And Luther told the truth. “None.”

Arthur Smalley’s eyes widened. “My wife and child are—”

“The Deacon don’t care about your domestic responsibilities,” Jessie said.

“But you-all? What you care about?”

Luther didn’t look at Jessie and he knew Jessie wasn’t looking at him. Luther pulled the .38 from his belt and pointed it at Arthur Smalley’s forehead.

“Care about the money,” he said.

Arthur Smalley looked into that barrel and then he looked in Luther’s eyes. “Boy, how does your mama walk the street knowing she birthed such a creature?”

“The money,” Jessie said.

“Or what?” Arthur said, which is exactly what Luther had been afraid he’d say. “You gone shoot me? Shit, I’m fine with that. You want to shoot my family? Do me the favor. Please. You ain’t gone do—”

“I’ll make you dig her up,” Jessie said.

“You what?”

“You heard me.”

Arthur Smalley sagged into the doorjamb. “You didn’t just say that.”

“I damn well did, old man,” Jessie said. “I will make you dig your daughter out her grave. Else I’ll tie your ass up, make you watch me do it. Then I’ll fill it back in, while she lying beside it, so you’ll have to bury her twice.”

We’re going to hell, Luther thought. Head of the line.

“What you think about that, old man?” Jessie put his .45 behind his back again.

Arthur Smalley’s eyes filled with tears and Luther prayed they wouldn’t fall. Please don’t fall. Please.

Arthur said, “I ain’t got no money,” and Luther knew the fight was gone from him.

“What you got then?” Jessie said.

Jessie followed in his Model T as Luther drove Arthur Smalley’s Hudson out from behind the barn and crossed in front of the house as the man stood on his porch and watched. Luther shifted into second gear and put some juice into it as he passed the small fence at the edge of the dirt yard, and he told himself he didn’t see the freshly turned dirt under the elm. He didn’t see the shovel that stuck upright from the dark brown mound. Or the cross made from thin planks of pine and painted a pale white.

By the time they’d finished with the men on the list, they had several pieces of jewelry, fourteen hundred dollars in cash, and a mahogany hope chest strapped to the back of what had once been Arthur Smalley’s car.

They’d seen a child gone blue as twilight and a woman no older than Lila who lay on a cot on a front porch with her bones and her teeth and her eyes lunging toward heaven. Saw a dead man sitting against a barn, blacker than black could ever get, as if he’d been struck by lightning through his skull, his flesh all bumpy with welts.

Judgment Day, Luther knew. It was coming for all of them. And he and Jessie were going to go up and stand before the Lord and have to account for what they’d done this day. And there was no possible accounting for that. Not in ten lives.