“Haircuts,” he shouted, loudly enough to be heard over the river.

“Huh?” Clara’s pretty pink mouth was hanging open. If he were a violent man, he’d backhand her for looking like an idiotic mouth-breather.

“Haircuts. That’s what was wrong with them. Trimmed above the ears, the kind that don’t need no comb.”

She nodded, finally closing her mouth. Ace unclenched his fists and rubbed a palm over his own greasy, tangled scalp.

“Think of the people we’ve seen out here,” he said. “None of them looked like they been in spitting distance of a bar of soap. Pretty much, most of them looked like they had fleas.”

Clara scratched her underarm, as if remembering some of their sleazy lodgings of the few weeks. “Those guys looked clean, like something out of the Ivy League,” she said.

Ace didn’t know fuck about the Ivy League. Sounded like soccer, or some other foreign sport. “Or maybe Quantico,” he said.

“Good thing they didn’t see us, then.”

Ace smiled, curling his tongue in the gap of a missing canine. “Told ya, it’s God’s doing,” he said. Just like God had helped him rig the time-delay fuses on those bombs in Birmingham and Tupelo. A little fire and brimstone for the baby butchers.

He waved toward a small clearing away from the ledge. “Come on, let’s make camp before dark.”

CHAPTER TWO

The thrill is gone.

B.B. King sang it as a bluesy lament about lost love. Bowie Whitlock applied the sentiment equally to his dead wife, his profession, and his unfortunate and unwanted habit of drawing the next breath. The breaths were coming a bit short now, and he wondered if his legendary endurance had faded a little with time, rust, and indifference.