“She’s out of pain now,” Lincoln says. “There’s nothing left to worry me now but earthly justice. Before long, Tom Cage is gonna be standing in the dock in handcuffs, just like any old nigger brought there by the sheriff. He’ll stand there while all his lies are stripped away and his soul is laid bare before the town he’s been worshipped in so long. It’s taken a lot of years, but the truth he tried so long to bury has finally found its way up to the light.”

The specter Lincoln has conjured sends a shiver down to my bones. To see Dad publicly shamed as a liar might be worse than hearing he’s been shot by a cop somewhere. I know he would rather die than be seen to have betrayed the code he tried to live by all his life.

“What you thinking?” Lincoln asks, a strange gleam in his eyes. “You thinking life would be a lot simpler if my truck ran off the road halfway back to town?”

“No.”

He laughs softly. “You sure, Mayor? Aren’t I just like some girl you fucked and hoped never to see again, come back to tell you I’m pregnant? You want me to disappear. That hope is smoldering deep in that overheated brain of yours, even if you don’t know it yet. And the fact that it’s there ought to prove something to you.”

I lay my hands on the table and push my chair back. “I think we’re done here, Mr. Turner.”

“Sure. Go home to your little girl and pull the covers over your head. You won’t forget one word of what I’ve said. This is exactly what you hunted me down to hear.”

I reach for my wallet, but Lincoln waves his hand to stop me. “My treat, brother.”

This time when he laughs, it comes from deep within his chest, like the laugh of the voodoo master in Live and Let Die.

“What the hell’s goin’ on here?” drawls a redneck voice. “Family reunion?”

Somehow Sheriff Billy Byrd has materialized beside our table, his potbelly straining against his starred brown shirt, and his red-tinged cheeks shadowed by the brim of his Stetson hat. His high-pitched cackle merges with and then drowns out the resonant laugh of Lincoln Turner, but it’s the pistol jutting from his gun belt that holds my attention.

Lincoln is staring at the sheriff, but I can’t tell whether he’s been expecting Byrd or not.

“Mayor Cage,” Billy says, “we don’t like people threatening witnesses in this county. And this looks to me like harassment of a witness. This man here’s gonna help put your father in jail for murder, which means you need to steer clear of him till the trial.”