For a moment, Darren saw the whole thing play out as if it were a reel from a nightmare, saw how likely it was that, given time, Levi would be a racist as dangerous as his father, who’d choked a black man to death behind a gas station and lit his body on fire. Darren had a furtive, almost painful thought of putting down a sick puppy, of turning his back on Levi completely. He knew it was wrong. He had to allow for the possibility that none of this would happen—his badge required it. Levi was a nine-year-old whose future could not be divined from the leaves of his family tree. Plus saving Levi gave Darren moral cover for framing Bill King. He didn’t have to like the fucking kid, but he still had to look for him, he said.

“Oh, that kid’s dead.” Greg said it so matter-of-factly, he very nearly followed it with a yawn. He glanced at his watch and looked up at Darren, who’d felt a jolt of something when Greg said the kid was dead, the whisper of truth in it and the press of responsibility. Greg wondered if Darren had eaten yet, said he’d not had a proper bowl of gumbo since he’d been here, and now that he was staying for a while, he might as well get some Creole food. Darren tensed, every muscle prepared for a blow, when he asked Greg why he was staying. Some part of him already knew the answer, knew the shit show that was coming. “We think this is a hate crime,” Greg said. “The FBI wants me to stay.”

Part Three

Part Three

10.

10.

GREG WANTED to drive the twenty miles or so across the border for the real shit. But Darren didn’t feel comfortable leaving the state, not while he was on a job. Nor did he want to chance running into his would-be minder Deputy Briggs, at the riverboat restaurant, so they ended up at a bar called Froggy’s, the only place in downtown Jefferson where Darren could get a real drink in peace. The gumbo was a roux-less embarrassment—thin as soup, with bland sausage and hard pieces of okra floating in an oily red lake that had been peppered to death—but the liquor was top shelf. Darren ordered a Knob Creek neat and Greg lined up two beers on the bar top so they could talk uninterrupted for the next half hour. They cut quite a sight, the two of them. Darren had removed his badge and looked like a black cowboy who’d wandered into the wrong bar; Greg, with his tailored suit and wing-tip shoes, stood out like an Easter Bunny at a Santa Claus convention, an oddity that even his race couldn’t close the gap on. The other white men in the bar were dressed in T-shirts, Wranglers, and work boots.