We both strip our pants halfway down our thighs. Like me Presley still wears jockey briefs, and my father’s comment about his anatomy is readily borne out. Satisfied that neither of us is wired, we button and zip back up.

“I don’t like bullshit,” I tell him. “So I’ll get right to it. You killed a man named Don Hillman in 1973 in Mobile, Alabama. You did that on your own hook, no matter what you thought. I’m prepared to offer you a substantial price for the pistol used in that crime, but it’s a one-time offer. An outright purchase. You can take what I’m offering, or we can go to Plan B.”

“You fixing to threaten me, sonny?” Presley sounds more amused than angry.

“If we don’t come to terms over this, I’m going to go straight to the district attorney—whom I went to school with—and use every bit of influence at my disposal to have you indicted for capital murder and extortion. That’s a risk for my father, but it’s one he’s prepared to take. He’s been more than generous with you, and he’s tired of living in fear.”

Presley looks off into the trees.

“He deserves better. And you know it.”

“I can’t help the way things turned out,” Presley says bitterly. “Fact is, Doc has money and I don’t. And I need some.”

“My father treated your family free for years, just like he did a lot of others. What he’s got now is patients who think he’s a saint and not much else. He’s in bad health himself. He deserves to retire in peace.”

Presley scratches his ratty pajamas. “The way I figure, that gun’s worth a lot more than fifty thousand.”

“Or nothing. It could simply be evidence sitting in the D.A.’s office.”

“A hundred grand. Cash money.”

Relief trickles through my veins like cool water. “You’ve committed other murders in the past. I suspect you’re blackmailing other people as we speak. Right now I haven’t the slightest bit of interest in those crimes. But that could change. You could spend what little time you have left in jail. And you know what that’s like, Ray.” I spit off the deck. “Sixty-five thousand.”

He doesn’t like me using his first name. And though he hasn’t moved, something changed in him at the mention of prison. “Eighty,” he says in a taut voice.

“Is the gun here?”

“Could be.”

“If you get it now, I’ll go seventy-five. That’s all I brought with me.”