“It would be to the advantage of everyone in this county if the truth was brought out. All of it. Including what happened after to that black fella.”

“Now, that sort of surprises me, Johnny,” Quinn said. “You’re not exactly one who likes to air the county’s bad business. I’d have thought you’d want to keep everyone quiet.”

“Come on, Quinn,” Stagg said. “I just try and make a dollar like everyone else. I ain’t hunting a man like he were some kind of animal. I don’t give a shit if he was black or white. You know much about the Staggs?”

“I know your people.”

“We been living up around Carthage for nearly a hundred years,” Stagg said. “We were all dirt-eating poor. If one family looked to hate another family for being black or white, we didn’t survive. That’s the way it had always been. All we needed to do was pay that rent to ole man Vardaman and he’d allow us to have a roof over our head. We were all niggers to those people.”

“Appreciate the history lesson.”

Quinn started to get up. Stagg reached out and clutched Quinn’s wrist. “Sit down.”

“Take your hand off me, Johnny.”

“Those people who done this were animals,” Stagg said. “You look down on me, always have. But I swam through a swamp of shit to get where I’m at. Before me, there were the Vardamans and the Stevens and they didn’t know how to tend to their own business. Before you were born there was a crew down here who ran things—hookers and dope—and no one had the balls to tell them to leave. You can call me a liar, but I paid your uncle twice a month for him to patrol the Rebel. These people paid him to leave them the hell alone.”

Quinn rubbed his eyes. Above Stagg was another picture he hadn’t noticed before. Barbara Mandrell and her sisters, with the biggest goddamn hair he’d ever seen in his life. Johnny Stagg pumps our gas! written across it.

“Who were they?”

“Miscreants, freaks, didn’t have no jobs or no beliefs,” Stagg said. “Didn’t believe in Jesus. Didn’t believe in America. All they believed in was an upside-down, double-fucked world. All for free. Motorcycle gang called themselves the Born Losers. That’s about all you need to know.”

“I’ve heard about them,” Quinn said. “Everyone in Jericho knows those stories, but they’re long gone.”

“Is that a fact?” Stagg said. The plate of lemon pie arrived and slid across to Stagg, the meringue nearly four inches thick. He reached for a fork. “Glad to hear it, Sheriff. Because those sons of a bitches just rode through here yesterday, wearing their leather and flying their colors and saying they were back to stay.”

“Why?”

“On account of one man,” Stagg said. “Chains LeDoux is about to go free. Stick around and I’ll tell you about the most evil bastard ever come to Tibbehah County.”

•   •   •

They’d called Brushy Mountain the end of the line, but it hadn’t worked out that way for Chains LeDoux. They closed down Brushy Mountain three years ago and sent him on to a new prison, Morgan County Correctional, which didn’t have the same heroics as Brushy Mountain. You felt like you were a part of history at the old place, fashioned from stone hand-cut by the prisoners a hundred years back, the entrance looking like a castle and the whole prison built in the shape of the cross. Something about bringing hope and promise and that every man could be redeemed. Chains started to feel a part of the place, although redemption was never on his mind, only an escape that would never come. For a few years, he’d taken it on himself to guard James Earl Ray, walking the grounds with the coot, listening to his wild ideas for breaking out, even though the old man had already failed a half-dozen times. One time Ray got as close as the next town and was found by the local police hiding in the bushes, pissing himself.

No, sir. A man didn’t escape Brushy Mountain. And now in Morgan City, it wasn’t nothing but a waiting game. Two weeks. Twenty years. And then it comes down to two weeks. What a gift.

Was he rehabilitated? Was he a changed man? Had he found Jesus?

Hell no. What Chains liked about the time in that old prison was that try as they might, they couldn’t bend him or break him or make him conform to the rules. You didn’t get your back broke or whipped or nothing, but they tried to break you with the fucking time. You got one hour in the yard—one fucking hour a day—to look at the layers of rock that had been blasted off the side of the mountain, counting the sediment layers, the amount of time it took, during the dinosaurs and cavemen and shit, when Tennessee was covered by an ocean with fish as big as tractor trailers roaming the waters. Sometimes when he wasn’t even drunk on toilet hooch, he’d see the mist rising off the walls of the mountain, covering the rock and the prison, and he felt like maybe he’d walked back in time. Twenty years. A hundred fifty years. Confederates, dinosaurs, and moonshiners running together.

Two fucking weeks. He’d already started growing his hair and beard out, just as it had been. The guards didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t their problem anymore. He’d gone in a hard ass at forty-five and would stroll out a hard ass at sixty-five, give the finger to the last guard he’d see and jump on his scooter—the boys keeping it clean, oiled, and running all these years. He knew there were Born Losers who were in diapers while he was running meth, ’ludes, and grass up from the Coast. And now they were joining in the brotherhood, wild and free, and taking aim right at the son of a bitch who’d cornholed his ass high and hard.

Johnny Stagg.

There was a mirror made of polished metal over his stainless steel sink. His face had a lot more lines, there was precious little black in the beard and the hair. But the body was strong, a lot stronger than when he came in all fucked-up on pills and booze. He wanted to be like that old Brushy Mountain rock, sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, etching his body with road maps of America, places he’d been and places he wanted to see. He’d had a big rebel flag tattooed across his back that said Southern Bad Ass and a Harley symbol etched on his flat, hard belly. He couldn’t wait to get on that bike, the club meeting him outside the gates of this joke of a prison. To call this place a prison was an insult to old Brushy Mountain. You walked out of that place and you felt like you’d been a part of history.

Here, you did your time. You waited. You made yourself harder and stronger and something more than you were before. He was a rock. He was mist. He was time.

Two goddamn weeks.

It was the morning of the Fourth of July and J.T. had bought some barbecue from a carnival vendor and served it up inside scooped-out watermelon halves. The watermelon made the pork sweet-tasting and nice with a breakfast beer. J.T. had the doors to his garage wide open, and even though it wasn’t much past ten, the day was growing hot. He had Jason’s stunt Harley on his workstation, welding the frame, his assistant Gangrene gone AWOL. The engine, tank, wheels, and the lot sat on a far table, waiting to be reassembled. Jason had left his trailer at the shop, too. Not much room at his daddy’s house. Jason knew as soon as the bike was done, he needed to head back west. All of it, the club, Jean Beckett, the whole damn town, pulling on him. Not knowing what else to do, he just sat cross-legged on that grease-stained floor of the garage, drank another cold one, and ate the sweet barbecue.