Dumb, but not impossible. And Josiah Bradford was just about ready to take those odds, like one of the fools who went down to the casino on Friday night knowing they’d get cleaned out but not giving a shit. Worse came to worst, they’d remember Josiah in this town. They’d damn sure do that.

“It can be done,” he said, but there wasn’t much vigor in his voice. “If you don’t have the balls, all right. But don’t you tell me it can’t be done.”

Danny was quiet. After a time he opened his beer and then they drank in silence for a while, standing there awkwardly because they couldn’t lean on the rail. Josiah went over and sat on one of the chairs and Danny followed and took the other.

“Story I had to tell you is that I spoke to my grandpa today. He said a man’s in town asking about old Campbell.”

Josiah frowned and lowered his beer. “That same son of a bitch I told you about?”

“The black kid? No. Said there’s another one now. This one is doing some kind of movie. Black kid is helping him.”

“A movie about Campbell?”

This was some kind of strange. Josiah’s great-grandfather had been the subject of plenty of old Edgar’s rants over the years, but who in the hell would want to make a movie about him?

“Edgar’s addled,” he said. “A movie?”

“What he told me,” Danny said, “was that some guy was down from Chicago working on a movie and wanted to ask about Campbell today.”

“Well, I don’t know why anybody would want to waste their time on him. Campbell left a lot of nothing behind, and I’m still living off that today.”

Danny said, “Well, that’s what I was wondering. If what this guy told Grandpa is true, and he’s making a movie about somebody in your family, don’t he owe you something?”

It was a fine question. A fine question. What right did strangers have to go wandering around asking about Josiah’s own blood? Let alone turn a profit from it?

“You said these guys are headed down to see Edgar today?”

“That’s right. I was going to go down there myself, make sure they wasn’t running some sort of scam like the ones you hear about with older folks, but you’d told me to come by…”

Josiah finished his beer, crushed the can, and tossed it aside.

“We’ll take my truck.”

ERIC LEFT ANNE IN the rotunda when Kellen called to say he was nearing the hotel, took the bottle back to his room, and then went outside to wait. He was feeling better after having the elderly woman confirm all of the things he’d seen in the bottle.

Kellen pulled up outside the hotel in his Cayenne with the windows down and hip-hop music thumping from the speakers, old stuff, Gang Starr that had probably come out when Eric was in high school and Kellen was, what, seven? Eric had to suppress a smile as he got inside the car. A midthirties white guy like him sitting in a Porsche listening to rap-ah, this was almost like being back in L.A.

“You feeling all right?” Kellen asked when Eric climbed in.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Look pale.”

“I’m white.”

“Knew there was something funny about you.” Kellen pulled away from the hotel. He was wearing jeans and a shiny white T-shirt made from one of those fabrics that were supposed to wick moisture, along with sunglasses and a silver watch.

“Are you close to your brother?” Eric asked, looking around the Porsche and thinking about the source of it.

“Oh, yeah. We talk about three, four times a week.”

Eric nodded.

“You’re wondering if it’s hard,” Kellen said. “Being his brother. Being the unfamous one.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Eric lied.

“Man, everybody wonders. It’s cool, don’t worry about it.”

Eric waited.

“I love my brother,” Kellen said. “I’m proud of him.” The fierceness in his voice seemed directed at himself, not Eric. “But the truth? No, it’s not easy. Of course not.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“I was supposed to be a professional basketball player. That was my destiny. I was certain of it. By the time I was in eighth grade, I was six four, and I was an athlete, you know? In AAU ball I had coaches coming to see me from the ACC, Big Ten, Big East, all of ’em. This at fourteen.

“I was a great student, too, reading books all the time. But you want to know why? This is the truth, man, I swear it-I was working on my image for when I joined the league. The NBA. I was going to be a paradox, you know, the professional athlete who was also a scholar. I had this plan for it, how in press conferences I was going to make comparisons between ball games and battles, coaches and generals, referees and diplomats. I would actually plan the interviews in my head, no lie. I would hear them, man, hear what these announcers would be saying about me, hear it like it was real.”

Eric looked away, feeling embarrassment not for Kellen, but for himself. Kellen was describing a child’s fantasy. He was also describing Eric’s twenties. And, hell, most of his early thirties, when mythical movie reviewers had raved constantly about films he would now never make. Was just a matter of time, he’d known, until the fantasies became the facts. He’d been sure of that.

“When you’re real young, all the coaches care about are tools,” Kellen said. “And, brother, I had them. Size, speed, strength. Didn’t have the feel for the game that some of the other kids had, but that comes with time, right? Well, it didn’t come for me. Ever. I was hearing the word focus so much it should’ve been my name, but I just couldn’t get into the flow the way I needed, could never lose myself in the rhythm of it. By high school, when other kids caught up in size, that was showing.”

They were driving out through the hills south of the hotel now, winding country roads.

“My brother feels that game,” Kellen said. “When he plays it, there isn’t anything else there. Nothing. He sees it all before it happens; even as a kid he was like that. He’d come down the lane on a fast break, go right to left, then somebody would step out to cut him off, and he’d see it just before they committed, and then dish… he was slick. No question. But he was a kid, too, and scrawny as hell. So it was no big deal.”

Eric was silent, waiting.

“My junior year of high school,” Kellen said, “I had a game in front of some major coaches. And I just butchered it. Scored thirteen and had eight rebounds but damn near double figures in turnovers, too. They had this small, fast team that ran a press the whole time and just rattled the hell out of me. I couldn’t handle it. Each time I’d make a decision on what to do with the ball, it was a half second too late. Just a disaster.

“So that’s on a Friday night, and the next afternoon I go with my parents to watch my brother’s eighth-grade game. And Darnell, he just ran on ’em. That’s all. Not a soul on that court could even imagine playing at his level. He drove anytime he felt like it, got shots anytime he wanted them, made passes when he didn’t, stole the ball from the other team like they’d left the doors unlocked and ladders at the windows. It was filthy. I went out on the court after the game and I congratulated him, but it was stiff.”

He ran a palm over the back of his head, leaned forward, close to the steering wheel.

“That night, he’s sitting in the living room watching TV, and I walked in and changed the channel without saying a word. He got pissed, naturally, and I just went after him. Tackled his ass over the couch and hit him and had my hands around his throat when my dad came in and dragged me off.”

He gave a small, wry smile. “My father, he is not a small man. He took me out in the yard, and he just whipped my ass. Knocked me up one side and down the other and then kept coming, and the whole time he’s doing it, he’s saying, Who you mad at? Who you mad at? Over and over in this real soft voice, Who you mad at? Because he’d been at my game and then at my brother’s, you know, and he understood what was going on. He understood it better than I did.”