Chapter Twenty-Eight Summary

The Black Cat Cafe owner Lyle Hooper had been an industrious man prior to the Athena prison riots, Eugene remembers. Hooper not only managed the bar and patrons of the Cafe, but equally ran prostitutes in the parking lot to cater to local men gone astray for the evening. The respectable folks in the Mohiga Valley look the other way, including the women. They pretend that Lyle Hooper's clear financial success is the result of hard work and disciplined saving, and not the fact he runs the local whorehouse, which is what the prisoners of Athena call it. When they later riot and take Lyle Hooper as a captive, Eugene recalls, they will begin calling him "Pimp" because of their disdain for his former, true occupation. Eugene laments that Hooper was doomed from the moment he shot and killed a rioting...