“Then walk me through it again. What were you doing when you saw the boy?” Darren asked. Leroy Page paused so long that Darren could hear the soft patter of water, as light as tears falling on sand, coming from somewhere in the kitchen. He glanced down and saw that the rolled-up bottoms of Mr. Page’s dungarees were sopping wet from the knee down. What the hell kind of fishing was he doing out there that got nearly his whole body wet? Thin beads of water, cloudy as crocodile tears, continued to patter onto the linoleum floor. The old man downed the rest of his beer and belched softly. “I was walking,” he said finally.

“Walking?” Darren said. “No horse, no patrol?”

“I don’t believe I ever said I was on patrol.”

Darren was sure he had. But five seconds later, he couldn’t remember if Quinn or Page had used the word patrol. He cursed himself for not taking the time to write up a few notes after that first encounter with Page and Donald and Ray Goodfellow. He’d been so focused on getting info for the task force—and on his own plans to use Bill King’s incarceration and messy family life for his own ends—that finding the kid had almost been an afterthought. But Levi King felt real to him now. He still had the boy’s picture in the pocket of his shirt.

“And so you were just taking a stroll…down by the trailers?”

“My property still,” Leroy said with a huff of indignation.

“Unarmed?”

“Didn’t say I was stupid.”

“And you saw the boy?”

“I saw the boy,” Leroy said. “He was locking up his granddaddy’s boat in Lester’s old shed.”

“You two speak?”

“Naw. I reckon he’d grown kind of scared of me, the way I cussed him after the mess with Margaret’s church and blackening my door with ugly words. Naw, Levi didn’t say anything, and neither did I.”

“Did you see Dana, Levi’s older sister, in the window of his trailer?”

“Didn’t look toward the trailer, just kept on with my walk.”

Darren sighed, removed his hat, and scratched at an itch at the back of his head. He didn’t like the fact that the story sounded slightly different than the one Leroy had given before, just as he didn’t like the part of himself that was clearly trying to protect the man. He thought of sitting with Greg in that bar, remembered his best friend of twenty-something years trying to get Darren to own up to his blind spots when it came to black folks, the feelings of deference that shot up through him like roots through fertile soil—the instinct to protect and serve that came over him around black folks, especially those of advanced age, men and women whose challenges and fortitude had made Darren’s life possible.