Bloody River Blues

makes his shots, which Pellam finds extremely frustrating. Pellam has been watching the Lakers all season. He tries to fly up to the basket and stuff the ball in, but he comes nowhere close. He is a terrible player. The Nocona cowboy boots don’t help much.
    Buffett gets the rebound away from Pellam and sinks another.
    “Hell with this,” Pellam says. “Let’s see a slam-dunk.”
    They play for a half hour and take a break for beer.
    In response to a question Buffett tells Pellam he isn’t seeing Nina anymore. “That’s over with. It was just a fluke thing. I never knew what to make of her. She was moody a lot. It was like she had some big secret or something.”
    “I picked that up, too.” Pellam wipes his mouth with his sleeve and thinks they’re crazy to be drinking beer in December.
    And crazy to be playing basketball now, too.
    “Did I tell you?” Buffett asks.
    “What?”
    “Penny’s moved out. We’re getting a divorce.”
    “You’re going to what?”
    “A divorce. Get one.”
    “God,” Pellam says.
    “Well—”
    “I think that’s awful.”
    Buffett looks away, inordinately embarrassed, and swallows a lot of beer. “It happens.”
    “Did she find out about Nina?”
    “No. She still doesn’t know.”
    Pellam shakes his head and starts to wave his arm at Buffett’s legs but changes the motion to encompass the entire court. “All this and she decides to leave you?”
    “No, Pellam. Uh-uh. I’m the one getting the divorce. It’s my idea. She’s going to live with her parents.”
    “Oh.” This, too, Pellam thinks is crazy. He looks at Buffett for a moment. “All this and you leave her? ”
    “Yep.”
    “Why?”
    “You were over to the house. You really have to ask?”
    “But you’ll be living by yourself?”
    Buffett shrugs. “I guess, yeah.”
    Pellam gives him a more-power-to-you shrug and practices dribbling. The ball gets away from him. He hops in front and stops it, then asks, “You see Dr. Wendy lately?”
    “Th’other day.”
    “So?”
    “Nothing new. Same old prognosis.”
    “You want to talk about it?”
    “No.”
    They drink beer for a few minutes, talking about the Knicks and the Lakers. Then Buffett says, “They’ve tried these new drugs on me. They don’t have any effect.”
    “You gonna kill yourself?”
    “I don’t think so. Someday maybe.” Buffett is neither joking nor serious when he says this.
    “I just thought of something. You play poker?”
    Buffett laughs at the idiocy of the question. “Of course I play poker.”
    “You like chili?”
    “No. I hate chili.”
    A breeze comes up and it’s too cold to sit still and drink beer so they head back toward the basket and begin to play again. Pellam comes up fast and gets the ball away from Buffett. He dribbles fiercely and lobs a long one, a three-pointer, which he knows isn’t going to go in, but it hits the rim, reverberates back and forth madly and finally drops through the rusty metal hoop into Buffett’s waiting hands.

EDGE
    J EFFERY D EAVER
    Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster
    Turn the page for a preview of Edge . . . .

JUNE 2004

The Rules of Play
    THE MAN WHO wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove through a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields this humid morning.
    A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.
    “Officer Fallow?” Alissa began. Then, as I’d been urging her for the past week: “Abe?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is he still there?” She’d seen my gaze.
    “Yes. And so’s our tail,” I added for reassurance. My protégé was behind the killer, two or three car lengths. He was not the only person from our organization on the job.
    “Okay,” Alissa whispered. The woman, in her midthirties, was a whistle-blower against a government contractor that did a lot of work for the army. The company was adamant that it had done nothing wrong and claimed it welcomed an investigation.But there’d been an attempt on Alissa’s life a week ago and—since I’d been in the army with one of the senior commanders at Bragg—Defense had called me in to guard her. As head of the organization I don’t do much fieldwork any longer but I was glad to get out, to tell the truth. My typical day was ten