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“He’s my son, ain’t he? That’s how I know. I could tell by his face.”

“So what if he did hear?”

Roy looked at her, astonished. “So what if he did? He’ll go to the cops.”

“The cops? Roy, you’re crazy. He’s nine years old and he’s your son.”

“That little bastard don’t give two turds about me, Angie. He was strictly a mama’s boy. And now that he knows—”

He didn’t need to say it. Angie had been waitressing at a truck stop when she’d met Roy. He was living in a trailer with his son, Jason, and his wife, Gina. He went for Angie immediately. On her nights off, he’d take her to Cedar Rapids, where they’d go to a couple of dance clubs. They always had a great time except when Roy got real drunk and started trouble with black guys who were daring white girls. Roy had some friends who were always talking about blowing up places with blacks and Jews and fags in them. Roy always gave them a certain percentage of his robbery money. That’s what Roy did. He robbed banks, usually small-town ones that were located on the edge of town. Roy was a pro. He figured everything out carefully in advance. He knew the exit routes and where the bank kept the video surveillance cameras, and he checked out the teller windows in advance to see which clerk looked most vulnerable. He’d served six years in Fort Madison for sticking up a gas station when he was nineteen. He was thirty-six now and vowed never to be caught again. What she liked about him was that he had a goal in life. There was this one bank in Des Moines where he said he could get half a million on a payroll Friday. They’d go to Vegas and then they’d go see this whites-only compound up in the Utah mountains. That was the only part that Angie didn’t like. She didn’t understand politics and Roy and his buddies always carrying on about Jews and queers and colored people bored her. She had a way of looking awake when she was really not awake. She did that practically every time Roy and his buddies started talking about some militia deal they had heard about and intended to join.

The wife got wind of the courtship between Roy and Angie, though, and raised hell. She wouldn’t give him a divorce, and she threatened to tell the cops about all his robberies all over the Midwest. So one rainy night he killed her. Shoved a knife into her right breast, which silenced her, and then cut her throat. He loaded her into a body bag and packed a hundred pounds of hand weights in there with her and then drove his two-year-old Ford out to the river that very moonglow night and threw her in just below the dam. The only trouble Roy had was his son, Jason. The kid just kept wailin’ and carryin’ on about where’s my mom, where’s my mom? He hadn’t wanted the kid in the first place, had beat the shit out of her, but she still wouldn’t get an abortion. Even back then he’d had the dream of this big Des Moines bank on payroll Friday, and who wanted a kid along when you had all the cash with you? But Gina had her way and Roy was stuck with the little prick. And now Jason had overheard him talkin’ about killin’ his mother. Roy knew that somehow, some way, the little prick would turn him in.

Roy said, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

She watched him carefully. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me, Roy. You really do. He’s your own flesh and blood.”

“I didn’t want him. Gina wanted him.”

“And you killed Gina.”

“For you” he said. “I killed her for you.” Then, “Shit, honey, here we go again. Arguin’. This ain’t what I want and it ain’t what you want, either. You c’mere now.” Then, “A kid like that, he’s a ball and chain.”

He liked it when she sat in his lap. He liked to feel her up to the point that his erection got so big and bulgy it was downright painful. She’d wriggle on it and make him even crazier. Then, as now, they’d go in on their big mussed sleepwarm bed and do the trick.

Afterward, today, he said, “I better get into town. I want to be there at noontime. See what the place is like around then.”

He was scoping out a bank. He was planning to rob it day after tomorrow. Their cash supply was way