He hated how desperate he sounded, the lilt of begging in his voice. It made Clayton suspicious and that much more likely to say no, which he did, several more times. “Your mother is a country knave, a grifter, and a liar. She couldn’t walk a straight line if you drew it in crayon in front of her. The sooner you let go of this romantic idea of maternal love and devotion, Darren, the sooner you’ll be able to focus on what you have in front of you. Lisa. The job, if you still want it,” he said. Clayton had begrudgingly accepted Darren’s return to the Texas Rangers. What choice did he have, now that he’d lost his greatest ally in the push to get Darren to go back to law school? Lisa had backed off the fight completely. “Your mother in your life will be nothing but heartache for you, Darren.” Clayton had never forgiven her for abandoning her son after the death of Darren’s father, Duke, even though it was Clayton who’d fairly snatched Darren from Bell’s teenage arms when he was only a few days old. But there was no point in getting into that now. Clayton had made himself clear on the matter.

He made the call to Mack from his truck too, not wanting to chance anything being overheard through the walls of a hotel. The old man started talking fast as soon as he heard Darren’s voice. “The district attorney been by here, once when I wasn’t home. He talked to Breanna, Darren,” he said, sounding breathless and afraid. Breanna was Mack’s twenty-year-old granddaughter, his only family, with whom he shared an A-frame cabin on the western edge of San Jacinto County. She’d been present the night Ronnie Malvo rolled onto Mack’s property; in fact, it was ugly talk from Ronnie about Breanna that had led in part to the armed standoff between the two men, Mack threatening to shoot Ronnie over the latter’s harassment of his grandchild. “And then he was back by here today,” Mack added, voice watery with worry. “Come up on me while I was pulling weeds, said he want to go over some more things.”

“You didn’t say anything, did you?”

Mack fell silent, and Darren felt a tightness in his chest.

He heard the blue note of a rusty hinge and then the screen door slamming. Mack had stepped out onto the front porch, not wanting to scare Breanna about any of this. “I told him I had a pot on the stove, how it wasn’t a good time and all. That seemed to put him off, but what was he doing here?”