Darren couldn’t think of anything he wanted less in that moment. But he bit through the stress of the mess he’d gotten himself into and said, “Sure thing, sir.”

He hung up with Wilson, already halfway back to Hopetown.

The old man didn’t answer his front door. The horses were stabled and the Buick was parked on the grass out front, but there was no other sign of Leroy Page, not a window cracked open nor the sound of his old radio coming from anywhere in the house. There was music, though. Harmonica, drums, and a flute of some sort, the sound reedy and thin but also warm, the drums almost welcoming, as familiar to him as the rhythm of his own heartbeat. It wasn’t his beloved blues, but something holy was in the air, and his first thought was the church, the conical hut that sat a little above the rest of Hopetown on a mound of packed dirt—the only part of the original settlement that wasn’t green with freshly clipped grass. Music like that had to be coming from a house of worship. He was walking in a semicircle around the hut, searching for a way in, when behind him he heard a man’s voice call out a warning, deep and sudden. “Got no place in there, you or none of the other pig deputies.”

Darren turned to see Donald Goodfellow on the porch of his mother’s yellow house. He’d casually laid a rifle over the drum between his legs. Beside him sat his son Ray, who was holding a wooden flute, and a Caddo man Darren didn’t recognize who’d tucked a harmonica in the front pocket of his denim shirt and likewise had produced a weapon, a Buck knife a good six inches long with a hickory handle so polished it caught the sun and sent a shard of light into Darren’s eyes. He squinted, stepped toward the men with deliberation. There were some things he needed to make real clear real fast. “Not a deputy, sir, don’t answer to the sheriff. You’re talking to a Texas Ranger, who’s gon’ ask you one time nicely to take care with those weapons. No cause for none of that.” The knife found its way into a leather sheath. Darren stopped squinting long enough to see that Donald Goodfellow hadn’t stowed his rifle yet. “I’m looking for Mr. Page,” he said.

“You and them other cops that been by here.”

Darren understood then that they were guarding the place, protecting Mr. Page’s property. “Wasn’t none of that my doing, Mr. Goodfellow,” he said.

Ray glared at Darren. “You got no right to be here.”

“I got a right to be anywhere that’s under the rule of Texas law—”