“See here, I have a very important meeting with my lawyers from Detroit.” Rabun spoke with the crisp fascism that would follow him to his deathbed.

“Sure you have a meeting you old goat fucker, you piss-gummed maniac. Touch my wife! I got your meeting right here in my hand. It’s with death, with mortedella as the Italians call it. On your knees, and turn around! Turn around, on your knees!”

“Johnny, please, I can explain everything.” Diana’s smile had become wan indeed.

“Turn around or I’ll blow this old fuck’s head off. I mean it!” He raised the shotgun and they knelt with some awkwardness, trying to separate their umbrellas. He couldn’t help but note that his umbrage had taken on a certain civic player’s banality; he fired two shots into the water, and tossed the gun in before the rippling shot pattern had subsided. Then he ran for it.

Warlock drove home as if pursued by demons, the hounds of hell, the police. No one much, however, was out and about that stormy day, and the incident went unnoticed except by the participants, and by the marina employee in his shack who decided he had heard two claps of thunder. Warlock swerved his way down rainy blacktops, the roads covered by broken branches, and the pale pastel, green leaves of May stripped by the wind. He reached home, ran in the door, and flopped on the bed with Hudley, aroused abruptly from a nap, barking in pursuit. He clutched the pillow to his face, moaned long and hard, and sucked his thumb for a moment for the first time in thirty years, having broken the habit at boy scout camp.

Oh jesus, have I gone too far? he wondered. Diana definitely was going to be pissed off. Then the phone rang and he leaped to answer. It must be Diana, he thought, but it was Schmidt.

“Where the fuck are you? We’re all here and Rabun comes in the door in a huff because a madman employee shot at him. Was it you?”

“Maybe yes. Maybe no.” Warlock in his frenzy had forgotten the meeting. “I’ve been on a tail and got burned. Go ahead and get started.”

The meeting had become a piece of ordinary cake by the time Warlock arrived. A much saddened, though innocent, Feingold was there. Schmidt had brought along three elegantly dressed cronies, posing as a Florida lawyer, an upper echelon IRS man, a State Police detective. The senior partner of the law firm, Bob Arrowsmith, was red as a beet at Schmidt whose services he had frequently used.

“I made you, I can break you,” Arrowsmith hissed.