“That woman says she didn’t mean to shoot him in the leg,” Reggie said, typing up the report on the laptop.

“I know,” Quinn said, lighting up the back half of his Liga Privada. “She meant to shoot him in the pecker.”

“Did she really say that?”

“Yep.”

“You want me to put it in the report?” Reggie asked, looking over at Quinn, eyes wide.

“No, sir,” Quinn said, blowing smoke out the window, watching the working girls at Vienna’s Place gather under the long expanse of its sloping tin roof. All ten of them were wearing black negligees, some covering themselves with black silk robes. In their thigh-high boots with the tall acrylic heels, they looked like a conspiracy of ravens.

“Never a dull moment in Tibbehah,” Reggie said. “This morning Deputy Cullison and I chased two brothers from Yalobusha County down County Road 191. They’d stolen six toilets from Robbie Neece’s work shed. The boy driving hit a pothole and damn near threw the commode into our windshield.”

“Where’d y’all catch them?”

“Highway patrol stopped them on the county line,” Reggie said, typing as he talked. One of the working girls at Fannie’s caught Quinn’s eye, opening her robe wide to show off her sparkling bra and panty set. She blew Quinn a kiss. “Mr. Neece sure was pissed about his commodes. Two of them got busted. Those damn brothers had been working for him on the new houses he’d been building up by the high school.”

Quinn watched two more girls wave. A new girl turned her butt to him and smacked it. Quinn hit the light bar on his truck with the siren and the black-clad ladies all stepped inside out of the rain. He continued to smoke, putting down the cigar for a moment, smoke curling up from the ashtray as the windshield wipers rocked back and forth. Fannie had added something new to Vienna’s sign. SUPPORT SINGLE MOTHERS.

“Any luck with those women from New York leaving town?” Reggie said, not looking up, the laptop screen shining on his face.

“They have every right to be here,” Quinn said. “I just don’t like them stopping by unannounced pretty much every other day. They don’t seem to understand forensics takes some time, especially in Mississippi. They think I’m hiding what I know about the body we found. And some other things, too.”

“What they were saying,” Reggie said, “sounded like a lot of bullshit to me. I’m sorry they’re making things tough on you and your family.”