“The Glades, hands down. It’s stressful, the way they watch you. But the plants are peaceful. The Ravine is just a shitshow. I mean, they have us down in that pit, like literally trying to hold walls of earth from falling so they can install the slope protection. A couple weeks ago, this guy had his legs crushed in a landslide. If he’d turned the other way, he would’ve been buried feet-up.”

“I can drop you at home,” I said. “You don’t have to come with me.”

“You said if you found Zeke, it might help you figure out what happened to Jules.”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’m coming. What’s the pay, anyway?”

I wasn’t really sure what was fair, but when I offered her a hundred bucks, she took it like she was ripping me off.

Entering Manatee from the north, I began to feel a little like I used to in south-side Retreat. Behind Spanish moss you could see the tents, and scorch marks sometimes defaced abandoned homes. I almost expected to find a purple truck patrolling the area.

“You know that show Cops?” Tori said.

“Sure.”

“They shoot like 50 percent of Cops in Manatee.”

—

The House of Brothers was a two-story family home on the northeast edge of the city, oddly situated among derelict warehouses, with a railway track running behind it. Tori told me Zeke went to stay here a couple weeks after I’d seen him discharged. It was his last known location, she said, the best she could do.

I limped to the front door, my leg bandaged and tight, and Tori stood behind me as I knocked. A man appeared behind the screen. He wore a wooden cross and an apron smeared with black paint. In his automatic smile I saw a glinting gold incisor.

I told him I was a journalist and he was surprisingly eager, as if we’d made an appointment weeks ago. His name was Lourdes, and this was his house.

“I’d invite you in,” he said, closing the screen door behind him, “but I respect the privacy of the brothers.”

“That’s alright. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

Lourdes brought out a two-liter bottle of Coke and some cups, and took us to the backyard. To either side it was all concrete and dust, but this was a verdant patch, inspiring Tori to ask about his lawn-care program. We sat on plastic chairs and I set the recorder on the table between us. Throughout our conversation, a freight train eased its way along the nearby track, and on the tape it sometimes became difficult to discern Lourdes’s words from the wheels of the train grinding down the rail.