“You think he’ll start singing some hymns?” Maggie said. The old woman beside her shushed her and held her sign even higher in her frail arms.

“Maybe ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’”

“Jesus would think he’s an asshole,” Maggie said. “Nobody cares about what he’s done or that he doesn’t even have a real agenda. This is the most broke-ass state in the Union. How about you fix our damn roads before trying to sell me your Southern history bullshit.”

“Don’t blame me,” Quinn said. “The Colson family joined up with the Union in Corinth. They didn’t give a damn about supporting plantation owners. We were too damn broke.”

“Rendezvous with destiny?” Maggie said, arching an eyebrow.

“This is a race about conviction and moral fiber . . .” Vardaman said, continuing, shaking his fist as he spoke, talking down from the lectern on the hundreds who’d gathered to hear him speak.

Quinn looked up and locked eyes with Vardaman, the man seeming to lose his place for a beat. He glanced over to a group of men hanging outside the shade of the pavilion, several of them dressed in military-style clothes, guns on their hips. Quinn had heard of them. Folks called them the Watchmen Society.

“Moral fiber,” Quinn said. “Interesting choice of words.”

“I don’t think I can take much more,” Maggie said, tugging at his arm. Her wrist was wrapped in thin leather bracelets and chains, nails cut short and painted black. Under her right arm was tattooed the words BE HERE NOW. Back in Tibbehah she’d been a bit of an anomaly, the kind of woman old folks might call a hippie. But Maggie was Maggie and Quinn loved her for it.

“Don’t you want to hear the big finish?” Quinn said. “I think he might just be warming up.”

“Not unless his head spontaneously combusts,” she said, sliding her hand down on his knee. “Now, that’s something I’d like to see.”

Vardaman had kept a big hunt lodge in Tibbehah County for decades, the source of wild rumors and sustained fact, a place where he’d worked out deals with some of the most corrupt sorry-ass people in north Mississippi. Several times Vardaman had been on the fringe of people Quinn had either sent to jail or shot. But Vardaman always slipped clear of it, like a man who stepped in cow shit and came out smelling like Chanel No. 5.

“If we don’t see this through,” Vardaman said, “you will be forced to bury our rich history and tradition in the red clay of Neshoba. I think our moral fiber is too tough for that.”

“How about me and you take a walk, Mags?”

“They sell daiquiris and margaritas by the Tilt-A-Whirl,” Maggie said.

“Can’t have an elected official drinking during daylight,” Quinn said. “We’ll have to be like regular folks and sip whiskey when the sun goes down.”