“Would you look at this?” Sam mutters, looking over his shoulder. “It’s the same car.”

The sheriff’s cruiser sits idling in the street, fifteen yards behind us.

Bolstered by the confidence of being on my father’s property, I set the .45 in Sam’s lap, climb out of the Hummer, and walk toward the car. The passenger window whirs down into the door frame. It’s the black deputy who followed me before. I put my hands on the door and lean into the window.

“Can I help you?”

The deputy says nothing. He has a bald, bullet-shaped head dominated by black eyes set in yellow sclera shot with blood. He’s at least fifty, but he fills out his brown uniform like an NFL cornerback. Even at rest he radiates coiled energy.

“You were following me earlier tonight, right?”

The black eyes burn into mine with unsettling intensity. “Could have been,” he says in a gravelly voice.

“Ten seconds after you passed me, somebody shot up my car. You stopped. Why didn’t you help me?”

“I didn’t hear no shots. I saw you stop. I waited to make sure you started again. Why didn’t you report it if you was shot at?”

“What the hell is this about, Deputy? Why are you following me?”

He purses his lips and taps the steering wheel. “Get rid of your friend. Tell him I warned you off the Payton case, then go inside. After he leaves, meet me back out here.”

“Look, if this is about Del Payton—”

“This is about you, Penn Cage.” He spears me with a chilling stare. “And unfinished business.”

Unfinished business? A needle of fear pushes through my gut. Could he be talking about Ray Presley? Could he know something about what happened in Mobile in 1973? “Do you know a man named Ray Presley, Deputy?”

His jaw muscles flex into knots. “I know that motherfucker.”

“Does this have anything to do with him?”

“It might. You just be out here when I get back.”

He presses the accelerator, spinning me away from the car. After regaining my balance, I watch the cruiser disappear, then walk back to the driver’s window of the Hummer.

“What the hell was that about?” Sam asks.

“How many black sheriff’s deputies are there?”

“Nine or ten, I think. That was one of them?”

“Yeah. Fiftyish, but tough. Bald-headed.”

“Had to be Ike Ransom. You know him.”

“I do?”

“Ike the Spike. Remember?”

I do remember. Ike “the Spike” Ransom was a legendary football star at Thompson, the black high school, in the mid-sixties. He was so good that his exploits were trumpeted in the pages of the Examiner despite his skin color, and the records he set had held until Sam and I played ball ten years later.

“What the hell did Ike Ransom want here?” Sam asks.