O'Toole glanced at her watch and waited.

"In the immediate future," said Kurtz, "I'm hoping to find an apartment."

"Week after next," said O'Toole, putting down her pen and removing her glasses to let him know that the interview was over. "That's when I'll make the official visit."

The Alabama Beagle Boys—back when there were five of them, there were only four living now—came by their name via an unfortunate photograph picked up by the wire services in the mid-1990s when an Alabama Department of Corrections official, exhilarated by his popular press after bringing back chain gangs, issued horizontally striped prison uniforms to all state inmates. The photographer from the Dothan, Alabama, newspaper had gone out to one of the prison-striped chain gangs working along State Highway 84 not far from the Boll Weevil Monument and photographed five men pulled from the work detail apparently at random.

It had not been random. It had amused the gang bull to line up five dim-witted brothers for the shot, the five overweight young men all serving three years for a completely botched Wal-Mart robbery in Dothan during which thirty-five legally armed Wal-Mart shoppers—the majority of them senior citizens—and the seventy-four-year-old "Wal-Mart Greeter," who had been carrying a.357 Magnum, all had drawn down on the boys, putting four of them in the hospital for gunshot wounds and sending all of them to the Babbie State Prison just outside of Opp. The five were known then just as the Beugel brothers—Warren, Darren, Douglas, Andrew, and Oliver—but a combination of a Dothan Journal misprint that went out to UPI and the comic image of the five in their striped coveralls changed their name forever to the Alabama Beagle Boys.

Six months after the photograph was taken, four of them escaped—Oliver, the youngest, had crawled back through the wire to rescue his pet crayfish and had been shot twenty-four times by guards. The first thing the Beagle Boys did after eluding the "Largest Manhunt in Southern Alabama History" was to visit the Department of Corrections' Chiefs farm outside of Montgomery, where they killed the man, burned down his house, raped his wife into a coma, and nailed the family's dog to the barn door (although those still in prison in the South maintain that it was the dog who was raped and the wife who was nailed to the barn door).

Warren, Darren, Douglas, and Andrew then headed for Canada but, stymied by the difficulty of crossing the border under the delusion that they needed passports, went to ground in Buffalo, where they became lay ministers and soldiers in the White Aryan Army of the Lord, headquartered in the suburb of West Seneca.

This night, at a warehouse near the State University of New York campus, they were shopping.

"Full auto with laser shit is what we want," said Warren, the oldest.

"Of course, of course," said Malcolm Kibunte, bowing the huge rednecks into the rear room of the cinder-block warehouse. "Full auto with laser shit it will be, then."

The Boys had been carefully and repeatedly frisked before being driven, blindfolded, to the warehouse site, where Doo-Rag and a dozen of his men watched carefully and a bit reproachfully. The Alabama Beagle Boys ignored the gangbangers.

"Holy shit," breathed Douglas, who, after Oliver, had always been the least brilliant of the five, "lookit here. Woowhee! Everythang we wanted, rat heah."

"Shut up, Douglas," Andrew said automatically.

Douglas was right, however. The long warehouse room was stacked with boxes of weapons and ammo. Laid out for inspection were AR-15s, M590A1 Pistol Grip mil-spec combat shotguns, Colt M4 full-auto carbines, combat-ready M-16s, compact machine guns such as HK UMP 45s and Israeli Bullpups, and sniper rifles such as Remington's model 700 Police DM Light Tactical.

All four of the Boys wanted to drool. Three of them resisted the impulse, but their small eyes were all alight. If the Boys saw any irony in buying weapons for the coming Race War Heralding Armageddon from black gang members, they did not show it. Of course, the Boys were not deeply into irony.

Darren was ogling a table filled with detachable sights: Aimpoint Red Dots, Bausch & Lomb 10 X 42 Police Tactical Scopes, U.S. Optics SN4 Specops Battle Sights, Comp ML red dots, and others.

"Careful, Darren, my man," said Malcolm. "Your hard-on showing. Weaken your bargaining position, you cum on the hardware." Malcolm grinned broadly to show that it was all good humor between guys.

Darren blushed and turned his back.

Warren was mixing and matching elements into a perfect weapon: the Colt M4 carbine with a compact laser sight, topped off with a Suppressed Tactical Weapons suppressor made out of gold-colored titanium.

"Good choice," said Malcolm. "A handsome combination to take to Armageddon, that be God's truth."

Warren glared but said only, "How much?"

"For how many of which?" said Malcolm.

The Boys licked their lips, looking around in a palpable heat wave of greed, while Warren took a wrinkled sheet of yellow legal-pad paper from his hip pocket—the Boys were all wearing old army fatigue jackets, jump boots, and jeans now rather than their trademark stripes—and consulted his shopping list. He read from the list slowly, obviously adding a few things from the displays.

Malcolm raised his eyebrows and named a price.

The Boys looked at each other in near despair. With the money the White Aryan Army of the Lord had raised so far, they could not quite afford Warren's single carbine-scope-suppressor combination.

"Let us go outsad an' fahr a few of these-here guns," Andrew said craftily.

Malcolm just grinned while Doo-Rag clicked his Tek-9 to full-auto. "Not quite time for test fahring yet, my man," said Malcolm.

"Maybe it'd be time for the police to hear that some Buffalo niggers were the ones who knocked over the Dunkirk army arsenal this past August," said Warren.

"Maybe," Malcolm agreed with a grin. "But if there come even a rumor like that—and we'd hear it because the police wouldn't know where to find these niggers or their guns—then the poor old Chapel of the Good Ol' Boy Aryan Nation Crackers for Jesus gets itself visited by fifty-sixty of Doo-Rag's friends, and the Aryan Nation faithful get themselves shot into little greasy mini-Aryan chickenbits."

"White Aryan Army of the Lord," corrected Douglas.

"Shut up, Douglas," said Andrew.

There were a few moments of silence.

"There is a way that you can get a thirty percent discount on some of the things you want here," Malcolm said at last.

"How?" said Warren.

Malcolm wandered over, picked up a Carbon AR-15.223, sighted through the Colt C-More red-dot sight, dry-fired the black weapon, and set it back. "There a dude that's going to die," he said. "He hiding out in a warehouse in the city. Not armed with nothing more than a pistol. Maybe not that. You take care of it for us, thirty percent off on whatever you carry in to do the job."

Warren squinted at Malcolm. "That don't make no sense." He looked around at the boxes upon boxes of weapons and then at Doo-Rag and his heavily armed friends.

Malcolm shrugged. "This dude a white boy. You know how sensitive we are these days about offing white boys."

"Bullshit," said Andrew.

"Shut up, Andrew," said Warren. To Malcolm, he said, "You want this guy wasted, why don't you just take him out on the street with one of those?" He nodded toward one of the scoped sniper rifles on display.

Malcolm made a gesture with his hands. "Agreed, be easy to do," he said. "But sometimes the Buffalo police take notice when you gun down citizens on their streets—you understand what I'm saying? Better let this white boy die and rot away in this old abandoned warehouse."