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way.

    I talk with the head of the campus cops at VCU for the hand-job piece on what you’re supposed to do to keep from getting killed on campus, then head back to the paper, where Jackson wonders why I don’t answer my cell phone.
    Because I turned it off, I tell him.
    I rewrite the lead story on the arrest, do the sidebar on safety, then write another one that uses most of what Stephanie told me, trying to make Isabel Ducharme look like the smart, interesting young woman I’m pretty sure she was and not an accident waiting to happen. Wheelie makes me fold it into what Baer wrote, since Baer is supposed to be doing the piece on campus reaction. He says something about being a team player.
    Baer’s stuff isn’t nearly as good as what I have, but he gets the main byline. When he asks me for Stephanie’s phone number, so he can “follow up,” I tell him he can’t have it. He seems pissed. Take a number, pal.
    The “team” seems to be short-lived, since the so-called manhunt is over already. Fine with me.

CHAPTER FOUR

    Friday
    C ustalow is standing with the refrigerator door open, pondering his choices. He and the side-by-side are about the same dimensions.
    He’s still getting used to having choices again, I guess. I don’t imagine they asked him what he wanted for breakfast down at Greensville.
    He doesn’t say much, but that’s OK. I’m not much of a talker, either.
    Abe Custalow grew up in Oregon Hill. His mother and step-father lived right down the street from us for a while, before either they or we moved. We moved a lot in those days, but always somewhere else on the Hill.
    Maybe because we were both just a bit different in a place where people tended to look like their parents married their first cousins, we hung out together.
    Custalow is a Native American, American Indian, whatever you call it these days, but I kid him that he’s really kind of a rinky-dink Indian. The Pamunkey can’t even get gambling casinos, for God’s sake. Most of them live around here, and they have blended in so well that usually only their last names give them away. Abe said his stepfather wanted him to change his, but Abe’s mother wouldn’t let him.
    Abe went into the Marines the same week I started at VCU. He was a pretty good student but had no desire to open another book again after we graduated from high school. Plus, he was born to be a Marine. Probably would have done twenty or thirty years in the Corps and retired with a great pension, but his mom got cancer and found out that neither her husband nor any of Abe’s sibs were there for the long haul. So Abe came back, about four years into his hitch, around the time I was graduating from college, to take care of his mom. She died a year later, but he never left again.
    His most notable physical characteristic is his width. Abe Custalow is just under six feet tall, and he’d probably weigh 200 pounds if he never ate again. His bones probably weigh 200 pounds. He’s just wide. He sometimes has to turn sideways to get through doors. Abe was a damn good high school tackle, offensive and defensive, and, while he doesn’t have a mean streak in his body, he does have kind of an on-off switch without any gradations to it. When Abe starts fighting, he doesn’t stop fighting until everything is settled. Which probably is why he’s spent the last three years as a guest of the state.
    He was working as a roofer, a job Les Hacker got for him after the machine parts company where he’d been for more than twenty years downsized his ass.
    One of the other roofers was a bit younger than Custalow. Hell, Abe would have been about forty-four or forty-five then, which would be about 110 in roofer years. Anyhow, the younger guy apparently started ragging on Abe for some reason. He knew he was an Indian because of his name, and he fixed on that, all the time doing stupid kid stuff like talking pidgin English—“Me wantum hammer,” shit like that—and asking about his teepee