“Y’all go ahead,” Dad shouts back. “We’ll clean up this mess and be inside in a minute.”

He slides a cigar from his pocket and puts it in his mouth, but doesn’t begin the ritual of lighting it. “You want another beer?”

“I’d better skip it. We need to take a ride.”

He raises an eyebrow. “We do?”

I raise my hand and make a mock pistol with my thumb and forefinger, then drop my thumb like a hammer.

“I see. Let’s clean this mess up for your mother first.”

As he begins wrapping the crawfish shells in newspaper, I carry the heavy boiler to the edge of the yard to dump the water. The gun is only twenty feet away from me, in the pool house, preparing for its final journey.

I am standing in the stern of a rusty green johnboat, poling it across a cypress swamp south of town. The sky is aflame with orange and purple light, the dying sun turning the hanging moss into long black beards on the cypress limbs. The johnboat belongs to a pumper who monitors an oil well that stays underwater for much of the year. The well has been pumping for over twenty years, and the johnboat has been sitting in a thicket nearby for most of that time. Sam Jacobs pointed it out to me one summer during college.

Dad sits forward, facing me, smoking his cigar and keeping watch on the receding shoreline. Between us stands a five-gallon plastic paint bucket filled with rock-hard cement. Embedded somewhere inside it is the Smith & Wesson .38 I bought from Ray Presley this morning. Dad flips some ash into the water and speaks in a casual voice.

“A patient told me she saw my car over at Willie Pinder’s house today. She asked if the ex-chief was having heart trouble again.”

“God can take a rest from watching sparrows fall in Natchez,” I reply. “Nothing gets by anybody here.”

He laughs mirthlessly. “And a rather strange fax arrived at my office this morning. A list of names with a note at the bottom saying something about Washington.”

I forgot all about the fax. “I’m sorry about that. Where is it now?”

He takes a folded piece of fax paper from his pocket. “What’s it about? This list?”

“Those are FBI agents who worked out of the Jackson field office in 1968. Did you see the name Stone on it?”

He unfolds the paper and scans it, then shakes his head. “No Stone. Where’d you get that name?”

“Althea Payton remembered a sympathetic FBI man.”

“And the visit to Willie Pinder?”

“Pinder had the original police file on the Payton murder. He stole it when he lost his job as chief. I bought it from him.”