She checked the level of her drink. It was going down real good today. Nothing like a little Jack and some nicotine behind a hit of speed. Course, Ray wouldn't like it if he came home and found her drunk, but she didn't have to worry about that yet.

She had a sip from the glass and then, what the hell, drank it all down in one gulp. Maybe she'd go down to the barn and fix one more weak one, mostly Coke with just a little mash in it to change its color. Ray wouldn't be home for another few hours anyway, and besides, he'd be all stoked and occupied for the rest of the night. Ray liked to count the cash money he brought back after he made his runs.

Ray and Earl's property was set back off Route 28, between Dickerson and Comus, not too far south of Frederick, at the east-central edge of Montgomery County. There was still forest and open country out here, but not for long. Over the years the Boones had seen the development stretch farther and farther north from D.C., white-flighters, mostly, who claimed they wanted 'more land' and 'more house for the buck.' What they really wanted, Ray knew, was to get away from the niggers and the crime. None of them could stand the prospect of seeing their daughters walking down the street holding the hand of Willie Horton. That was the white man's biggest nightmare, and they ran from it like a herd of frightened animals, all the way out here. Ray could understand it, but still, he wished those builders would go and put their new houses someplace else.

Ray moved the car to the on-ramp of 270 and drove south.

'Here,' said Ray, handing his pistol butt-out to his father. Earl took the gun, opened the glove box, hit a button, and waited for a false back to drop. He placed the Beretta in the space behind the glove box wall.

Ray had bought this particular vehicle from a trap-car shop up in the Bronx. It was your basic Taurus, outfitted with more horses than was legal, more juice than Ford used to put in its high-horse street model, the SHO. The bumper was a false bumper, which meant it could withstand a medium-velocity impact and could also accommodate relatively large volumes of heroin between its outer shell and the trunk of the car. Hidden compartments behind the glove box, to the left of the steering column, and in other spots throughout the interior concealed Ray's guns and his personal stash of drugs.

Ray lit a cigarette off the dash lighter, passed the lighter to his daddy so he could light his.

'You'd know we was the bad guys,' said Ray, 'if this here was a movie.'

'Why's that?'

"Cause you and me smoke.'

'Huh,' said Earl.

'Down county, I hear they want to outlaw smoking in bars.'

'That so.'

'They can have mine,' said Ray, beaming at his cleverness, 'when they pry 'em from my cold, dead fingers. Right?'

Earl didn't answer. He didn't talk much to begin with, and he talked even less with his son. Ray had been absent the day God passed out brains, and when he did say something, it tended to be about how tough he was or how smart he was. Earl had twenty years on Ray, and Earl could take Ray on his weakest day. Ray knew it, too. Earl figured this was just another thing that had kept the chip on his boy's shoulder his entire life.

Earl popped the top on a can of Busch.

Ray dragged on his cigarette. It bothered him that his father barely gave him the time of day. It was him, Ray, who had set up this business they had going on right here. It was him, Ray, who had made all the right decisions. If he had left business matters up to his father, who had never even been able to hold a longtime job on his own, they'd have nothing now, nothing at all.

Course, it took a stretch in Hagerstown, where Ray had done a ten-year jolt on a manslaughter beef, for him to find the opportunity to connect to this gig he had here. Ray had been paid to kill some K-head who'd ripped off the stash of a dealer out in Frederick County. Ray had killed a couple of guys for money since high school, and he'd gotten a rep among certain types as the go-to man in that part of the state. He'd never intended to become a hired murderer – not that he ever lost any sleep over it or anything like that – but these were people who deserved to die, after all. After his first kill, who begged and didn't go quick, it had been easy.

This particular job, Ray's idea had been to do it in the bathroom of a bar where the K-head hung out, then climb out the window and make his escape. After he gutted the thief with a Ka-Bar knife, though, the bar's bouncer came in to take a leak and disarmed Ray, holding him until the pigs could get to the scene. Ray should've killed the bouncer, too, he had replayed it in his head many times, but the bouncer was one of those cro-mags, he broke Ray's wrist real quick, and then there wasn't all that much Ray could do.

What he did do, he claimed the dust bunny had attacked him, and lucky for Ray, a piece-of-shit.22 was found in the jacket pocket of the corpse. So the hard rap couldn't stick, and Ray drew manslaughter and Hagerstown.

Prison life was okay if you could avoid getting punked. The way to avoid it was some strong attitude, but mostly alliances and gangs. The whites hooked up with Christian Identity and the like. The blacks hung together and so did the Spanish, but the whites and Spanish hated the blacks more than they hated each other, so once in a while Ray made talk with a brown or two.

One of them was Roberto Mantilla. Roberto had a cousin in the Orlando area, Nestor Rodriguez, who worked for the Vargas cartel operating out of the Cauca Valley in northern Colombia. Nestor and his brother Lizardo made the East Coast run, selling powder to dealers in D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly, and New York. Purer heroin at a lower cost had expanded their market, crushed their foreign competition, and fueled the growth of their business. Roberto said that his cousins could no longer handle the logistics of the transactions themselves and would be willing to sell to a middleman who could make the back-and-forth into D.C. and satisfy the demands of the dealers more readily than they. For this, said Roberto, the middleman would receive a ten-thousand-dollar bounce per transaction.

Ray said, 'All right, soon as I get out, I'd like to give that a try.' A year later, after a parole board hearing at which he convinced the attendees that the good behavior he had exhibited during his term was not an aberration, he was out of Hagerstown. And two years after that, when he had completed his outside time and said good-bye to his PO, he was free to go to work.

Ray supposed he had Roberto Mantilla to thank for his success. But this was impossible, as Roberto had been raped and bludgeoned to death by a cock-diesel with a lead pipe shortly after Ray's release.

'This load we got, it's eighty-five-percent pure, Daddy,' said Ray, thinking of the heroin sealed in the bumper compartment at the rear of the car.

'Lizardo tell you that?' asked Earl, needling his son, knowing Ray hated the Rodriguez brother who never showed Ray an ounce of respect.

'Nestor told me. Down in Florida, they got brown heroin, it's ninety-five-percent pure when it hits the street.'

'So? What's that do?'

'For the Colombians, it kills the competition. I'm talkin' about the Asians, who were putting out seven-, ten-percent product, and the Mexicans, too. The Colombians upped the purity and lowered the price, and now they're gonna own most of the U.S. market. And what this pure shit does, it creates a whole new class of customers: college kids, the boy next door, like that. It's not just for coloreds anymore, Daddy. 'Cause you don't have to pop it, see, to get a rush. You can smoke it or snort it, you want to.'

'That's nice.'

'You're not interested in what we're doin'?'