“I heard his lawyer said today they’re gonna make a fight of it.”

“Sure sounded like it to me. But they got their asses handed to them all day long in court. If the jury could have voted right after that air force major spit on Dr. Cage, he’d already be in the bus headed for Parchman.”

“Yeah, but that’s not when they vote.”

“I don’t think it matters, buddy. That Avery’s been acting like he’s gone senile.”

“‘Acting’ is right,” Snake muttered. “Quentin Avery is the craftiest spade you ever come across in your life. You can bank on that.”

“Well . . . what do you need from me?”

Snake closed his eyes and made a command decision. “Tell me about Dr. Cage’s jail routine.”

“Ohhhh, shit now. Come on. Don’t go there. We got media from all over the world in town!”

Snake winced and spat into the river. “Start talking, Billy boy.”

As the sheriff reluctantly complied, Snake turned and walked up into the dark trees between the river and Rodney. A cloud of mosquitoes instantly swarmed his head. He cursed and swatted until they were a bloody paste on his cheek and forearms. He had no intention of becoming one of the ghosts of this forgotten town.

Chapter 44

An hour after nightfall, we finally caught a break. The one-sided nature of today’s courtroom action had an unintended consequence: after seeing how badly things were going for my father, Reverend John Baldwin and his son Reverend Richard, whom Serenity and I visited on her first full day in Natchez, knocked at my front door and asked to see us. With them they carried something Henry Sexton would have seen as the holy grail of local journalism: two photocopied pages from the journals of Albert Norris.

According to Henry, Norris’s journals disappeared from his music store on the night it was burned by the Double Eagles. Some investigators had even theorized that Norris had been murdered over the journals themselves. A set of accounting ledgers, these apocryphal volumes supposedly contained records of all the trysts Albert had arranged over the years between mixed-race couples, as well as records of bootlegging sales, loans, and many other activities that fell on the wrong side of the law. Henry had once told me that anyone in possession of those ledgers would never have to worry about money again, so valuable would they be as a blackmail tool.