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crowd.
        “Can’t I kill him, Neely?” T.Z. said.
        Neely put out a hand.
        Snapped a finger.
        Put out the hand again.
        T.Z. handed over the derringer.
        “Wait outside,” Neely said to T.Z.
        “But-” T.Z. started to protest.
        “Outside,” Neely said.
        As T.Z. left, reluctantly, Neely watched Mike Dougherty. The man obviously couldn’t wait to get his hands on the girl. Neely could imagine those fists on the delicate bones of her face.
        Neely, who had boxed for two years, stuffed the derringer in his jacket pocket and then ground a fist deep into Mike's solar plexus, followed it with a crashing punch to the man’s temple and then finished things off by raising his knee brutally to Mike’s groin.
        The big man collapsed, smashing a pine chair on the way down. To the girl, Neely said, “Do you have parents?”
        “Yes, sir.”
        “Then go there. Stay there. Otherwise he’s going to hurt you.”
        “I’m afraid.”
        "Hurry. Get home.”
        Neely waited till the girl had rushed out the door. Then he went to find T.Z.
        “That wasn’t smart,” Neely said, jogging to catch up with T.Z., who walked down the street, in and out of the pools of lamplight.
        “I get sick of you running my life.”
        “I figured you’d be mad.”
        “As I said, Neely, I’m tired of you running my life.”
        They came to a comer. You could hear and smell the river. From here you could see May’s island, where the municipal buildings were.
        Neely grabbed T.Z. by the sleeve and spun him around. “You forget. Thanks to your screwup on the train last April, they’ve got a description of us now.”
        “Of me,” T.Z. snapped. “Of me. Not of you.”
        “I’m traveling with you. They might as well have a description of me.”
        “Anyway,” T.Z. said, “it wasn’t my fault the bandanna slipped off.”
        “No,” Neely said, “it never is your fault, is it, T.Z.?”
        Neely pulled his pocket watch out and held it up under the streetlight. He sighed, getting hold of himself. He needed T.Z. for this one last job. Then it would be finished between them.
        “It’s time," he said.
        “I hate to do this to the kid.”
        “It’s already been settled, T.Z.”
        “He’s changed. He’s-”
        Neely said, and his voice brooked no argument, “It’s time, T.Z. It’s well goddamn time.”
        

CHAPTER SEVEN
        
        Les Graves lived in a boardinghouse on the west side of the city in a section called “Time Check,” so called because a bankrupt railroad paid many of its workers here with checks that took a long time to become cashable. People here came to be known as Time-Checkers.
        The boardinghouse was a two-story, white-frame place with seven roomers in all.
        As usual on summer nights, most of the roomers, four men and two women, were on the front porch. There was a table in one corner of the porch with a Rayo table lamp so you could play cards or read. Or you could join in the conversation, which usually ran to reminiscences of “older and better times” back on the farm, which is where most of the people came from, or about “newfangled inventions” (this being Mr. Weiderman, who worked at the three-story Grand Hotel downtown), or about Cedar Rapids history (if Mr. Waterhouse, who was an accountant at the Hawkeye Lumber and Mill Company, was talking; Mr. Waterhouse, it was said, was doing nothing less than writing a history of the town).
        You could hear somebody stirring lemonade in the pitcher when Les reached the steps and you could hear Mr. Waterhouse saying, almost like a disembodied voice in the night, “Yes, sir, this town had its own steamship built back in 1858 and it docked in Cedar Rapids soon after. I can still remember the night-Roman