Luther whispered, “Oh, Jessie,” and used his thumb to close his eyes, and then he placed his hand to Jessie’s cheek. The flesh had begun to cool, and Luther asked the Lord to please forgive his friend for his actions earlier today because he’d been desperate, he’d been compromised, but he was, Lord, a good man at heart who’d never before caused anyone but himself any pain.

“You can…make this…right.”

Luther turned at the sound of the voice.

“Sm-smart boy like…like you.” The Deacon sucked at the air. “Smart boy…”

He rose from Jessie’s body with the gun in his hand and walked over to the table, coming around to stand on the Deacon’s right so the fat fool had to roll that big head of his in order to see him.

“You go get that doctor you…you…saw this afternoon.” The Deacon took another breath and his chest whistled. “Go get him.”

“And you’ll just forgive and forget, uh?” Luther said.

“As…as God is my witness.”

Luther removed his mask and coughed in the Deacon’s face three times. “How about I fucking cough on you till we see if I got me the plague today?”

The Deacon used his good hand to reach for Luther’s arm, but Luther pulled it away.

“Don’t you touch me, demon.”

“Please…”

“Please what?”

The Deacon wheezed and his chest whistled again and he licked his lips.

“Please,” he said again.

“Please what?”

“Make…this right.”

“Okay,” Luther said and put the gun into the folds under the Deacon’s chin and pulled the trigger with the man looking in his eyes.

“That fucking do?” Luther shouted and watched the man tip to his left and slide down the back of the booth. “Kill my friend?” Luther said and shot him again, though he knew he was dead.

“Fuck!” Luther screamed at the ceiling, and he grabbed his own head with the gun clutched against it and screamed it again. Then he noticed Smoke trying to pull himself across the stage in his own blood and Luther kicked a chair out of his way and crossed to the stage with his arm extended and Smoke turned his head and lay there, looking up at Luther with no more life in his eyes than Jessie’s.

For what felt like an hour—and Luther would never know how long he stood there exactly—they stared at each other.

Then Luther felt a new version of himself he wasn’t even sure he liked say, “If you live, you’ll have to come kill me, sure as sin.”

Smoke blinked his eyelids once, real slow, in the affirmative.

Luther stared down the gun at him. He saw all those bullets he’d scored in Columbus, saw his Uncle Cornelius’s black satchel, saw the rain that had fallen, warm and soft as sleep, the afternoon he’d sat on his porch, willing his father to come home when his father was already four years five hundred miles away and not coming back. He lowered the gun.

He watched the surprise flash across Smoke’s pupils. Smoke’s eyes rolled and he burped a thimbleful of blood down his chin and onto his shirt. He fell back to the stage and the blood flowed from his stomach.