Presley himself sits on a sofa opposite a large color television tuned to a soap opera, a TV tray before him and a stainless steel intravenous drug caddy standing beside. He looks surprisingly fit for a fifty-six-year-old man with metastatic carcinoma. He has the stringy toughness of a laborer, the long, ropy muscles you see on men working shirtless on highways, shrimp boats, and oil rigs. He wears blue cotton pajama pants and a white tank T-shirt. A grease-stained John Deere cap covers his head, which has been burned bald by chemotherapy, the green bill shading browless eyes that smolder in their sockets.

I glance around the room so that he won’t feel I’m staring. The walls are decorated with plaques and photos commemorating a career in law enforcement: certificates from various police societies, a couple of trophies sporting a man aiming a pistol. There’s also the usual complement of stuffed deer heads and mounted largemouth bass, along with a fearsome compound bow hanging from a hook. Sliding glass doors open onto a small deck behind the sofa, where a gas grill and a smoker stand rusting in the sun.

“So you’re Doc Cage’s boy,” Presley says. His voice is deep and rough as a wood rasp. “I recognize you from the paper. Excuse me if I don’t get up.”

“Please don’t.” It’s odd how we revert to the basic courtesies, even when talking to killers, especially if they are ill. My seating choices are a cracked Naugahyde recliner and a pillowy velour monstrosity that looks like a Kmart special.

“Take the La-Z-Boy,” Presley advises.

I sit on the edge of the chair so that I can keep my forward attitude. With men like Ray Presley, the critical subtext of any conversation is animal. Even in the silences, everything is territory and dominance, a battle for advantage.

“So you’re the one shot his mouth off about Del Payton in the paper,” he says, a half-humorous light in his eyes.

“That’s right.”

“You looking to make a name for yourself?”

“I already have that.”

He leans back and regards me with disdain. “I guess you do. But you’d have to go a long way to outdo your daddy.” He reaches down and eats a crust of toast from the egg-stained plate on the TV tray. “How come you didn’t go to medical school? Grades not good enough?”

This is the ultimate baiting question for any doctor’s son who didn’t follow his father into the profession. “They were too good. The medical school thought I’d be bored there.”

I let Presley chew on this a minute, and it takes him about that to finally decide I am joking. His primitive instincts are finely honed, but his grasp of the larger world is limited.

“I remember you in high school,” he says. “You was porking Livy Marston.”

I keep my face impassive.