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“I want it, Paw! More’n anything!”

“Then ever-thang I say, you do, and without no questionin’ or backtalk, ya hear?”

“Yes, sir, Paw, yes, sir, I shorely do,” and then Dumar rushed out the back door to embark on his unreckonable duties.

“Same goes fer you,” Helton told Micky-Mack.

“Yes, sir!”

“We’se goin’ on a road-trip. Collect up three sleepin’ bags and extra clothes.”

“Right away, Uncle Helton,” but then the boy paused. “But…how many changes’a clothes should I fetch?”

“Don’t rightly know how long we’ll be but I reckon it could be as much as a month—”

“A month?”

“—so’s ya better bring two changes’a clothes fer each of us.”

“Right away, Uncle!”

“Not so fast— After ya done that, I want ya to go up in the attic, and I want ya to tear that place inside-out till ya find a cigar box”—Helton pronounced “cigar” as see-gar. “You know what a cigar box is, boy?”

“Uh, yeah, Unc, I’m pretty sure I do.”

“Well, I know ya can read a bit and this box, it say King Edward on it, and’s got a picture of a fella from olden times with a beard kind’a like a toilet brush. You find that box, son, and you bring it to me.”

“But, Uncle Helton. You don’t smoke cigars.”

“No, I’se don’t but, see, there ain’t no cigars in this box. There’s somethin’ else. Now, the box is tied with twine, and it better still be tied with twine when you bring it to me. Don’t’cha be lookin’ in the box ’cos if’n ya do…I’ll give ya a whuppin’ worse’n the time I caught ya stealin’ watermelons from Bill Sodder’s field. You understand?”

Micky-Mack gulped and nodded.

“Now git!”

Micky-Mack sprinted away with the determination and zeal that came with blessed youth.

However, Helton remained stock-still in the middle of the room…

He’d asked God to help him get a fix on this devil-lovin’ fiend named Paulie and shore as hail God had answered his prayer, because when the voice on that blasted cellphone had said Thibald Caudill sends his regards, Helton knew in the space of half-an-instant who Paulie really was and why he had murdered young Crory Tuckton so horribly.

And for those on the edges of their seats wondering what the sinister King Edward cigar box contained, the author will completely ruin the element of suspense by making that revelation now.

It contained several rusty and quite well-used 3 1/4-inch hole-saw blades.

— | — | —

Chapter 4

(I)

The crowd had gathered at the crime scene. “Step on back, folks,” Deputy Chief Dood Malone ordered once he’d disembarked from the patrol car. “Make way.” The crowd parted, the act of which led Malone through a fidgeting and enraged aisle of human bodies. It was one of the southside houses—the bad blocks—that the crowd congregated before, after Mitzy Crooker had spied the atrocity while walking her dog. She’d immediately run home and called the police, then subsequently blabbed her discovery to the entire neighborhood.

Well holy jumpin’ FUCK, Malone thought, spinning the tips of his handlebar mustache when he saw the puppy’s head on the stake.

One other county car sat parked right up in the yard; from the house, meanwhile, emerged Malone’s day-shift sergeant, a lanky, stoop-shouldered man with an overly large adam’s apple: Sergeant Boover.

“Shit, Boover. Another one?”

“Another one, Chief,” the younger man said and wiped his brow in spite of the chill. “Another dog head and another smack house. Place done full up with stolen insulin needles, spoons, candles, and empty baggies.”

“But the house is clear?”

“It is now. Must’ve been more cowboys just moved in, so Vinchetti’s bagmen sent ’em this warning. Then they took off.”

Fuckin’ Vinchetti, Malone thought. The oddest thing. DEA had sent Malone the tip sheet: Paul Vinchetti III, big-time heroin and underground porn dealer from New Jersey. Mafia. But the guy was so insulated, no one could touch him. No evidence.

Boover spat some chaw juice. “Just hard to figure, you know, Chief? Little town like Pulaski and we got a Mafia drug lord working the turf.”

“That’s the way they do it now. They’re movin’ out of the big cities to set up shop in little burgs like this ’cos the law-enforcement budgets are so piss-ant. Kind’a makes sense. I mean, look at Pulaski. Sleepy little town, sure, but it’s sittin’ right in the middle of the bigger towns like Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Radford; then we got the cities like Roanoke, Richmond, Lexington, Charleston easy drivin’ distances. Shit, twice last month we caught middle-class white kids drivin’ all the way from Manassas to buy smack in Pulaski. Why? ’cos there’s no heat. DEA’s got their hands full just with crack and State’s neck-deep with meth. Meanwhile, smack slips back in between the cracks and grows and grows—it’s all the rage now, movin’ out the urban ghettos.” Malone nodded in angst. “Fuckin’ Vinchetti’s pretty damn smart. He’s gettin’ over on everyone, and even though we know he’s the guy, we got nothin’ on him. Every time the feds get close, Vinchetti cuts loose a bunch of lawyers like those guys who got O.J. off.”

“The motherfucker could walk right by us and wink and we couldn’t do shit,” Boover observed. “Unless we had the balls to—”

Malone cast a stern look and shook his head.

“You ever seen the guy?” Boover asked, to change the subject they’d all thought about but never voiced.

“Yeah, couple of times. Word is he bops between here, New York, and Jersey; when he’s here, he stays at the Caudill Mansion with his wife—”

“Marshie Caudill,” Boover acknowledged. “There’s a match made in heaven. Best-lookin’ stripper in town winds up hitched to a fuckin’ don.”

“And that’s where he met her, too. She worked that strip joint since she was 16 but then bought the damn place once her father died and left her all those mineral rights and money.”

“You figure Marshie’s got anything to do with Vinchetti’s smack business?”

“Naw. She’s just arm-candy and a piece of ass,” Malone felt certain, for as attractive as Marshie Vinchetti was, she was twice as stupid. “What I heard is they spend some’a their time at the Mansion, but most at some