Frank smiled at Sonny’s deduction, but once more he shook his head. “It may come to killing Jerry one day, but right now he’s off-limits. I want him feeding the FBI a steady stream of bullshit on the regular White Knights. We want Hoover’s boys thinking they have their finger on the pulse around here.”

“Then who?” Sonny asked, genuinely stumped.

Frank grabbed two wooden paddles and shoveled the alligator steak off the grill. One venison tenderloin remained on the hot iron mesh, cut from a doe poached off the International Paper woodlands last night. After fishing a fresh Jax from the cooler, Frank swallowed half the beer in the can, then leveled his gunner’s eyes at them.

“If I dropped each of you in a hole with three rattlesnakes and gave you a machete, what would you do?”

“Shit my pants!” Morehouse cried. “And jump right back out.”

“You can’t get out, Mountain. You’re stuck in the hole. So what would you do? Start flailing around at everything that moved? Chopping snakes left and right?”

“No,” said Sonny, trying to visualize the situation. “That’s how you get bit.”

“Okay, Corporal. So, what do you do?”

Sonny thought about it. “Stand still, take my time … and when the moment’s right, chop off their heads. Closest one first.”

Frank grinned. “Outstanding.”

“What the heck is this about?” Morehouse asked.

“Killing leaders,” Sonny thought aloud. “Killing the guys who matter. You kill the head, the body dies.”

“De-capitation operation,” Frank said with a savage grin.

“What leaders?” Morehouse asked. “You talking about the head of the Deacons for Defense or something?”

“I don’t think so,” Sonny said, a strange thrumming in his chest.

Frank picked up a long barbecue fork and drew three letters in the sand at their feet: KKK.

“What the hell?” asked Morehouse. “You don’t mean kill Klan leaders!”

Frank scrubbed out the letters with his boot, then redrew them as corners of an equilateral triangle.

“I still don’t get it,” Sonny said.

Frank smiled, then reached into his back pocket and unfolded a page torn from a magazine. A photograph filled the top right quarter. In it, Attorney General Robert Kennedy stood beside Martin Luther King, while Lyndon Johnson towered above Kennedy to his left. An old black man Sonny didn’t know stood to the right of King. Bobby Kennedy was smiling in the picture, but King looked troubled, even afraid. Red crayon circles had been drawn around the heads of King and Kennedy. The caption said the photo had been taken in the Rose Garden of the White House.

Morehouse asked Frank something, but Sonny missed it because blood was pounding in his ears. He knew without asking what those red circles meant; he only wondered who had drawn them.

“What you think, Son?” Frank asked softly.