As he started up the eastbound span that arched over the red-tinged river, he saw the spire of St. Mary’s cathedral standing stark against the clouds. The sight lifted his heart. From this view, Natchez appeared to be the mythical City on the Hill. Sited on a high bluff over the river, the three-hundred-year-old town dominated the landscape for miles around, its churches taller than every other building but one. Natchez occupied the only such high point between Missouri and the Gulf of Mexico, and its citizens had egos to match it—or that’s what you believed when you grew up on the Louisiana side of the river. Living in the shadow of that bluff, Henry had felt a mixture of jealousy and resentment toward the people in the antebellum mansions across the water. He just knew that the folks on that hill believed they were better than he was. And from an economic perspective, they always had been.

The cotton barons of the nineteenth century—the “nabobs of Natchez”—had grown most of their crops on the Louisiana side of the river, but they lived on the bluff at Natchez, in palaces that would shame a sultan. High above the yellow fever and the riffraff that plagued the flatboat port at Under-the-Hill, they hunted fox, raced Thoroughbreds, and hosted glittering soirées while only a mile across the river the poor working sods tried to scratch out a living on the margins of the floodplain. The Civil War had taken the nabobs down a few pegs, but not to rock bottom, since the city had surrendered without a shot, dodging Sherman’s fury and remaining structurally intact. Several lean decades had followed the war, but during the Great Depression, a few wily old belles had restored their mansions, put together an annual Spring Pilgrimage, and started fleecing the Yankees and Europeans who traveled south to gawk at plantation palaces that dwarfed Tara from Gone with the Wind. Then, around 1940, some lucky redneck struck oil, and within ten years the city was rolling in cash again, selling black gold instead of white and lording it over every town for miles around. This second wave of wealth had brought Brody Royal his fortune, or the seed of it anyway. In the decades afterward, Royal had wisely diversified into a half-dozen other businesses that allowed him to ride out the oil bust of the 1980s like a southern John D. Rockefeller.

As if summoned by Henry’s thoughts, an oil field service truck bearing the blue legend ROYAL OIL roared out of his blind spot and passed him, headed east toward Natchez.

“I’m coming for you, you bastard,” Henry muttered, looking at his watch again and thinking of his upcoming interview. He could not afford to waste time with Shad Johnson.