Even Morehouse seemed unsettled by the anger that seethed through Frank’s pores like sour sweat. Sonny studied the two men with clinical detachment. The gentle giant had done his share of killing during the war, but Morehouse had quickly grown soft in civilian life, putting on eighty pounds of new fat. He stood with his thumbs hooked behind the straps of his overalls and masticated a blade of grass as though it required all his concentration. By contrast, Frank Knox still had a washboard stomach, ropy muscles with pipeline veins running along them, and eyes that Sonny had never seen more relaxed than when behind the sights of a .30-caliber machine gun.

Sonny didn’t push Frank for more information; whatever was coming would arrive in its own time. Keeping Morehouse’s body between himself and the sinking sun, Sonny sipped the Jax and watched Frank’s teenage son spray rooster tails out in the reddish-brown river behind his father’s souped-up bass boat.

“There’s reporters crawling all over Neshoba County,” Frank said, basting the gator meat with his special sauce. “Whole damn country’s stirred up, and it’s gonna get worse.”

Sonny took a bent Camel from his shirt pocket and lit it with a Zippo. “I heard they had navy divers up there, helping search for those corpses. You believe that?”

“Navy pukes,” Frank muttered, reaching out to turn up the volume on a GE transistor radio. Marty Robbins was singing “Girl from Spanish Town.” Whenever Frank saw a Japanese radio, he’d slam it into the nearest wall, and no one ever protested. “But it wasn’t any navy diver found them bodies,” he said.

“Who found ’em, then?” asked Morehouse.

“It ain’t who, Mountain. It’s how.”

Morehouse still looked lost, but Sonny’s eyes narrowed. “He’s saying they got rats up there just like we do down here.”

Frank nodded. “Federal informants, they call ’em. Paid Judases is what they are. Feds never would have found them bodies without help.”

“I heard the reward was twenty-five thousand dollars,” Morehouse said in an awestruck voice. “That’s enough money to buy a house and a truck and a boat besides.”

Frank speared him with a glare. “Would you sell out your ancestors for twenty-five grand, Glenn?”

Morehouse’s eyes bugged, and his cheeks filled with blood. “Hell, no! You know that, Frank.”

“My wife told me something weird this morning,” Sonny said thoughtfully. “Her sister lives up in Kemper County, and she heard some Italian bastard was going around Neshoba threatening people. She heard he beat up a Klansman, pulled down his drawers, shoved a pistol up his butt, and asked for the burial location. She said some Klan boys thought he was a mob button man.”

“When exactly did she tell you this?” Frank asked.

“This morning, in the camper. She talked to her sister just before we pulled out of town Friday.”