Ransom shakes his head and laughs with eerie certainty. "You just sit tight. You gonna understand everything in a minute. You gonna thank old Ike for this one."

He turns right at the Ford dealership and crosses Lower Woodville Road near the paper mill, which glows fluorescent in the dark like a small city, churning white smoke into the night sky.

"Where are we going? The river?"

"Battery plant."

"The battery plant? What for?"

"Privacy. They closed right now. Asian market's down. They crank back up in thirty-six hours."

There are few lights on this road. Beneath the sulfurous odor of the paper mill drifts the thick, ripe smell of kudzu, sweetened by a breath of honeysuckle. The river is only six hundred yards away, and just a few feet below our present elevation.

The dark skeleton of the Triton Battery plant materializes to our right as Ike turns onto Gate Street, then right again into a parking lot lighted by the pink glow of mercury vapor. The Triton Battery Company came to Natchez in 1936 to build batteries for Pullman rail cars. In 1940 they retooled the line to manufacture batteries for diesel submarines. After the war it was truck batteries, marine batteries, whatever fit the changing market. The last I heard, Triton was using its ancient equipment to produce motorcycle batteries for European manufacturers.

Ike stops the cruiser on the far side of the parking lot. We're sitting on an acre of gravel packed into dirt by years of hard use, bordered on three sides by trees and unkempt grass. The west side faces the main gate of the battery plant, with Gate Street running between. I used to bring girls out here in high school.

"Is this where Del Payton died?"

"This it," Ransom says. "Come on."

"Where?"

He laughs harshly. "You a nervous son of a bitch, ain't you? Come on."

I get out of the cruiser and follow him across the gravel. A massive old pecan tree grows out of a clump of grass at the center of the lot. The spaces in its shade are probably coveted by everyone who uses the lot.

Ransom stops ten yards short of the tree, his back to me.

"Thirty years," he says. "Thirty years ago Del Payton parked his Fairlane right in this spot. When he came out of the plant, the bomb was in his car." He half turns to me and spits on the gravel. "I seen car bombs go off, man. It's a motherfucker. That fire burned forty minutes before they got it out. Del was sitting behind the wheel all that time."

I stand silent in the buzzing of the lights, wondering where Ike Ransom has seen car bombs go off. He squats on his haunches and picks up a piece of gravel.

"A man's soul left this earth right here."

I walk a few steps closer. "Look, Ike… I know what happened that night. And I'm damn sorry it did. But I don't see any connection to me."

He stands and points at me, his black eyes smoldering. "I'm gonna say two words, college boy. After that you gonna be in this thing up to your neck."

"Okay."

"Leo Marston."

He watches me as though waiting for me to guess a riddle.

"Leo Marston? I don't get it. What-"

"Judge… Leo… Marston."

My palms tingle. "Are you saying Marston was somehow involved in the Payton murder?"

"Involved?" Ike the Spike laughs quietly in the dark. "Oh, yeah."

"That's impossible. What could Leo Marston possibly have had to do with Del Payton?"

"He was D.A. back then, wasn't he?"

My head is swimming. "Leo Marston was district attorney in 1968?"

"You didn't know that? It was in the article this morning."

I see my father jerking the paper from my hands and wadding it up. "I didn't read the whole thing."

"That wasn't too smart, was it?"

"You're saying Marston covered something up? Buried evidence while he was D.A.?"

Ike fires his rock across the street like a major league outfielder. It flies over the cyclone fence bordering the plant and strikes something metal, silencing the crickets for a few seconds. "I'm saying all these years that motherfucker been handing out jail time and making millions, he should have been rotting at Parchman Farm."

A dark thrill ripples through my chest. "You're saying Marston was involved in the actual crime?"

"I done said all I got to say."

"You can't drop a bomb like that and then shut up! How do you know any of this?"

"You a cop in this town for twenty years, even a black cop, you get to know some things."

The hair on my arms is standing erect. I cannot interpret my emotions. Fear? Excitement? I walk the ten yards to the pecan tree, unzip my pants, and urinate on its trunk as I try to get my mind around what Ransom has told me.

"Shook you up, huh?" he says, laughing.

I zip up and turn back to him. "You've known for thirty years that Leo Marston was guilty of a felony and you've done nothing about it?"

"What says I knew for thirty years? I wasn't on the job thirty years ago. What I'm gonna do anyway, man? A nigger cop on the bottle gonna go up against the judge? That's why you here, man. Takes somebody like you to do it."

"Like me?"

"You're white, famous, and you make your money someplace else. They can't hurt you much here."

"Who's they?"

"That's what you got to find out."

"Christ. Just tell me what you know. I'll take it and run with it."

Ike gives me a knowing smile. "You want Marston's ass bad, don't you?"

"Tell me, goddamn it!"

"That don't play, college boy. You gotta work your way to it. Then you'll understand."

"Why tell me this, Ike?"

"Why me, Ike? " he mocks in a woman's voice. "Don't play that shit with me! Everybody knows the judge went after your old man. Damn near got him too."

This stings me to the quick. "That's bullshit. My father was unanimously exonerated by a jury."

"I ain't talking 'bout that. I'm talking about damage. Doc Cage had a heart attack while he was waiting for that trial, didn't he?"

I nod slowly.

"Hey, I love your daddy, man. He took care of me when I was a kid. Took care of my mama till she died. That's why I'm telling you this. It's what the hippies used to call karma. What goes around comes around. That's what brought you back here. You the chicken coming home to roost. Right on Marston's ass."

"So give me what I need to nail him."

Ike shakes his head. "Gimme, gimme, gimme. I told you, it don't play that way. I can point you in the right direction. But that's it."

"I don't like playing games."

Ransom snickers. "That's what they do here, college boy. You ain't been gone so long you forgot that yet. Right now they playing their favorite game of all."

"What's that?"

"The quiet game."

"The quiet game?" Memories of Sarah flood into my brain, of her trying to trick Annie into being silent long enough for us to eat dinner in peace, by seeing who could go the longest without talking. "Who's playing the quiet game, Ike?"

"Everybody, man. White and black both. Everybody keeping quiet, making like things is sweet and easy, trying to fish that new plant in here. Nobody wants nobody digging into Del's killing. Nobody 'cept you. You got a reason."

"What about you? What's your reason?"

His grin vanishes as though it never existed. Hatred comes off him like steam. He extends his forefinger and taps his powerful chest with it. "That's between me and me. Del's killers is playing the quiet game too. They been playing it thirty years. Not even sweatin'. You got to make people nervous to win the quiet game. And I got a feeling you pretty good at that."

Something is coiling within my chest, something I have not felt for years. It's the hunter's tension, wrapped like the armature of an electric motor, tight and copper-cored, charged with current and aching for resolution, for the frantic discharge of retribution.

"A lot of people think poking into this case would be damned dangerous," I tell him.