“Good,” Leroy said, pushing past Darren into his house, where he unceremoniously dumped the fishing gear in the front parlor. “They had to get a warrant to get into them white people’s trailer down the way, they gon’ have to do the same for me. Wasn’t about to let a black man with a badge use his East Texas bona fides to trick me into letting the law search my house. I want the same rules the white man gets.”

“So that’s it?” Darren said. “That’s why you kicked me out?”

“That ain’t good enough?” He walked down the hallway to his kitchen. Within moments he had the radio on and the refrigerator open. He popped the top of a Miller High Life, then pulled a premade bologna sandwich from a stack of at least two dozen just like it, all of them wrapped loosely in wax paper, lunch for a month, maybe two. The sight saddened Darren in a way he couldn’t explain. There was a bluesy zydeco on the radio, Beau Jocque on the accordion, singing about coming home, another song trying to pin that elusive idea to a place and time. Darren didn’t think he’d ever heard a blues song consider the place currently under the singer’s feet home. No, home was always a long walk on a dusty road, a stowaway ride in a boxcar, or a slow train to Jordan. All you need is faith to hear the diesels humming. For Beau Jocque, home was where his mother was. ’Cause that’s where I belong, he sang before one of the meanest guitar solos in zydeco history, more East Texas than western Louisiana, the black coloring the French. The longing in his throaty tenor was familiar to Darren, who’d been raised on this music, who set a blues record on his uncles’ hi-fi the second he walked into the house in Camilla, every time, because even there, even in the house where he’d grown up, home was always a reach back in time, glassed as it was in memory. It was still an idea he couldn’t exactly touch. Food could sometimes reach it, a pot of peas and ham hocks on the stove. Stories too. But music did it every time. Texas blues were the way home.

Darren asked, “Did you or did you not see Levi King Friday night?”

“Not gon’ be called a lie in my own home.”

“Dana, Marnie King’s daughter, says you weren’t even on patrol that night.”

“You see what trash she come from?”

“Don’t make her a liar.”

“But you gon’ take her word over mine, a homeowner and a man who never caused nobody no trouble in his whole life, a vet who served his country?”

“She says she never saw you.”

“She’s wrong,” Leroy said. He guzzled half the bottle of beer.