Billy laid his palms on the desk with restraint. “Are you going senile or what? The Beacon is a pissant weekly that people forget as soon as they wrap the garbage in it. But if you kill Henry Sexton, the goddamn lid will blow off this place. Penn Cage’s girlfriend will fill up the Natchez Examiner with Double Eagle stories. Then we’ll get Jerry Mitchell down from the Clarion-Ledger. That bastard got the Medgar Evers case reopened, and he’ll jump on your asses with both feet if you give him an excuse. We’ve got too much to hide for that!”

When Snake opened his mouth to argue, Billy rotated his chair and looked at the huge razorback mounted on a polished stand of swamp ash standing behind him. The kids in the family called it “Hogzilla.” His cousin Forrest had killed that hog; the spear he’d used still jutted from the monster’s back like the sword of a matador. The taxidermist had done a superb job: the hog’s eyes blazed, and its tusks gleamed like the deadly weapons they were. Billy often wondered at the courage it must have required to take on such an animal with only a spear and a horse. Seven hundred pounds of pissed-off razorback—

“Hey!” Snake barked. “You gonna just sit there with your back to us, like Elvis?”

After a deep breath, Billy turned, carefully spat tobacco juice into the shot glass, then looked up at his father with startling coldness. “Before we dispense with your insane proposition, I want to know something.” He jabbed a finger at his father. “And I want a straight answer.”

Snake regarded his son with some emotion between suspicion and malice, but Sonny nodded like a faithful lieutenant.

“When I heard Viola Turner died this morning, I thought of you first. So I made a couple of phone calls. And Sheriff Billy Byrd told me that Dr. Cage is going to be charged with that murder.”

Snake nodded, a little smugly, Billy thought. “That’s what we heard, too.”

“I know you guys went out to see Viola a couple weeks back. A friendly reminder, you said, that she needed to stay quiet until the end.”

“That’s right,” Sonny confirmed. “That’s all we done, Bill.”

Snake glared at his comrade.

Billy let the silence drag, but his father gave up nothing. “Be that as it may,” Billy went on, “I’m asking you two, here and now, did you kill that woman?”

Snake almost came up out of his chair. “You just said they’re charging Dr. Cage for murder! You think they’d do that for the hell of it?”