At last the janitor’s eyes find mine, and they are filled with unspoken feeling. “I ain’t exactly clear on what they think your daddy done, Mr. Mayor. And I’m just a custodian, like my brother. But if you need somebody to stand up in that courthouse and tell the truth about Dr. Cage, I’d be proud to do it. Ain’t no better man in my book. My sister, too.”

I want to say, “Thank you, Noel,” but all I manage to do is shake his callused hand and turn back up the dark street, my eyes stinging with tears of confusion.

“Hey, Penn,” Tim calls, closing the distance to me with a graceful economy of motion that belies the speed involved. “You’ve got an audience over there.”

Following Tim’s hand, I look across the street and see a brown-shirted figure with his arms folded standing before the glass doors of the sheriff’s department. Billy Byrd. Over his big belly and burly forearms, the gold star gleams on the sheriff’s chest. His satisfied grin reaches toward me like a slapping hand. Then he calls, “I see you’re out mixin’ with the quality, as usual. Looks like you forgot your mop, though. We can get you one from inside.”

A deputy standing behind him laughs.

“There’s no upside to me going over there,” I say softly. “Right?”

“Absolutely none,” Tim agrees.

“You wanna come in and say hello to your daddy?” Byrd taunts me. “He’s a sad sight, Mayor. But I’m doin’ all I can to keep him comfortable, yes, sir. Lots of special attention.”

“How about we go kick their asses?” I suggest.

Something like harsh laughter sounds in Tim’s muscular chest. “I’d like five minutes with that bastard in a locked room. That grin would be on his asshole, not his face.” Tim takes hold of my arm and leads me up State Street. “But it’ll have to be another time. Unless you do want to check on your father?”

“Byrd wouldn’t let us in now.”

“Hey!” Sheriff Byrd calls after us. “Why don’t you two lovebirds get a room? We don’t like a lot of PDA between men around here.”

Their laughter echoes after us between the buildings, sounding exactly like that of the boys I used to play against in the cow pasture football fields of the “Christian schools” in the 1970s.

“Another time,” Tim repeats, like mantra. “Another time.”

About a mile outside Athens Point, Mississippi, two men sat smoking in a pickup truck near a crooked old shack at the edge of the woods. The driver was in his midforties, his passenger twenty years older.

“Tell me again what Kenny told you,” said the driver.

“He was passin’ by here going to check a well, and he saw the car parked here. It was an Audi S4. The one with the big engine.”