“They don’t really ride ’em,” Diane said, “they’re more tied to cattle dogs. The cattle dogs work the sheep and it looks like the goddamn monkeys are cowboys.”

“They dress the monkeys as cowboys?”

“Oh yes, ma’am,” Diane said, blowing out another stream of smoke. “Hats, chaps, six-shooters. The works.”

“Signs and wonders.”

Lillie just stood silent and watched Diane smoke the cigarette, no other vehicles in the gravel parking lot that morning. It was still early and the Farm & Ranch wasn’t even officially open yet. She’d left the front cattle gate unlocked and slightly open for a feed delivery, now sort of wishing she’d locked up behind her as she most often did. She wasn’t ready to get into all this again and wished liked hell she hadn’t let Hank Stillwell stir up the muck from the bottom.

“So everyone pretty much knew this man was killed because of what happened to y’all?” Lillie said.

Diane nodded.

“I wasn’t even eighteen.”

“But you do know who did it?”

Diane shook her head. She tossed the cigarette and started a new one. Lillie brought out her notebook and left it hanging by her right leg, not even opening her pen.

“But you knew,” she said. “Everyone knew?”

“I knew right away that a black man had been taken out and hung and then burned,” Diane said. “I’ll be real honest with you, Miss Virgil. You know how I felt?”

“Relieved.”

“Yep.”

“And now?”

Diane Tull’s face twitched a bit, sitting there on those sacks, mind back into the summer of 1977. She gave a nervous laugh, hands shaking a bit, holding the cigarette, as she blew out some smoke and wiped her eyes. “What I feel about it now?” Diane said. “How about shame? Embarrassment? Guilt? You want me to keep going, keep coming up with words on the horror of what they did?”

“You’re a hell of a person,” Lillie said. “If a man did that to me and to my friend, I don’t know if I’d care where he ended up.”

Diane’s face shifted into a bitter and knowing smile. “Shit,” she said. “Y’all don’t know?”

“What’s that?”

“Wasn’t him,” Diane said, shaking her head, looking away, crying again, feeling embarrassed for it. “I saw the man who did this to us not six weeks later. I told Sheriff Beckett and he told me to keep quiet. I told my daddy and he told me the same thing. No one would listen. I guess this story seemed a lot neater if they’d hung the right man.”

Lillie swallowed and took a deep breath, at first not seeming to know what to say or ask. “Then who’d they get?”

“First black man they could find,” Diane said. “Looking for the first tree they could find. I never knew the man’s name or his people. And I don’t think anyone else did, either. Can you imagine the horror of those bastards coming for you?”

“Who?” Lillie said. “Who were they?”

You know there’s an easier solution to this, Mr. Stagg,” Ringold said. “We need to consider some creative options on this issue.”

Stagg grinned, liking the official manners and formal way Ringold spoke. But the man was off base about his plans, not understanding the way this county worked. “You mean just kill the bastard?”

“Pretty much what I had in mind,” Ringold said.

Stagg glanced over at the black-and-white surveillance TVs stacked on the wall: restaurant register, truck stop register, wide shot of the Booby Trap stage, wide shot of the diesel pumps, and long shot of the parking lot behind the Rebel. They hadn’t had an armed robbery in seven years, not since that teenager from Pontotoc had come over and held up a couple working girls with a hunting knife. Stagg hadn’t had to do a damn thing other than disarm the boy, call the sheriff, the boy busted and bleeding and crying by the time he got there. The girls, all six of them, deciding to take matters into their own hands, inflicting a world of pain with their long nails and tiny fists.

“If you got a fucking copperhead in a jar, I wouldn’t advise you let it loose,” Stagg said. “You might have a plan for that son of a bitch, but them sidewinders are unpredictable, finding nooks and crannies and laying low till you don’t see them. That’s what this man is like, who he is. You think I hadn’t thought about just shooting the son of a bitch dead? How ’bout every day for the last twenty years.”

“He’s a threat,” Ringold said, arms crossed over his chest. “To your business and to all you’ve done around here.”

“OK,” Stagg said, picking up a toothpick, working a little meat from a back molar. “Let’s say we blast this bastard’s grits all over north Mississippi. Right? He’s gone, but our troubles are still with us. No, sir. You being an Army man, top shelf, with all that Secret Squirrel ninja training and all, should know not to prepare for what you think might happen but what could happen.”

“Yes, sir,” Ringold said. “I follow.”

“This man has a lot of friends,” Stagg said. “He’s the goddamn Will Rogers of shitbirds. They love him. Follow him to hell and back and beyond. They been waiting and planning for his release since his ass pranced into the doors of Brushy Mountain. If we take him out, they’re still coming. That’s what he’d want and what they’ll do. We ain’t dealing with rational people here. They don’t have any belief system other than to fuck up the order of the world.”

Ringold stood cocksure, with erect military posture that always reminded Johnny Stagg of that goddamn Quinn Colson. Ringold was the flip side of the coin: tough, good with a gun, but knew on which side his bread was buttered. He didn’t think Colson had all of Ringold’s tattoos, skulls and daggers and spears for the number of men he’d killed overseas. Colson was a Boy Scout, a non-realist, someone who needed to be taught the lessons of the world.

“But, tactically speaking . . .”

“Sure,” Stagg said, “he gets out. Yes, sir, he’s coming this way.”

“And what happens next?”

“That’s why I plan to keep that fucking snake in the jar,” Stagg said. “We do that and all the plans and bullshit and threats are gone. He wants to lead a revolt, a movement. He wants to come back to Jericho not ’cause it’s the best thing for his people. He wants to come back to Jericho to cornhole the shit out of me, the way I cornholed his ass more than twenty years back.”

Ringold nodded. His bald head catching in the light, the stubbled beard on his face more than the fella had on his head. Stagg was pretty sure he’d never seen the man as much as crack a grin, which suited him just fine. Ringold was the pure and unfiltered killing machine he wanted, and if Chains LeDoux wanted to ride his Harley and nasty ass on into the Rebel like a fucking parade, that Ringold would be there to greet him at the door.

“So how’s it work?” Ringold asked. “To keep him incarcerated?”

“I got things in motion,” Stagg said. “This man has secrets. Fucked up a lot along the way. And I got a long memory of this town. Even if some of our citizens think their asses are lily-white.”

Stagg swiveled a bit in his leather chair, the executive model in the catalog, pushing forward with the tips of his oxblood loafers. He nodded, again glancing over the surveillance screens, seeing a fat woman buying three Moon Pies and a Coke inside the Rebel, and one of the working girls not giving but a half-assed effort on the pole, looking dog tired or drunk. She’d need a talking-to. You work the pole, you work the pole. You didn’t know how to sell it, go back to your momma and tin can trailer.