Sleepy had made his usual rounds tonight, which was how he’d recently gotten reacquainted with the characters from the bad old days of his youth. It was also how he’d discovered the Audi S4 parked outside the Concordia Beacon. While he waited to see who would come out and claim that car, a sheriff’s cruiser had pulled up and scared him off. By pulling around to Main Street and waiting a couple of minutes, Sleepy had managed to follow the Audi back to Natchez, to a town house on Washington Street. There the car’s owner had gotten into some kind of confrontation with a black man in a white pickup truck with Illinois plates. By rolling down his window at the nearest intersection, Sleepy had heard the truck’s driver refer to the white man as “Mayor.”

Then he’d understood. Henry Sexton had been meeting with the mayor of Natchez, the son of a doctor who had sewed up Sleepy’s right knee when he was a little boy. Rumors were already circulating that Dr. Cage had killed his old nurse as part of some suicide pact, but most folks seemed to think that she had been ready to die. All Sleepy knew was that Viola had been the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, before or after he left the South. And her brother Jimmy had been one hell of a musician—far better than Sleepy or Pooky would ever be.

Sleepy turned on the radio and searched for an R&B station. The sound of rap drove him crazy. He finally settled on Sly and the Family Stone playing “If You Want Me to Stay,” circa 1973. As the bass guitar pumped sinuously around him in the closed cab, Sleepy lit a Salem and wondered at the tragedy that, of Jimmy, Pooky, and himself, only one had survived to hear this song on the radio.

If God has a plan, he thought, it’s a piss-poor one.

TUESDAY

CHAPTER 33

SHERIFF BILLY BYRD personally arrested my father at 8:45 A.M. Dad was sitting at the breakfast table when the law arrived. Mom sat opposite him with a cup of coffee and a Dopp kit filled with prescription drugs in front of her, while I talked to her on the telephone, reassuring her that I would be waiting at the sheriff’s department. A strangled sob came over the line.

As I sped toward the sheriff’s department, my mother called my cell phone and told me that a deputy had handcuffed Dad before they put him in the backseat of the cruiser, with all the neighbors watching. She was terrified that he would develop chest pain on the way to the station; his nitro tablets were sitting in a Ziploc bag on the passenger seat of her car. Surely, I thought, Dad kept a couple of tablets in his pocket for the ride downtown.