I roll down my window and listen to the deceptively faint trickle of water moving over and through the gray riprap rock placed here by the Corps of Engineers to retard erosion. Beneath that sound I hear the nearly subsonic drone of tugboat engines pushing a quarter-mile-long string of barges upriver. If this truck rolled five feet farther down the ramp, the river would snatch us and send us tumbling toward Baton Rouge like a child’s toy.

“Look over there,” Lincoln says, pointing across a mile of open water at Natchez Under-the-Hill, and the great bluff above it. “Looks like a storybook, doesn’t it? The big antebellum mansions on the hill and the bars below, the lumber mill south of town and the Victorian palaces to the north. The cemetery and the Devil’s Punchbowl beyond them. But just a few streets back from all that, there are houses with holes as big as car tires in the floor. Shotgun shacks that look like they’re in some third-world country. And you’re the mayor of all that. How does that make you feel?”

“Tired. What’s your proposition, Lincoln? What are you selling?”

“I’ll let my product speak for itself.”

He reaches out one big hand and presses a button near the center of the dash. The truck’s cab fills with hissing static. Then I hear an old woman’s voice, cracked and reedy.

“I ain’t scared of you two,” Viola says. “You want to do what you done before, go ahead. I’ll bet you can’t do it anymore, anyway. You’re too old, like me.”

“You don’t want to test us,” says a strangely familiar male voice. “I promise you that.”

“I ain’t scared of you, Snake Knox. Or you either, Mr. Sonny Thornfield. That’s right, I recognize the both of you. I can call you by name. And I will, any time I feel like it. Your kind don’t rule this world anymore, not even down here in Mississippi.”

“You keep talking to that reporter,” growls Sonny, “you’ll find out what we can do around here.”

“Any damn thing we want,” says Snake. “Same as it always was.”

“I talk to who I please,” Viola says bravely, but then she coughs herself into a fit that lasts half a minute. Lincoln’s eyes probe mine as I wait for the voices to resume, but I give him nothing. “You’ll have to kill me to stop me from telling what I know,” Viola goes on, “and you can’t do worse to me than God’s doing already. I’m getting my punishment. I only wish I’d live to see you get yours. There’s a fearsome reckoning coming for you two. Yes, Lord.”

“Listen here, nigger,” says Snake. “You can die easy or you can die hard, like your brother.”