Apparently, there was a lot more. Ronnie and the girl actually knew each other, if not socially, then in the way of a trading partnership. Personal beliefs and politics aside, Ronnie would sell drugs to anyone, and despite the nearly corporate-level organization of the Aryan Brotherhood’s meth business—which Darren knew from his work on the task force actually overlapped with the Mexican gangs’ in South Texas—he peddled weed and pills to college kids on the side. Breanna had bought from him a few times and turned around and sold it to some drill-team girls she knew. “It was just weed,” she said, eyes on the floor.

“But why?” Darren said, almost singing the words like a hymn, a plaintive plea for understanding a situation he’d been reading wrong for months. “Why did you kill him, Breanna? Why did you shoot the man in cold blood?”

Ronnie didn’t like her turning a profit off him and threatened to cut her off, and they may or may not have started hooking up so she could keep making side money selling to her friends. But then Ronnie quickly tired of worrying about his Aryan brothers discovering the lack of purity in his sexual appetite, the black girls—plural—he’d fucked. He wanted all his money back, came up with a number Breanna owed him for the drugs and gave her forty-eight hours to deliver an amount of money she’d never seen in her lifetime. That was the real reason Ronnie had come by Mack’s house all those nights ago. Sure, he was harassing Breanna—but money was at the root of it. “He said he would hurt Paw-Paw if I didn’t get him all of it. But I didn’t have it, Mr. Mathews.”

By now, Darren had stopped listening. He felt like his head wasn’t on right; it was too heavy for his neck, like his hat was the only thing actually holding his head in place. That if he lifted the Stetson, his skull might roll right off his body and onto the floor at Mack’s feet. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said, standing.

He didn’t want anything to do with this.

This whole time, he’d thought he was saving an elderly black man who had seventy years’ worth of justification for shooting a white supremacist threatening his granddaughter on his property, but in fact, he was protecting a millennial black girl who was putting out to get weed from a man who called her a nigger.

Yes, Pop, I am some kind of fool.