By the time he made it behind fences topped with coiled razor wire into the prison’s parking lot, he’d left a message for Lisa accusing her of betrayal, had likewise left a voice mail for Clayton telling him to stay away from Bell and stay out of the whole damn thing. You have no idea what you’ve done. And as he turned off the truck’s engine and opened the windows so he could breathe again, he called Mack at his home. “You may hear some things,” Darren started, “but I want you to be assured that nothing is any different. As long as you don’t change your story, we’re both going to get out of this unscathed.”

“‘We’? Darren, what are you talking about?”

“Nothing I want to get into over the phone,” he said, looking out at the reinforced-steel bars around the prison’s front doors, the men with guns in the lookout towers. He felt they could hear what he was saying right now, that like hawks, they could sense when fresh meat, a potential new inmate, was close. “It’s just like we said, though, there’s nothing new with District Attorney Vaughn. Whatever he asks, just tell him the exact same thing you said to him before, nothing about an altercation with Ronnie Malvo at your place.”

Mack grunted out of frustration. “It’s my grandbaby I don’t want him harassing.”

“Tell her the same as I told you,” Darren said. “I’ll be back to San Jacinto County soon, and we’ll get it all worked out, I swear.” Though he wasn’t sure anymore what that meant. He had lost control over this entire mess.

He went into the attorney-client meeting room in King’s cellblock hating himself. So he was relieved by the hating of Bill King that awaited him, glad that all the ignominious rage he felt over his own twisted moral compass could be aimed in this white man’s direction. For how could Darren be confused about himself in the presence of a man who had hunted blacks for sport? Oh yes, he hated Bill King right now, could taste it on his tongue. He hated the man’s ties to the Brotherhood, hated the destruction he’d caused, the lives he’d destroyed, and for what? He’d murdered a man who hadn’t done anything to him, a man whose name he didn’t even know, just to prove to other white folks that he was loyal to a toxic ideology, that it was safe to make and sell drugs with him. Keith Washington, the man he’d killed, had had a wife and two kids, one of them just about Levi King’s age, both of them growing up in Longview right now without a daddy. Darren relished the chance to sit across from Bill King and have his own humanity reaffirmed.