She raised a hand and he shut up. “You know I don’t like to use profanity or firearms, so please don’t push me, Tucker. A lady controls her anger.”

“Firearms?”

Mary Jean pulled the Lady Smith automatic out of her purse and leveled it at Tucker’s bandaged crotch. Strangely, he noticed that Mary Jean had chipped a nail drawing the gun and for that, he realized, she really might kill him.

“You didn’t listen to me when I told you to stop drinking. You didn’t listen when I told you to stay away from my representatives. You didn’t listen when I told you that if you were going to amount to anything, you had to give your life to God. You’d better damn well listen now.” She racked the slide on the automatic. “Are you listening?”

Tuck nodded. He didn’t breathe, but he nodded.

“Good. I have run this company for forty years without a hint of scandal until now. I woke up yesterday to see my face next to yours on all the morning news shows. Today it’s on the cover of every newspaper and tabloid in the country. A bad picture, Tucker. My suit was out of season. And every article uses the words ‘penis’ and ‘prostitute’ over and over. I can’t have that. I’ve worked too hard for that.”

She reached out and tugged on his catheter. Pain shot though his body and he reached for the ringer for the nurse.

“Don’t even think about it, pretty boy. I just wanted to make sure I had your attention.”

“The gun pretty much did it, Mary Jean,” Tucker groaned. Fuck it, he was a dead man anyway.

“Don’t you speak to me. Just listen. This is going to disappear. You are going to disappear. You’re getting out of here tomorrow and then you’re going to a cabin I have up in the Rockies. You won’t go home, you won’t speak to any reporters, you won’t say doodly squat. My lawyers will handle the legal aspects and keep you out of jail, but you will never surface again. When this blows over, you can go on with your pathetic life. But with a new name. And if you ever set foot in the state of Texas or come within a hundred yards of anyone involved in my company, I will personally shoot you dead. Do you understand?”

“Can I still fly?”

Mary Jean laughed and lowered the gun. “Sweetie, to a Texas way a thinkin’ the only way you coulda screwed up worse is if you’d throwed a kid down a well after fessing up to being on the grassy knoll stompin’ yellow roses in between shootin’ the President. You ain’t gonna fly, drive, walk, crawl, or spit if I have anything to say about it.” She put the gun in her purse and went into the tiny bathroom to check her makeup. A quick primping and she headed for

the door. “I’ll send up some flowers. Y’all heal up now, honey.”

She wasn’t going to kill him after all. Maybe he could win her back. “Mary Jean, I think I had a spiritual experience.”

“I don’t want to hear about any of your degenerate activities.”

“No, a real spiritual experience. Like a—what do you call it? — an epiphany?”

“Son, you don’t know it, but you’re as close to seeing the Lord as you’ve ever been in your life. Now you hush before I send you to perdition.”

She put on her best beatific smile and left the room radiating the power of positive thinking.

Tucker pulled the covers over his head and reached for the flask Jake had left. Perdition, huh? She made it sound bad. Must be in Oklahoma.

The High Priestess of the Shark People ate Chee-tos and watched afternoon talk shows over the satellite feed. She sat in a wicker emperor’s chair. A red patent leather pump dangled from one toe. Red lipstick, red nails, a big red bow in her hair. But for a pair of silk seamed stockings, she was naked.

On the screen: Meadow Malackovitch, in a neck brace, sobbed on her lawyer’s shoulder—a snapshot of the pilot who had traumatized her was inset in the upper-right-hand corner. The host, a failed weatherman who now made seven figures mining trailer parks for atrocities, was reading the dubious résumé of Tucker Case. Shots of the pink jet, before and after. Stock footage of Mary Jean on an airfield tarmac, followed by Case in a leather jacket.

The High Priestess touched herself lightly, leaving a faint orange stripe of Chee-to spoor on her pubes (she was a natural blonde), then keyed the intercom that connected her to the Sorcerer.

“What?” came the man’s voice, weary but awake. It was 2:00 A.M. The Sorcerer had been working all night.

“I think we’ve found our pilot,” she said.

At the last minute Mary Jean changed her mind about sending Tucker Case to her cabin in the mountains. “Put him in a motel room outside of town and don’t let him out until I say so.”

In two weeks Tucker had seen only the nurse who came in to change his bandages and the guard. Actually, the guard was a tackle, second-string defense from SMU, six-foot-six, two hundred and seventy pounds of earnest Christian naïveté named Dusty Lemon.

Tucker was lying on the bed watching television. Dusty sat hunched over the wood-grain Formica table reading Scripture.

Tucker said, “Dusty, why don’t you go get us a six-pack and a pizza?”

Dusty didn’t look up. Tuck could see the shine of his scalp through his crew cut. A thick Texas drawl: “No, sir. I don’t drink and Mrs. Jean said that you wasn’t to have no alcohol.”

“It’s not Mrs. Jean, you doofus. It’s Mrs. Dobbins.” After two weeks, Dusty was beginning to get on Tuck’s nerves.

“Just the same,” Dusty said. “I can call for a pizza for you, but no beer.”

Tuck detected a blush though the crew cut. “Dusty?”

“Yes sir.” The tackle looked up from his Bible, waited.

“Get a real name.”

“Yes, sir,” Dusty said, a giant grin bisecting his moon face, “Tuck.”

Tucker wanted to leap off the bed and cuff Dusty with his Bible, but he was a long way from being able to leap anywhere. Instead, he looked at the ceiling for a second (it was highway safety orange, like the walls, the doors, the tile in the bathroom), then propped

himself up on one elbow and considered Dusty’s Bible. “The red type. That

the hot parts?”

“The words of Jesus,” Dusty said, not looking up.

“Really?”

Dusty nodded, looked up. “Would you like me to read to you? When my grandma was in the hospital, she liked me to read Scriptures to her.”

Tucker fell back with an exasperated sigh. He didn’t understand religion. It was like heroin or golf: He knew a lot of people did it, but he didn’t un-derstand why. His father watched sports every Sunday, and his mother had worked in real estate. He grew up thinking that church was something that simply interfered with games and weekend open houses. His first ex-posure to religion, other than the skin mag layouts of the women who had brought down television evangelists, had been his job with Mary Jean. For her it just seemed like good business. Sometimes he would stand in the back of the auditorium and listen to her talk to a thousand women about having God on their sales team, and they would cheer and “Hallelujah!” and he would feel as if he’d been left out of something—something beyond the apparent goofiness of it all. Maybe Dusty had something on him besides a hundred pounds.

“Dusty, why don’t you go out tonight? You haven’t been out in two weeks. I have to be here, but you—you must have a whole line of babes crying to get you back, huh? Big football player like you, huh?”

Dusty blushed again, going deep red from the collar of his practice jersey to the top of his head. He folded his hands and looked at them in his lap. “Well, I’m sorta waitin’ for the right girl to come along. A lot of the girls that go after us football players, you know, they’re kinda loose.”

Tuck raised an eyebrow. “And?”