At bottom, this was the reason Sleepy hadn’t contacted Henry Sexton. Because in spite of all the progress since the bad old days, nobody could protect you from bastards like Brody Royal. Henry Sexton couldn’t even protect himself. Oh, they’d sing your praises at your funeral for doing the noble thing, but you’d still be dead.

Sleepy touched the baseball card he’d taped to his dashboard before driving down from Michigan. The card bore the image of Gates Brown, one of the black stars of the 1968 Detroit Tigers team, which had won the World Series. Sleepy had actually made it to three of those games, and not much in life had come close to the joy he’d felt there. Feeling a part of that season was what had finally enabled him to tolerate living in the North. Ever since, he’d carried the Gates Brown card as a good luck charm, and it had often brought him peace during tough times.

“I could throw my cell phone in the river,” he thought aloud. “After I called 911.”

Then Sleepy realized that he knew too little about technology to feel safe even if he did that. Brody Royal probably knew people who could backtrack a 911 phone call and tell him exactly who’d made it. Sleepy was still arguing with himself when Royal stumbled out of the burning building and leaned against the side of the truck. The sight of the old man in such a vulnerable position made Sleepy want to drive down the street and squash him between the two trucks. His hand was rising to his ignition key when Royal’s son-in-law ran out of the building and pulled off his heavy backpack. Sliding down low in the seat, Sleepy watched the two men from beneath the arc of his steering wheel until the truck backed away from the burgeoning fire and disappeared down the dark street.

With shaking hands, Sleepy cranked his own truck and followed them.

CHAPTER 49

WALT GARRITY CRUISED slowly up the gravel road in pitch darkness while Tom studied the scope monitoring the GPS tracker on Sonny Thornfield’s truck. A hundred yards down the slope to their left lay Old River, once a great bend in the Mississippi River but now a lake created by a cutoff dug by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1932. You could still access the Mississippi from Old River, through a channel a half mile east of here, and that’s why all the fishing camps along Old River were built on thirty-foot-high stilts. When the Mississippi flooded, Old River did, too, and the only way in or out was by boat. But the people who owned camps here loved that isolation, and that, Tom figured, was what Sonny Thornfield had come here to find.

“Let’s hope he’s alone,” Walt said.