His breath is ragged above me, like a sick animal’s.

“Ike?”

“Where the fuck you been?” he shouts, and the reek of cheap whiskey rolls over me like steam. “Answer me, goddamn it!”

“Ike, what’s wrong? Let’s talk face to face, man.”

“I said, where the fuck have you been?”

“Colorado! I went back to see Stone.”

“I knew it! You sneaky son of a bitch. You been holding out the whole time. What that motherfucker tell you?”

“He told me what we want to know. He told me what happened here in sixty-eight. I’ve got Marston nailed, man.”

He twists around me and jabs the gun into my cervical spine. “What did Stone say happened?”

“He told me why Marston wanted Payton dead. It was a land deal . . . Marston stood to make a lot of money off some land, but he had to make an example of a black union worker first. He paid Presley to do it for him. Presley chose Payton.”

“Bullshit!” Another fog of whiskey blows over me.

“What do you mean, bullshit?”

“Don’t lie to me, goddamn it! Don’t you lie!”

He jerks back the slide on the gun, and everything inside me goes into free fall. My thoughts, my courage, my blood pressure. “Ike, please . . . I’ve got a little girl, man. Just tell me what the problem is and—”

The gun barrel rakes around my neck, under my jaw, up my right cheek to my eye. All I can see now is the taut belly of Ike’s brown uniform.

“Get up,” he says coldly. “Get up!”

The gun barrel stays screwed into my eye socket as I rise, but my terror abates slightly. The prospect of dying on my knees was as debasing as it was frightening.

Ike’s gun is shaking. As he pulls it out of my eye socket and lays the barrel against my forehead, I see his eyes, bloodshot and jerky, the eyes of a man in agony.

“You a goddamn liar,” he says. “I shoulda known a white boy wouldn’t go against his own in the end. You been dicking that Marston bitch all along. You in with ’em all the way.” He shakes his head as though at his own stupidity. “Setting up to get the nigger. Like always.”

“Ike, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m setting up to get Leo Marston, and I’m going to use Ray Presley to do it. If I can find him. Dwight Stone and Ray Presley are going to send that bastard to the extermination chamber at Parchman.”

But Ike isn’t listening. At the word Presley, his eyes glaze over with blind rage. “That fucking Presley . . . he told you, didn’t he?”

“Told me what? Talk to me, Ike! Something’s been eating you up since we started this. What is it?”