“Maybe you’d better enlighten me.”

“Since you’re not wearing a wire, I will.” Knox takes a tin of Copenhagen from his desk drawer and stuffs a plug behind his bottom lip. “The only gods who ever existed were men who had the courage to live as gods. You follow? Men who seized the power of life and death, embraced it, ruled through it.”

“You’re the Ubermensch, huh?”

“You think I’m ignorant,” he says, betraying some bitterness. “Unread, like my father. But you’re wrong. You, your father, Henry Sexton . . . do you know what kind of men you are? You’re the ones who plant crops in the river valleys, who invent gods, who pray for rain. You build houses and write laws, then beg forgiveness for every natural impulse.”

Knox leans forward, puts his elbows on his desk, and speaks with naked disdain. “I’m nothing like you. I’m like my father was. We’re the men who swept down off the steppes on horseback like a storm. We burned your cities, devoured your crops, salted your fields, pillaged your treasure, raped your women, and left them pregnant and wailing. Men like your father took black slaves to do the hard work, then mated with them and corrupted both races. But to us, you’re all slaves: to be used, worked, fucked . . . and finally killed, if necessary.”

“You did some mating yourself, I believe,” I say in a neutral voice. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re Lincoln Turner’s father.”

Forrest barks a laugh. “So? What could I possibly care about that?”

“You’re as guilty of corrupting your race as anybody else. That’s my point.”

Knox leans sideways and spits in a trash can. “The difference is, I don’t give a shit whether some nigger whelp lives or dies. A man takes his pleasure where he will and moves on, same as the buck.”

“You’re full of shit, Knox.”

Startled from his rant, he regards me as he might some a mentally defective child. “How’s that?”

“You think you fucked Viola Turner, but she fucked you ten times over.”

Suspicion comes into his face. “What are you talking about?”

“Viola Turner killed your father, dipshit. She killed the great Frank Knox.”

At last my words have struck home. The whites of Forrest’s eyes have grown larger. “Are you drunk?” he asks softly.

“I wish I was. It’s hard to think about this shit sober. But I’m going to, because you need to hear it. See, two days after you and your father’s crew raped Viola, Frank was brought into my father’s office, hurt. Viola saw her chance at payback and took it. She injected him with enough air to stop his heart. That doesn’t sound much like a sheep, huh? I’ll tell you something else, too. My father saw it happen, and he didn’t do a damned thing to stop it. He watched your father die like a dog, Forrest. Not a lion. A dog. Or a sheep, maybe.”

Knox’s Adam’s apple bobs in his throat.

“Frank Knox died in terror on a cold tile floor,” I press on. “He died helpless and begging for mercy from a black woman who cursed him while he bled out.”

Forrest has gone so still that I wonder if he’s even breathing. The blood has finally drained from his face. He raises a callused hand and rubs his jaw, the sound like the scrape of sandpaper.

“Doesn’t sound like the death of a Hun to me,” I say simply. “Sounds like one more broke-dick factory worker too dumb to see death coming for him.”

Knox’s eyes have narrowed to slits, yet I sense that he no longer sees me. Rather, he sees his father dying under the hand of a woman they both raped nearly forty years ago. Suddenly his eyes clear, and I feel the single-minded stare of a true predator upon me.

“You just signed your daddy’s death warrant,” he whispers. “Your mother’s, too. And your kid. And last of all . . . you. You’re going to watch them all die, Cage. And then, when you least expect it . . . I’ll step out of the shadows and gut you.”

In the wake of Caitlin’s death, his threats mean nothing to me. Perhaps this is a sign that my mind has come unmoored from reality.

“I’d like to do it now,” he says. “But too many people know you’re here.” His eyes suddenly flash with comprehension. “Or do they?” He raises a hand and points at me. “You came here to kill me, didn’t you? You want to cut my fucking throat. Only you can’t do it without going to jail.” A weird glint comes into his eyes. “Shit, Cage, you might just have some potential after all. Same as your old man. I guess Daddy was right. The blood never lies.”

I take a deep breath, then slide back my chair and get to my feet.

“You going somewhere?” Forrest asks.

“Yes. But you haven’t seen the last of me.”

“Oh, I know that. Well . . . there’s one thing I forgot to mention. I’d spare you, but the medical examiner’s going to tell you anyway, so I might as well enjoy it.”

Something in me rises to his goad, like iron filings to a magnet. “What are you talking about?”

Just before he answers, I feel a sickening dread that he’s going to tell me he raped Caitlin—which I could not bear. Because of her past experiences, Caitlin had a special hatred for rape, and it was an ever-present fear.

“Your fiancée was pregnant,” Forrest says. “Ain’t that a shame? You thought you just lost one person, but you lost two.”

For a moment I lose track of his voice, so loudly is my blood rushing in my ears. “How do you know that?”

“She told the nigger who killed her, when she was pleading for her life. She figured he might spare her, I guess. And the truth is, he might’ve. He was awfully upset about shooting her when he came out of that swamp. He was talking crazy. Scared to death.”

“But you killed him,” I say in a flat voice.

Knox laughs again. “Alphonse did. Stuck a knife in his gizzard, to make sure he stayed quiet. You know what Daddy always said: a man’s worst enemy is his mouth.”

My next breath is a gasp, and I realize I haven’t breathed for so long that I’m dizzy from oxygen deprivation.

“He was right,” I whisper, more to myself than to Knox. Without looking away from his eyes, I gauge the distance to the holster hanging in the corner. Twelve feet. Knox’s knees are still under the desk. . . .

Two backward steps cause me to bump into the giant razorback standing on its pedestal. Turning as though surprised, I lay my hands on the shaft of the spear.

“That’s no toy,” Forrest says. “That’s a man’s weapon. You think you could kill a monster like that?”

“What do you call this thing?” I ask dully.

“A spear, or a dart. But you throw it with an atlatl, which comes from a Nahuatl word, which is Aztec.”

My eyes go once more to the pistol in the corner. It’s too far away.

“That’s gotta hurt about your girl,” Knox says with mock sympathy. “She could’ve been carrying a son. Guess you’ll never know now, unless you ask the M.E. to check.”

He’s pushing me to go for the gun. With the speed and power of a man with everything to lose, I yank upward on the shaft of the spear. For a sickening moment the whole animal rises, and I sense Forrest aiming a gun at my back—but then the shaft slips free and I’m whirling with the gleaming black point before me.

Forrest is moving too, shoving back his chair and reaching for something below my line of sight. I lunge toward him, but the distance is too great. Then, just as his bright pistol clears the desktop, the wheeled chair skates backward and he grabs for the edge of the desk with his free hand. In that instant of uncertainty, I drive the spear into the hollow at the base of his throat. His blinding muzzle blast scorches my face, but I cling to the shaft and drive forward until the point strikes bone.

Knox’s hands fly to his throat, and his gun caroms off the wall behind him. His eyes follow its path, but instead of chasing that pistol, he hurls his body toward the corner, reaching for the gun on the coatrack. The spear point goes with him, but the shaft remains in my hands. As his right hand closes on the holster, I twist the shaft with all my strength and jab it forward. There’s a sharp crack, then Knox drops like a puppet whose operator has snipped its strings.