Raylan told him, “We’re on the case now, the marshals. Gonna stop this new business startin up.”

“You’re tellin me to my face,” Pervis said, “my boys cut this man open and took his kidneys?”

“I think they had somebody along knew how. Whoever he is,” Raylan said, “I’m gonna find him.”

This time Pervis brought a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, got one lighted and blew a stream of smoke like he was cooling himself off. He said, “Well, I know it wasn’t my boys. Who was it told you?”

“The man waitin to get his kidneys back,” Raylan said.

“He name my boys?”

“After a while he did.”

“He lied,” Pervis said, “account of the broke deal. My boys farm reefer, they don’t cut into a man’s body for his parts. Even if they knew how.”

“They shoot a buck,” Raylan said, “they know how to dress him out.”

He was on the edge with this old man, one time bootlegger, dirt-track driver, the man pinching his cigarette between his fingers staring at Raylan. Raylan said to him, “Mr. Crowe, I respect how you feel, but I’m gonna have a talk with your boys, in your presence if you want. Have ’em come by the next day or so, or I’ll hunt ’em down.”

“I always felt,” Pervis said, “we’re a good twenty years behind the times livin here, what we get by on. But it’s how I like it. Now you tell me we’re catchin up, gettin into this new business, sellin parts of the human body.”

“You brought yourself up-to-date,” Raylan said, “wholesaling marijuana. Drug Enforcement thinks of your boys as high-tech rednecks drivin around in Cadillacs, talkin to each other on cell phones.”

“You ever get to accuse my boys face-to-face,” Pervis said, bringing out a jar of moonshine from under the counter, a peach floating in the clear whiskey, “this’ll help ease your pain.”

Pervis put on his gray hat with the snap brim he’d been wearing the better part of his life, and went up the log steps two hundred feet to his home: a two-story white frame house he’d have repainted as it showed wear. He went in the bathroom and took a leak, shook the dew off his lily and started going again, goddamn it.