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PROLOGUE

Diggin’ in the graveyard—finding all the all your secrets out

—Oren Morse, “Midnight Graveyard Blues”

This is a cruel cruel cruel world You have to live in each and every day You can’t hardly trust your next-door neighbor Or they just ht steal your life away

—Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater, “Messed Up World”

(1)

The Bone Man was as thin as a whisper; he was a scarecrow froe of the hospital roof, toes jutting out over the gutter, his trousers fluttering against the stick sliorously but silently around his emaciated hips The only sound the wind h him was a faint plaintive whine as it caressed the silvery strings of the guitar slung behind his back

Far below, the parking lot faded back fro half-circle that had been cut acres-deep into the surrounding sea of pines Even this late there were dozens of cars down there, dusted withof black clouds that were invisible against the night, but above the Bone Man the stars flickered and glimmered by the thousand

For three hours he had sat cross-legged on the roof, playing his songs, hu the sad blues out of the ghost of an old guitar that Charley Patton had once used to play “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” at a church picnic in Bentonia, Mississippi Another tiuitar to play backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson The guitar had history It had life, even though it was no uitar in a deadmusic almost no one could hear

He’d sat there and played and listened to the whispers and cries andthe beep of the -circle whisper of needles and thread as the doctors stitched Terry Wolfe’s skin, and the faint grinding sound as they set his bones He heard the whimper of hopelessness from the throat of José Ramos as the doctors stood by his bed and explained to his mother that his back was broken, and then the scream as the enormity of that pronouncement drove a knife into his mother’s heart He heard the dreadful terror as Dr Saul Weinstock ain as he knelt alone in the bathroom of his office, hands on either side of the toilet bowl, his face streaked with tears and his lips ith vomit

He heard all of these things while he played, and then he heard the hospital slowly fall quiet as drugs or shock or alcohol took each of them into their private pits of darkness That’s when the Bone Man had stopped playing and rose to stand on the edge of the roof, staring across blacktop and car hoods and trees at the moon

It was an ugly quarter moon, stained yellow-red like bruised flesh, and its sickle tip seemed to slash at the treetops The sky above the trees was thick with agitated night birds that flapped and cawed, hectoring him like Romans at the circus

2

“Where are you now?”

Jim Polk cupped his hand around his cell and pitched his voice to a whisper “At the hospital, like you said Back loading dock ”