I can’t blame Serenity for her suspicion. After all, I’m up here kissing her. “I’m going to head back down.”

“Hey, I said I was sorry.”

“It’s okay. I just don’t want Annie running up here and feeling weird.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She raises her hand in a wave of regret. “It sucks doing the right thing, doesn’t it?”

“Almost always.”

Snake Knox rolled over in the dark of his room at the sod farm in Sulphur. His burner phone was vibrating. He shook himself awake and checked the text, which read: Call this number: 601-304-0095.

Snake felt under his pillow for his pistol, slid it to within easy reach. Then he dialed the number.

“You answered quick, Grandpa,” said Toons Teufel. “You nervous?”

“Did they get the bitch?”

“No.” Toons hawked and spat. “They were too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody got her out.”

Snake rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Who did?”

“Don’t know. Only person my guys saw was a woman. Young. Black. Armed.”

“A black woman made fools out of your boys? I shoulda sent Wilma.”

“Fuck you, Knox. I’m just lettin’ you know. Had to be FBI, a black chick who knew how to use a gun like that? She played it like an undercover.”

Snake thought about this. “Penn Cage is tight with some FBI. If he got what I think he got from this Cat Lady, he might have brought the Bureau in.”

“Hey, I don’t know what you wanted with that woman. She lived in a goddamn palace, I heard. Rode out Katrina like Marie Antoinette. But they didn’t even have time to empty the mansion. Somebody called in a home invasion across the street, and the NOPD showed up for once.”

“No idea where she is now?”

“Nope.”

“Thanks for nothin’, Toons. Jesus.”

Snake clicked off, but he didn’t lie down again. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking in the dark, his mind spinning outward like a hawk flying over dark trees, till the oak and hickory and pecan that covered the hills gave way to cypress and black water. He saw boats in the dark, arrowing through the night, lanterns in their bows. And he saw taut skin that looked golden in the flickering light. He closed his eyes, and the vision grew clearer. With it came sounds: laughter and screams and grunts in the humid dark. And then he heard it, the strangest claim he’d ever heard a human being make: I’m a nigger, too . . . I’m a nigger, too!

Snake wondered if the throat that screamed those words still really drew breath on the earth. If so, the woman who owned it had more power over him than almost anyone alive.

And she had vanished.