The eyes narrow to slits. “More than you, I’ll bet. I know what my mama knew. Your daddy might have shut her up last night, but I’m still vertical.” Turner thumps his big chest with his fist. “I’m the chicken come home to roost, brother, the cat that got thrown in the river but finds his way back home. I’m the avenging motherfucking angel. A black angel! Men reap what they sow, Mr. Mayor. You’ll find out the details when reaping time comes.”

“When will that be?”

The low thunder rolls in his chest again. “When the judge and jury are listening. When all the cameras are switched on, and the lights are shining bright as noontime.” Turner jams his truck into gear with a lurch. “You take care now.”

The big wheels spin with a scream that makes me shudder, and the truck reverses up Washington Street to the intersection, where Turner executes a stunt maneuver that spins his vehicle 180 degrees. Gunning the engine, he fishtails up Washington, narrowly missing sedans parked on both sides of the crape myrtle–lined street. I stare after the pickup, recalling a night two months ago when a man far more frightening than Lincoln Turner ambushed me on my porch. But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

CHAPTER 26

HENRY SEXTON’S GIRLFRIEND lived in a leafy neighborhood near the western end of one of the two bridges spanning the Mississippi River from Vidalia, Louisiana, to Natchez. As per Penn’s instructions, Henry had gone straight there and loaded her shotgun, then waited for a retired cop that Penn had hired to pick up Henry’s mother and deliver her to Sherry’s house. He’d told Penn that the two women had never gotten along and never would, but Penn had persuaded him that twelve hours of constant fighting between Sherry and his mother would be preferable to both of them being killed. Of course, Henry had the much harder job of making the women understand what was at stake—without sending them into total panic.

Sherry cottoned on pretty quick. She’d always insisted that Henry was courting disaster by probing old Klan murders, and she’d often tried to dissuade him from pursuing potentially dangerous leads. His mother, on the other hand, believed that since nothing had happened to Henry up to now, nothing was likely to in the future. The white-haired old lady perched in a club chair in Sherry’s den like a dowager countess being forced to accept the hospitality of a peasant, while Sherry made futile offers of coffee, biscuits, fried chicken, and even banana nut bread.