up the steps to his house—two wound-up colored men with masks that covered their noses and mouths, one of them with a row of black stitches sticking out of his jaw like a spiked fence. Time was, the look of them would have been enough to terror the money out of any God-fearing Greenwood man, but these days it didn’t mean much; most folks were scary sights. The high windows of the small house had white Xs painted on them, but Luther and Jessie had no choice but to walk right up on the old porch and ring the bell.

By the looks of the place, Arthur Smalley had at one time tried to have a go at farming. Off to his left, Luther could see a barn in need of painting and a field with a skinny horse and a pair of knobby-looking cows wandering in it. But nothing had been tilled or reaped out there in some time and the weeds stood tall in midautumn.