“You want the neighbors asking everybody what the sheriff’s department was doing at your folks’ house?”

I look up the street. There are still lights in a few windows. “How do I know you’re not in with whoever shot at me tonight?”

“If I wanted you dead, your mama would be at the funeral home right now.”

This is easy enough to believe. “Okay. Ride.”

Ike Ransom drives up to the bypass and heads south. Most of the traffic is eighteen-wheelers bound north for the interstate junction sixty miles away, or west for the bridge over the Mississippi.

“What’s this about, Ike?”

He glances at me. “You know me?”

“My friend did. What’s the big secret?”

“It’s about Del Payton.”

“I told you I didn’t want to hear about that.”

“It’s about you and Del both.”

“Me and Del? I was only eight years old when the guy died.”

He looks at me again, the yellow sclera of his eyes washed white by oncoming headlights. “He didn’t die, college boy. He was murdered. There’s a difference. You and him tied together, though. Ain’t no doubt about that.”

“How do you figure that?”

“First tell me why you said what you said in the paper.”

“I was talking through my hat. I wasn’t thinking.”

“That newspaper bitch didn’t pick Del’s name out of the blue.”

“I mentioned him.”

“There you go.”

I sigh in frustration. “I’m lost, Ike.”

“That’s for damn sure. Can’t you see? Del died thirty years ago and nobody paid for it. His soul ain’t never been at rest. It’s been wandering ’round here all this time, looking for peace. But it can’t get no peace. Not while his killers walk free.”

Maybe Ike the Spike is some kind of religious nut.

“Now, here you come, thirty years later, and in one day you got more people talking about Del’s killing than they was the day he died.”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“That don’t matter. Don’t you see? What goes around comes around! You just an instrument. An instrument of a higher power.”

“I’m a guy with a big mouth. I’m not an instrument of anything.”

Ransom shakes his head and laughs with eerie certainty. “You just sit tight. You gonna understand everything in a minute. You gonna thank old Ike for this one.”

He turns right at the Ford dealership and crosses Lower Woodville Road near the paper mill, which glows fluorescent in the dark like a small city, churning white smoke into the night sky.

“Where are we going? The river?”

“Battery plant.”

“The battery plant? What for?”

“Privacy. They closed right now. Asian market’s down. They crank back up in thirty-six hours.”