The gate started to roll open and Sam Frye drove inside.

*   *   *

Reggie peeked into the dispatch to let Cleotha know he was headed up to County Road 380 to check on a fallen tree. Cleotha sat at the control center wearing her headset, watching the computer screen, sipping on a jumbo sweet tea from Sonic. She waved Reggie away, telling someone that she didn’t know a damn thing about some prisoner coming in from Lafayette County.

“What?” Reggie said.

“You heard about some man named David Allen Joy being brought over from Oxford?” Cleotha said. “Deputy said we got warrants on his ass for exposing himself to a gospel choir.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Man’s insisting on it,” Cleotha said, pointing to her screen. “He’s waiting outside in the rain right now, said he got transport papers and all that mess.”

Reggie slipped into his rain slicker, ball cap down in his eyes. He knew he’d hate like hell to have made this ride down to Tibbehah in all this weather for nothing. He looked at Cleotha, who stared at him, aggravated as hell, with that tired look Cleotha liked to give, until he said, “OK. Send ’em in. Unlock the gate. I’ll meet them outside and see what’s up.”

“If it ain’t one goddamn thing,” Cleotha said. “You know what I’m saying?”

Reggie didn’t listen to the rest as he got buzzed into the main jail door, meeting a trusty named T. J. Burgess who’d been at the jail for the last two years. He couldn’t last a day on the outside, getting arrested within hours of leaving the jail. It wasn’t so much that he was a career criminal, he’d admitted to Quinn, he just didn’t trust himself on the outside. He said he liked the routine of jail, knowing what time he was getting up, what time he was eating, and helping out with chores. T.J. was a good kid but had a serious mental defect.

“What we got?” T.J. asked. He was mopping the floor in the intake room, a slick checkerboard pattern of black and white linoleum tiles.

“Lafayette County’s bringing in some man named Joy,” Reggie said. “You heard anything about a man exposing himself to a gospel choir?”

“That’s some sick shit, Reggie.”

“Deputy, T.J.,” he said. “Deputy. How many times I got to tell you?”

Reggie stood by the sally port, watching the man get out of his patrol car and walk around the side of the vehicle. The Lafayette deputy was a big man in a uniform, a ball cap down over his eyes, his wide, hatchet face in shadow. The prisoner was short and muscly, half hidden in a hoodie so you couldn’t tell if he was Latino or black. He had his face buried down in his chest as he walked.