Hours later, despite my exhaustion, I find it almost impossible to sleep. When I do, I dream of helmeted men on black horses pursuing me through dense fog. After I can stand no more of lying restless in the dark, I get up and go down to the kitchen, where I fix a bowl of raisin bran and watch the second half of To Have and Have Not with the volume set low.

As I watch Humphrey Bogart and his alcoholic first mate suffer through a hellish fishing charter, a dark memory rises into my mind. It wears the face of Lincoln Turner, my half-black half brother. I’ve only seen Lincoln three times since he confronted me in the Adams County jail, where I was being held on suspicion of murdering Forrest Knox. Twice from a distance, without him seeing me—not that I could tell, anyway. But the third time I realized he was following me across town in his truck. With the confidence imparted by the pistol under my seat and the bodyguard in the car behind me, I called Tim Weathers and told him what I planned to do. Then I pulled into a barbershop parking lot on Homochitto Street and waited to see if Lincoln would follow me.

He did.

He pulled his Chevy F-250 alongside my Audi, rolled down his window, and waited for me to do the same. In the truck, he was three feet higher than I off the ground, and his eyes smoldered with anger. My right hand gripping my pistol in my lap, I lowered my window with my left as crazy scenarios swirled through my brain. For some reason I was thinking of Cain and Abel, only I had no idea which of us was Cain and which was Abel. Maybe that would depend on who fired first—for I was strangely sure that Lincoln, too, had a weapon in his hand.

“You have something to say?” I asked, searching, as I always did in his presence, for my father’s face in his—or even for traces of my own. I saw none, and once more, I could not get over how dark he was. Passing him on the street, I would never have suspected a high percentage of Caucasian blood. But my skepticism was moot: a DNA test had proved Dad’s paternity beyond all doubt.

“So they let you out of jail,” Lincoln said in his deep bass voice. “You killed a state police officer with a spear, and they let you right out. So sorry, Mr. Mayor, all just a misunderstanding. It must be nice to throw that kind of weight.”

“I’m late for an appointment. If you have something to say, say it.”

The dark eyes regarded me with discomfiting intensity. “We got the same blood running through our veins, Penn Cage. So answer me this. How come you got everything and I got nothing?”