KANE WALKED UP TO THE COUNTER AT THE ROADHOUSE and hit Little John in the face with an overhand right. Little John staggered backward and went down. The lowlife he’d been talking to started to say something. Kane looked him in the eye.

“Beat it, asshole,” he snarled.

The lowlife left, walking fast with his feet splayed out like a duck in a big hurry. Kane moved around the counter, grabbed Little John by the front of his shirt, heaved him to his feet, and dropped him into the chair that sat beside a telephone stand. He watched as the man regained his senses. The side of his face was red and swollen.

That punch is going to leave a bruise, Kane thought. Good.

“Both hands on that table,” he said.

Little John didn’t budge.

“Now,” Kane said, “before I decide your face would look better with matching bruises.”

Little John raised his hands and laid them on the table. He opened his eyes and looked at Kane.

“The money’s in a cash box under the counter,” he said.

Kane gave him a wolfish grin. Without taking his eyes off the man, he felt around under the counter until he found the cash box. He laid it on the top of the counter, opened it, and threw it at the far wall. It struck with a crash. Coins flew everywhere. Bills jumped into the air, then floated toward the floor.

“Now that we’ve established that this isn’t a robbery,” Kane said, “let’s get down to business. I want you to tell me everything you know about Faith Wright.”

Little John took his hands off the table and put them on the arms of his chair. Kane leaned toward him. Moving very slowly, Little John pushed himself erect in the chair and put his hands back on the table.

“I don’t know anything about Faith Wright,” he said.

Kane’s grin got even bigger.

“I think you should know that I’m dying for an excuse to beat the crap out of you,” he said. “And when you lie, it just gives me one.”

Little John let his shoulders slump.

“Go ahead, pound on me, I don’t care,” he said.

In two steps, Kane was by the man’s side. He wrapped his free hand in the man’s hair and jerked. Little John cursed.

“I hope I have your attention now,” Kane said, “because you need to know just how the land lies. I’ve got videotape of Faith with a john in one of your rooms. I’ve got your brother’s story about how she came to work for you. You’re nailed for pimping. The only question is what else you go in for.”

Little John tried to shake Kane’s hand off his head but failed.

“You leave my brother out of this,” he said. “He didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

Kane gave the man’s hair another jerk and was rewarded with another curse.

“Oh, but he did,” Kane said, “In fact, it’s possible he was the last person in these parts to see Faith Wright. If anything’s happened to her, he could be in for some trouble. Big trouble.”

“I said leave him out of this,” Little John said, trying to sound tough.

“What do you care?” Kane asked.

Little John seemed surprised by the question.

“What do you mean, what do I care?” he said. “He’s my brother.”

Kane let go of his hair and stepped back.

“That’s just biology,” he said. “Otherwise, the boy hates you. In fact, he was telling me that he hoped I’d kill you.”

Little John was almost on his feet when Kane grabbed his collar and pushed. He slumped back into the chair.

“He didn’t say that,” he said.

“Oh, but he did,” Kane said. “He also said you didn’t have the balls to stand up to your father.”

Little John looked at his feet for a while.

“Families,” he said at last. “What a fucking joke. Nothing but trouble. I’m so sick of this place, and my old man, and having my kid brother look down on me, and the shit I have to do. If I had any brains, I’d roll right out of here and never look back.”

Kane leaned against the counter and waited. Minutes passed.

“If I tell you,” Little John said finally, “you got to promise not to make any trouble for Johnny. Or me.”

Kane shook his head.

“I’m not the troopers,” he said. “They want to knock this crib over, or grab you up for something else, there’s nothing I can do about it. And if something bad’s happened to Faith, and you or your brother were involved, I’ll burn you. Otherwise, I could give a rip what you do.”

Little John was silent for another long stretch.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I’ll tell you what I know about the girl. Johnny brought her around, said she wanted to meet my dad. But he never deals directly with anybody if he can help it. So I talked to her. She told me she wanted to spend a few months as a sex worker here—that’s what she called it, sex worker—to make money for college. I asked her, what, was she wearing a wire? She just smiled and said no and that she’d prove it and took all of her clothes off, right here in front of me. Then she just stood there, naked, like it was nothing. I told her, all right, all right, put your clothes back on. I mean, anybody could have walked in.

“I was tempted. She was a looker and, frankly, I could’ve used some new blood around here. The others were looking pretty wore out. Still are. So I told her I’d think about it. Then I went to talk to my old man, to tell him one of the Angel girls wanted to spend some time working on her back.”

Little John shook his head again.

“He did what he always does whenever I have an idea,” he said. “He said it was stupid. That if we started using Angel girls, we’d be shut down for sure. So I figured, what the fuck, and started to leave. When I got to the door—we were talking in the cabin. He don’t come around here much. Doesn’t like the risk, even though he takes most of the money, the old bastard—he asked me the girl’s name. And when I told him, he got this big grin on his face. ‘Faith Wright?’ he said. ‘Moses Wright’s granddaughter?’

“ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘the old man’s granddaughter. So what?’

“ ‘Well, that makes all the difference,’ he said. ‘Put her to work. She’s fresh, so save her for the good clients. And work her in the video room. I wants lots and lots of tape of her at work.’ Then he laughed like he’d just heard the best joke in the world.

“Now, I know Moses is always preaching against us over there in Rejoice, so I figure my old man wanted something to get even with. So I did what he said. I didn’t want to, but I did.

“And everything went fine. The girl was mainly servicing the high rollers from up at the mine, so it’s not like she was getting knocked around or anything. She was making money and seemed satisfied with the arrangement. We were making money, good money, off her. And my old man got his dirty tapes to cackle over. And then, boom, she just disappeared. And that’s all I know.”

Kane stood looking at Little John for a while.

“So, you put a seventeen-year-old virgin to whoring, and everything was just hunky-dory?” he said. The look on his face must have been something, because Little John put his hands in front of him like he knew he was going to be hit.

“Hey, look, it was a business arrangement,” he said from behind his hands. “It’s not like we went out and grabbed her, held her against her will. She came to us. She was of age. And she wasn’t no virgin.”

Kane could feel himself grinning again. The grin felt so wide he thought his face might split. He wanted Little John to keep talking, needed him to keep talking, because he was sure that this was the way to find Faith. But he also wanted to shut him up, to grind his face into the floor, to punish him for what he’d done, to wash away with Little John’s blood the things he’d heard. He could feel the anger boiling up from his stomach to the base of his throat, threatening to make him throw up. He took a deep breath.

“Wasn’t a virgin, eh?” he said. “And you’d know that how?”

Little John dropped his hands. Kane watched the bad news pass across his face in waves. First that he’d said too much. Then that he’d have to say more. Then that what he said might very well get him hurt or worse.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Little John said. “I gave her a try-out. Who wouldn’t? I had to know that she knew what she was doing.”

Kane just looked at him.

“Okay, okay, and she was prime, too,” he said. “She didn’t know a lot about the stuff the girls do, the faking and everything, but she knew where the noses went. She wasn’t no virgin.”

Kane took in air through his nose and pushed it out through his lips. Once. Twice. Three times.

“She tell you where she got her experience?” he asked.

“Crap, no,” Little John said. “I didn’t need to know nothing like that. I felt bad enough about turning her out as it was. If it hadn’ta been for that fucking old man of mine, I never would have done it.”

The whining note in the man’s voice pushed Kane over the edge. He went for Little John, lifting him out of the chair like he was made of feathers and bulldozing him up against the wall. Kane’s breath was coming in hot gasps, and red was gathering at the corners of his vision. Everything that was wrong in his life was in that anger. His right hand was around Little John’s throat and he was squeezing, squeezing.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice said, “hey, what’s going on?”

Kane looked over his shoulder. Tracy, the waitress from the café, was standing in the doorway with some bills in her hand. She took a step back when she saw his face.

“I just needed some change,” she said. “I’ll come back later.”

She turned, jumped through the doorway, and pulled the door shut behind her.

Kane laughed. He let go of Little John’s throat and laughed some more.

“She just saved your miserable life,” he said.

He lowered Little John to the floor, spun him around, pulled a pair of Slade’s cuffs off his belt and handcuffed the man’s hands behind him.

“What’s going on?” Little John said.

“I’m taking you somewhere you can’t make any phone calls, like to warn your father,” Kane said.

“You can’t do this,” Little John said. “You ain’t no cop.”

Kane pushed Little John across the room to the outside door, his captive trying to dig his heels into the ratty carpet. Then he spun him around.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m no cop. So I’m going to leave it up to you. There’s two ways this can go. You can come along and spend a few hours in a nice, warm cell over at the trooper office. Or I can beat you so badly you don’t wake up for a while. Your call.”

Without a word, Little John turned around and let Kane take him out the door and into the pickup. As they pulled away from the roadhouse, Kane said, “Tell me something. You really think all this shit you do is somebody else’s fault? I mean, you’re what, thirty? Thirty-five? Isn’t that a little old to be blaming everything on your father?”

“Wait’ll you meet my father,” Little John said.