He barked a laugh, harsh and derisive. “Only somebody who’s got money could ask that.”

“Is that what you want out of all this? Money?”

“Everybody wants money. But there ain’t enough money in the world to take away my pain.”

“What do you want, then?”

“Justice.”

“That’s a big word. It means different things to different people.”

Lincoln shook his big head. “Only means one thing to me.”

“What’s that?”

“Payback.”

“You want our father to suffer the way your mother suffered.”

Lincoln smiled then, and his smile was more frightening than anything he’d ever said to me. “The Bible says the sins of the father will be visited upon the sons, even unto the seventh generation. You and your little girl ain’t but two generations. But that’s a start, I guess.”

My hand tightened on the pistol in my lap. “Are you threatening my daughter?”

“Man, I don’t have to threaten nobody. Karma’s on its way around, all by its own self.” He glanced away, at the cars passing on the road beside us, then behind my Audi at the big Yukon. “Got your muscle back there, huh? You keep on paying him. He can’t protect you from what’s coming.”

“I wouldn’t go back there and test him.”

Lincoln’s laugh was deep and jolly. “You know, most of our lives, you and me didn’t know each other existed. But it’s like I told you in that juke joint out by Anna’s Bottom. We’ve been tied together as sure as twins separated at birth. We come from the same pair of balls, but you got blessed and I got cursed. Maybe you come from the left nut and I come from the right. What you think?”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“You’re wrong, bro. Hey, you ever been diving?”

“Diving?”

“Scuba diving.”

“A few times.”

“You and me . . . we’re like two divers tethered to each other, dropping down into an underwater cave. What they call a blue hole. Down, down into the dark, to a place nobody’s ever seen and lived to tell, where there’s no light and no oxygen, nothing but the bones of those who went before.”

“You’re losing me, Lincoln.”

“Oh, you’re with me. You know what’s at the bottom of that hole?”

“What?”

“The truth.”

This got my attention. “And what’s the truth?”

“Another big word, like justice. Maybe the biggest one of all. One truth is, you spent your life trying to measure up to a father who was a liar. And I spent mine trying to save a piece of shit I thought was my father, but he dragged me down with him like a drowning man.”

I didn’t know what to say to this.

“But that ain’t the bottom truth,” Lincoln said. “That’s just currents in the water.”

“What’s the bottom truth?”