He didn’t think he’d ever heard those words from Wilson, and hell if it didn’t cross his mind that to save a white child he was being given carte blanche to go around the locals here, that with this one, he had Wilson in his pocket. A match head’s flame of anger lit in his chest and extinguished itself just as quickly. Did he think the missing blond boy lit a fire under Wilson? Yes. Did it mean the boy didn’t still need his help? No. Could he possibly keep Leroy out of prison? Yes.

He took the torn map from Marcus’s book plus a tourist version that Marcus kept in the store, tucked both of them into his pants pocket, and started for the door. He didn’t realize Marcus was following him until he was on the pavement outside and heard the door to the store lock behind him. He turned.

“I’m coming too,” his uncle’s old college roommate said.

“What?”

“You’ll never find it without me,” Marcus said, sliding his arms into a red faux-leather bomber jacket. He put a hand on Darren’s shoulder as if they were partners in some grand adventure, as if he was about to have the time of his life.

Marcus told him they’d find a ton of boats on the docks in Karnack near the Big Pines Lodge restaurant, but he neglected to add that every last one of them would be filled with tourists, men, women, and children who’d paid good money to buy lake-tour tickets from one of the five tour companies running businesses out of shacks sitting like rotting teeth in a semicircle behind the restaurant’s parking lot. The air carried the scent of burning boat fuel from the idling engines and the grease exhaust from the lodge’s kitchen, where everything from gator to catfish to hushpuppies swam for its life in a vat of hot oil.