The closest thing to relief I’ve felt in months courses through me like a rising breeze, and I get to my feet, the coin and the letter still in my hand. The rest of the mail falls to the porch when a Honda SUV pulls up to the curb in front of my house. As the back door opens and Annie gets out and struggles to shoulder her heavy backpack, I wave, then look down at the coin in my hand. Not long ago, this JFK half-dollar was hanging around the neck of Snake Knox.

“What are you looking at?” Annie calls, running up the stairs under the weight of her pack.

“Nothing,” I tell her, closing my palm. “Just a foreign royalty statement.”

“Oh,” she says, instantly bored.

I hug her tight. “Do you want to know a secret, Boo?”

“Yeah!” she cries, her eyes lighting up.

“This is one you can’t tell a soul.”

“You know I never tell secrets.”

Amazingly enough, this is true. “You . . . are my very favorite daughter.”

Annie shakes her head and laughs, the sound like crystal tinkling in a cabinet.

“How about we take a walk along the bluff? We need to run to the post office for a change-of-address form.”

She nods excitedly. “Let me put my backpack inside.”

“Hurry.”

She scurries through the tall doors, drops her book sack with a thud, then rockets back onto the porch. As we make our way down the right-hand staircase and across Broadway to the great bluff that follows the bending river, I feel something I have not felt in longer than I care to remember. Safe. We have no bodyguards tailing us, no enemies hunting us. None that I know of, anyway. The sensation is so foreign that it will likely take some getting used to. The weight of the pistol on my ankle became second nature for a while, but today it feels like a burden once more. Maybe someday soon I will walk out of Edelweiss without it, and only realize after I return what I have done.

But not today.

Acknowledgments

From Writers House: Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar.

At William Morrow/HarperCollins: my thanks to Liate Stehlik, David Highfill, Tavia Kowalchuk, Danielle Bartlett, and everybody in sales and marketing up and down the chain. Thanks also to Julia Wisdom, Charlie Redmayne, and the rest of the gang at HarperCollins UK.

Copilots: Stanley Nelson, Ed Stackler, David Hudgins, and Laura Cherkas.

My guide to the dark side of Louisiana: Frank Rickard (deceased).

Experts: Mayor Darryl Grennell, Mayor Tony Byrne, Sheriff Travis Patten, Mimi Miller, Ronnie Harper, Tony Fields, Tom Grennell, Marty Kemp, Inez Mason, Keith Benoist.

Legal guides: Scott Slover, Judge George Ward, Kevin Colbert, Rusty Fortenberry.

Docs who rock: Roderick Givens, M.D.; Michael Bourland, M.D.; Kellen Jex, M.D.

For a million things: Caroline Hungerford, Geoff Iles, Madeline Iles, Mark Iles.

Amateur southern philosophers: Courtney Aldridge, James Schuchs, Kevin Dukes, Billy Ray Farmer, Jim Easterling.