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kids on the riverbank to give the car a good thirty yards of clearance. When Sonny’s wife realized what must be about to happen, she started running toward the children, but by then Snake had held up the walkie-talkie and pressed a button.
    A blinding yellow flash lit the interior of the car for a millionth of a second, whiting out an oval disk in Sonny’s field of vision. Then the kids were cheering and running toward the car, with Frank and Snake close behind. Back under the cottonwoods, a woman gave a piercing rebel yell. Turning, Sonny saw Glenn’s sister Wilma standing in a bikini, pumping her fist high in the air. The other women looked indifferent to the commotion by the water. Sonny trotted down to the knot of people while Morehouse huffed and puffed along behind him.
    The acrid stink of high explosive hurled Sonny back to the war, but the Chevy didn’t look like anything much had happened to it. The dummy was still sitting behind the wheel, though it had fallen forward like a drunk who’d passed out after pulling into his driveway. Then Snake yanked open the door with a screech of metal, and Sonny saw the result of his work.
    The dummy’s torso had been cleanly severed at the waist. Whatever kind of charge Snake had rigged under the dash, it had sliced the dummy in half as cleanly as a guillotine. Sonny had known men to survive a conventional car bomb, but no man could survive a wound like that.
    Frank whistled in admiration, and Snake preened like a cat. Sonny’s wife gave Snake a piece of her mind for pulling tricks like that with kids around, but Snake ignored her, and she stalked off in furious silence. The kids had hoped for more destruction and soon lost interest. They begged for more bottle rockets, which they’d expended on Friday night, but Frank scattered them with a curse.
    While Snake occupied himself with bomb damage assessment, Sonny stared openly at the waitress. She was trash compared to the star of his primary fantasy—the Negro nurse of Dr. Tom Cage, Triton Battery’s company doctor. Viola Turner was the most beautiful woman Sonny had seen in years; Frank himself had made several comments about her over the past months. Like his preacher father, Frank never let skin color stop him from taking whatever woman he fancied, and Sonny’s chest tightened with jealousy and resentment every time he mentioned Viola. Sonny remembered climbing onto the scale at Dr. Cage’s office to be weighed; he’d looked down and seen the perfect curve of two coffee-colored breasts disappearing under the white uniform—
    “You need some Vaseline?” Frank whispered in his ear.
    “Get off me!” Sonny snapped, shouldering Frank back and banishing the image from his mind.
    Frank’s laughter was raw and knowing, like that of a demon who has seen all human frailty laid bare.
    As the crowd drifted away from the car, Snake said, “I could wire that charge to the starter, the turn signal, even the radio. And this stuff is so stable you can fire a bullet into it without detonating it.”
    Frank slapped the waitress on the ass and said, “Why don’t you run up the hill and grab a beer, hon? We’ll join you in a minute.”
    She flushed at the unexpected contact from Frank, but she clearly didn’t mind it. Snake did, but he didn’t murmur a word of objection to his brother. Snake Knox might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid.
    “Is this how you’re thinking about going after Kennedy and King?” Sonny asked skeptically.
    Frank shook his head. “Nah. Too much security. There’s only one way to take down the big game. A sniper-scout team. Preferably more than one.”
    Sonny nodded with relief. Both Frank and Snake had qualified as expert marksmen in the Marines, and Snake had done some actual sniping in Korea.
    Frank stretched his arms behind him, then popped his back with obvious pleasure. “This has been a hell of a weekend, considering. Why don’t we eat that gator, then pack this junk up and head back