“I don’t know.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Fuck no.”

“What did he look like?”

“White.”

“Terrific.”

Teddy looked down at us, sweating and out of breath. “Y’all ready to go? I ain’t got the energy to run that motherfucker off again. What you poor-mouthin’ for, kid? I said let’s go.”

“What’d you do with my dogs?”

“I got ’em.”

“You ain’t got the right.”

“Sure I do. That was a ton of money. Had to make you think about the shit you done.”

“That was my money.”

“Yeah, I heard Cash was fillin’ your head up. Wants you to roll with those Angola ballers when I’m dead. Right?”

I got up from the stoop. Looked at the time. Noon. I should’ve been on the road by now. Eatin’ chicken-fried steak in Vaiden, Mississippi. Headed into Maggie’s heavy iron bed. Her Texas show boots by the door.

“You see this man?” Teddy said, pointing at me. “See him? He don’t look like much. All that gray hair and don’t shave his face and tries to be funny all the time. Which of course he ain’t. But he gonna help find them fuckers. He ain’t like the police.”

“Why wouldn’t they help?” I asked. He did bring it up.

“‘Signal 7,’” ALIAS said.

Two teenage girls in halter tops, lollipops in splayed fingers, strolled by ALIAS and smiled. Both with bright red lips. Bare feet dusty from the broken concrete around Calliope.

ALIAS smiled back.

“What’s ‘Signal 7’?”

“‘The popo ain’t got answers,’” ALIAS began in a slow, deliberate rap. Enunciating words to me the way you would to a retarded person or a very smart monkey. “‘Ain’t nothin’ but lies. Put that Glock in their face and see if they read our minds.’”

“The ‘popo’ didn’t like that too much?” I asked.

Teddy nodded his head.

“Guess not,” I said.

We followed ALIAS into a small room with three filthy windows crowded with dead plants and covered in comic strips. A haggard woman, oddly old in a way I couldn’t quite place, had her feet up in a ratty recliner chair. She flipped through channels on a television that flickered so much it made me dizzy.