‘This is Boots.’ He used one finger to stroke the head of the alligator, which watched Cab with beady eyes and snapped its jaws.

‘Alligator Boots,’ Cab said. ‘That’s funny.’

‘Boots could take your finger off if he were so inclined.’

‘Well, one of my guiding principles in life is never to stick my fingers in an alligator’s mouth,’ Cab said.

Twill allowed a smile to crease his face. His skin was a light oak color, with mottled darker spots on his forehead. He wasn’t tall, and he was skinny, with bony arms left bare by a loose gray tank top. He wore a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. One of his chocolate-brown eyes stared at Cab, and the other was fixed, like glass. A milky scar ran along the line of his misshapen chin.

‘So what is it you want, Detective?’

‘Are we off the record?’ Cab asked.

‘You don’t have to worry about that. Since the beating, I don’t write anymore. It scrambled my brain.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It is what it is. Like they say, the Lord closes a door, he opens a window somewhere else. I can’t put two words together now, but I can play piano like some kind of Art Tatum. Or at least it feels that way to me. Stop by Cherry Pocket for dinner some Friday. You can judge for yourself.’

‘I may do that.’ Cab added: ‘I suppose you can guess what I’d like to talk to you about.’

‘Sure. Ham Brock, Chuck Warren, Birch Fairmont, all that ugly stuff back then. You realize about a thousand cops have gone down this road before you.’

‘Well, do you mind going for a thousand and one?’

‘I don’t mind, but if it means giving up a source, even from a decade ago, I won’t do that.’

‘Understood.’

Twill pursed his lips. He glanced at his house and the surrounding woods, whose branches hung limply as if they were wilting in the humid air. ‘How about we go out on the boat? My new toy. Let me just put Boots in his cage.’

‘Do you think your house is bugged?’ Cab asked, with a small smile.

Twill didn’t smile back. ‘You never know.’

The former reporter turned on his heel and headed up the lawn toward his back door. He walked with a pronounced limp. He wasn’t gone five minutes before he returned to the dock, with a six-pack of Bud Light dangling from one hand. He and Cab boarded the airboat. Twill took the seat beside the rudder stick, and Cab sat next to him. Twill fired up the caged propeller, which howled like a Boeing jet, and smoothly guided the flat-bottom boat onto the lake.