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figured they’d eat anything, goat, horse, mule, burro, whatever. This stuff wasn’t lion meat and it hadn’t been in there yesterday but it was so fresh it still had some blood oozing out of it. He guessed maybe Mr. Hamburger had brought it in sometime.
    This meat was in some strange chunks and didn’t really resemble any meat he’d ever seen, but he knew there were plenty of other kinds of meat in the world. What he wished he could get his hands on again was some whitetail. Now there was some good stuff. It was about the best stuff he’d ever put in his mouth. But it was hard to get your hands on whitetail if you didn’t hunt. And Domino didn’t hunt. The only whitetail he’d ever had was roadkill that had been brought to the prison kitchen sometimes. And since he’d worked in the prison kitchen his last two years, he’d always gotten some of it. Along with the warden, who was crazy about it, too.
    He’d been lucky to land this job straight out of Parchman. You could pick a lot of cotton in eighteen years. Domino was one of those people for whom prison rehabilitation worked in that he’d learned a marketable skill and had made connections that were helping him in the outside world.
    The weed came in once a month from a connection Domino had now in Oregon, on a UPS truck with one of those friendly guys in a brown uniform carrying a five-gallon bucket of drywall plaster. Mr. Hamburger had okayed the deliveries to his place when Domino told him that he had a Sheetrock operation on the weekends (a lie) and had to sleep in the daytime (not a lie), which was when United Parcel Service made their deliveries, so somebody else who worked the day shift always signed the chart for him, since it was evidently just drywall plaster. Domino dug the wet plaster out from around the package of weed late at night, waterproofed it and wrapped it in old meat that was about to turn bad, stuck it in a marked box, and froze it in the lion-meat freezer into one solid chunk that would take a chain saw to cut apart. It worked out real good for everybody. The lions got fed. Nobody got hurt. Domino knew he might get hurt if Mr. Hamburger ever found out what he was doing. He’d heard things about the mob and Chicago. Everybody had. But Domino didn’t ask any questions. He just went about his work.
    He cut through some big pieces of the fresh meat with a sharp knife and a bone saw, still wondering what it was. Maybe it was elk. Maybe one of Mr. Hamburger’s rich buddies had gone on a hunting trip out West and bagged an elk and hadn’t been able to eat all of it. He looked closer. He was sure it wasn’t whitetail. If he’d thought it was whitetail, he’d have kept some of it for himself.
    Actually, the lion guy got a pretty good deal. He only paid fifty cents a pound for the meat even if it was porterhouse steaks, even if it was filet mignon. But going down there wasn’t like going to a zoo where the lions were walking around pretty healthy and intact. Some of these lions couldn’t walk around too good because they had only three legs. Some had half a tail, or one ear, or not many teeth because they were so old, and the lion shit smelled really bad. He knew the guy tried to keep the cages clean, and was just trying to help the lions, who had been mistreated and neglected by previous owners, but Domino could take one look into their big yellow eyes and see that they would eat him, too, if they could get to him, even if some of them did have only three legs. While he was down there, he dropped off the weed at an empty house in the country down close to Water Valley. He made a phone call beforehand and the money was always sitting on the front porch in a plain brown paper bag. He left the box, picked up the bag. It went about as smooth as a baby’s ass. And he’d already made the phone call for this trip.
    He started taking the boxes out and stacking them on a two-wheeler, and carrying them outside, and started sticking them in the