Hell, they’d already gotten rid of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest up in Memphis, leaving the bones of him and his wife in a concrete box, not a hundred feet from a community basketball court. It was a damn disgrace and a laugh riot that these people wanted to erase the history of his ancestors and folks who’d given their lives for what they believed was right. If Lovemaiden had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times. If some of these damn antifa millennials holding signs and singing rap songs wanted to head on into Parsham County and take down the soldier by the old railroad station, they’d have a real fight on their hands.

He shook his head with the thought of it as the radio headed on into a commercial about a big gun and knife show at the Jackson convention center. Two days of family fun with all kinds of guns, knives, and antique weapons. “Win a survival backpack valued at five hundred dollars, a brand-new Ranger ATV, or a Vietnam commemorative M16. Special appearance by YouTube sensation and catfish noodler Mary Beth Brown. And boys, don’t forget, women are always welcome.”

Lovemaiden wouldn’t mind riding down to the capital to see that Mary Beth Brown. One of his deputies had passed around pictures from the internet of her catching the big boys in nothing but a pink string bikini. Lord. The thought of them puppies swinging around in that little top nearly made him drive off the dang road. Instead, he belched into his hand while he turned onto the dirt road and parked, checking his watch for the time and phone for a message from Quinn Colson. He figured that tow truck would be here any minute.

The rain fell soft as he got out and stretched, turning his bad back this way and that, and stepped over a narrow drainage ditch to take a leak into a kudzu-filled ravine. He looked down to where folks had come to toss out old TVs, refrigerators, car engines, and buckets of motor oil. This was one of the main unofficial county dumps in Parsham and illegal as hell. Lovemaiden wasn’t into hugging damn trees, but he sure as hell didn’t like his county to look like a postcard from Tijuana.

As he zipped up his fly, he noticed the buzzards circling the ravine high above him, those big-winged, floating creatures zeroing in on something down in that old gully. Lovemaiden sniffed at the air but didn’t catch a whiff of nothin’. Although this was the kind of place where folks gutted a deer shot off-season and tossed the head, legs, and the guts. Or maybe some dog got hit on the road and made it down that hill to die. That ravine sure seemed like a good place to die, as nasty and godforsaken as any in his county.