A long exhalation. An expression of relief I can only guess at. He’s been waiting with the same anxiety his patients suffer through when awaiting a call from him about test results. “Jesus,” he breathes. “Son, you don’t know—”

“Forget it, Dad. It’s all over. We’ll talk tonight, okay?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it. It’s a new world. I’ll see you tonight.”

I punch off and zoom south toward Natchez, profoundly aware of the gun in my pocket. I feel like a character from Poe, the symbol of guilt attached to my body and screaming for atonement. But there’s no danger. Ray Presley is happy with his seventy-five grand. He isn’t calling anybody about that gun. Not today, anyway. With every mile I put between myself and his trailer, the burden of my father’s anxiety falls away, and my mind returns to its own selfish concerns.

Ike Ransom awakened a sleeping giant within me. The giant is anger. Anger so profound, complex, and deeply buried that I have never fully plumbed it. I have, in fact, spent years not thinking about it, which required that a constant portion of my life energy be devoted to denial. Yet the anger was always there, pulsing quietly beneath my surface life, affecting my judgment, my decisions, my very concept of justice and morality. For years I thought it was based on Leo Marston’s attack on my father, but this was self-delusion. My anguish was not for my father’s pain but for my own. The most devastating result of Marston’s merciless legal persecution of my father was the end of any possibility that Olivia Marston and I would have a future together. And that altered my life in ways beyond measuring. Ultimately, it weakened my character, like a crack in the steel of a bridge. Because always, at the periphery of my existence, the unwalked road of my life with Livy stretched tangentially to infinity, to be reflected upon only in sadness, frustration, and regret. Last night Ike Ransom offered me a chance I never thought I would get: a chance to settle up with Leo Marston for all he did to me and my family. To put paid to two decades of resentment and confusion.

The sheer power of my desire to destroy the man disturbs me. As a prosecutor I tried to divorce myself from the concept of revenge. Justice, not punishment, was my ideal. I didn’t always succeed, but I tried. This is different. I have no idea how Leo Marston could be involved in Payton’s murder, but he is a complex man of vast appetites, and he has rarely been thwarted in his desires. I can easily envision a situation in which he let his temper get the best of him. Great wealth does not confer immunity to violent impulses.