“I’m a Texas Ranger, and you brandish a weapon, I’ll arrest you on the spot. This here, ain’t not a bit of this is any concern of yours. Go on, now.”

To Gil, Darren softened his tone, reminding himself that this was all about a nine-year-old no one had laid eyes on for three days. “I don’t need to come inside. I’m just hoping for a picture of the boy, something to show your neighbors, folks who live up that way,” he said, pointing past the trailer park to the part of Hopetown the woman cooking fish had so matter-of-factly called Nigger Town. “Sheriff Quinn got reports that a man by the name of Leroy Page might have seen Levi on Friday evening. It’s crucial that we confirm that as soon as possible. He’s the best lead we have right now.”

The bearded neighbor nodded to Gil. “You want me to get the others?”

Gil shook his head, smiling faintly now, wearing the look of a wolf having stumbled upon a wounded white-tailed deer. This gon’ be easy, his expression said. He yelled over his shoulder into the open door of the trailer, “Dana!” It was Marnie who came out of the trailer first. She was unsteady on her feet, her face flushed from an afternoon of drinking. Darren would recognize that gait anywhere. Dana, the teenage girl he’d seen earlier, poked her head out next. Gil told her, “Get this man a picture of your brother. One from the school, not them your mama took. Get it now.” Dana disappeared into the darkness of the trailer.

Marnie turned to Darren and started shaking her head. “What’s he saying, Gil?” she said, her voice clotting with snot before a sob wrenched itself free of her control and she wept. “He ain’t find my boy?”

Darren shook his head. “No, ma’am.” He heard a television playing. Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune, one of those. The applause was too bright, too much, coming out of the tiny trailer. Dana returned with a wallet-size photograph, bent at the corners. She held Darren’s gaze when she handed it to him. She had the same wide-set muddy-green eyes that stared back at Darren from the photo in his hand. Levi was blond, hair lighter than his mother’s and his sister’s, and he saw some of Rosemary in the boy’s face, something vaguely patrician in his bearing that did not fit the world around him. There was something else too. You had to look closely to see it, but it was there behind the eyes, the tiny upturn of his mouth. Rage.

8.

8.