Lincoln wipes his mouth with a napkin and gets up from the table. He towers six inches above Billy Byrd, and he doesn’t make any effort to give the sheriff the space he’s accustomed to.

“You in the wrong jook, Sheriff,” he says. “We settle our own business up in here. Ain’t no place for the law.”

Byrd seems stunned by “his” witness’s behavior. Leaving his hand on his pistol grip, he takes a step back and says, “I’m the high sheriff of this county, boy. I go any damn place I please.”

“Then go,” Lincoln says. “Before somebody decides to disabuse you of your notions.”

Sheriff Byrd glances over his shoulder. The big bartender stares back at him, both hands invisible behind the bar. The waitress and cook are watching from the kitchen curtain, and there’s a cleaver in the cook’s hand.

“All right, now!” Billy says loudly, backing away from our table. “Nobody do nothin’ stupid!”

“That sounds like good advice,” Lincoln says.

Billy finally looks to me for help—the only other white man in the room. But I simply turn up my palms.

“Where’s my damn biscuits?” he calls, trying to assert the old hierarchy.

The bandanna-clad waitress slides between two tables with a small brown sack in her hand. As Billy reaches out with his free hand, she drops the sack on the floor at his feet.

“Sorry ’bout that,” she says, making no effort to pick it up.

“You people need a little reeducation,” Billy mutters. “Oh, yeah.”

The sheriff looks like he’s going to say something else, but instead he shakes his head and marches out to the parking lot, leaving his biscuits on the floor.

“I thought you were working with him,” I say to Lincoln.

“I’m not working with anybody, Mayor. I’m here for justice. I’ll use a cracker like Byrd if I have no choice, but I don’t have to like it.”

“What about Shad Johnson?”

Lincoln shrugs. “Same for that Oreo. But he’s the man in the DA’s office.”

“What were you doing outside my house this afternoon?”

“Looking at the life I might have lived, if things had been different.” He gazes down into my eyes with emotion that I can’t begin to read. “Think about what I’ve told you today. Think about what the Bible says: ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the father on the sons unto the third and fourth generation.’”

As he quotes the Bible, I sense a malevolent urge within him, something darker and more primitive than anything he’s voiced today.