Only to walk back in two seconds later. “Speaking of the task force,” he said, throwing it away like an afterthought, going for nonchalance. “You ever think to let San Jacinto County know that Ronnie Malvo was a snitch?”

Wilson knitted his brow. “And compromise a federal investigation?”

“Or get the DA out there to do what he should have done before Malvo was in the ground—consider other suspects.”

It wasn’t like Darren hadn’t thought of it before. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas didn’t let snitches sing and live to tell about it. They’d just as soon cut out your tongue and make you eat it. In theory, anyone in their gang could have put a hit out on Malvo. Days Darren sat before pages and pages of Brotherhood misdeeds—ABT members suspected of everything from drug dealing to assault to straight-up murder—and he sometimes thought of how easy it would be to pluck out a name, like reaching into a bingo cage and coming out with a winning number. It scared him, how simple it would be to slap on Frank Vaughn’s desk a mug shot of a tatted-up member of the Brotherhood and say it was Ronnie Malvo’s killer, which would take the heat off Mack as the killer and off Darren as a potential accessory after the fact. He felt the disapproval of his late uncle William, who’d been a Texas Ranger too, a man Darren revered for his integrity, for the blind faith he held in the rule of law. But Darren wasn’t sure anymore that the law could withstand blindness. He’d protected Mack out of instinct, because his own read of history told him a black man should have a right to his own fear. Otherwise, he would forever be dying because of someone else’s. It’s us or them, isn’t it? The belief felt like a heavy brick in his chest, chipping away at the bones in his rib cage each time he took a breath, breaking him from the inside out. But did that make it any less true? Had anything in the weeks since the election proved his cynicism wrong? Maybe the rules had to be different. Maybe justice was no more a fixed concept than love was, and poets and bluesmen knew the rules better than we did. He remembered an old Lightnin’ Hopkins record, a song his uncle William never cared for but that William’s twin brother, Clayton, would hum with a wry smile. Yeah, I’m black and I’m evil, but this black man did not make hisself. To Clayton, justice was always relative.