by Attica Locke
“Of course.” And then Darren heard footsteps, Mack coming off the porch and walking away from the house; the background noise went from the hum of a television to the hum of tree frogs in the pines surrounding Mack’s land. “But Darren, see, there’s things in this that you don’t know.”
“Don’t need to.” The less he knew, the better. Mack had never actually confessed. It was a gun on his property, that’s all Darren really knew. And that’s all he wanted to know. Any more, and to protect Mack, he’d have to perjure himself.
“That night, Darren, I had—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Stop. Just stop.”
Mack fell silent on the other end of the phone. His voice came back soft and ashamed. “Don’t mean you no harm.”
“I’m sorry, Mack,” Darren said, not wanting the old man to feel he’d been scolded. “It’s just I’m on this job up here in Jefferson, a missing kid—”
“Aw, no,” Mack said with a feel for the tragedy of it.
“I guess I’m just a little on edge.”
“Understood.”
“But, look, Mack, you do me a favor?” Good Lord, am I really gon’ do this? “Any chance you could run five hundred dollars to Puck who stays up in front of my mama’s house?”
“I don’t have that kind of money on me.”
“Run over what you can,” Darren said. “I’ll fill in the rest later.” He hung up before he felt any more nauseated. He left his truck parked in front of the Cardinal’s front doors and brought in the last of his luggage.
Someone was in his hotel room. He knew it the second he walked in.
As soon as the door swished closed across the ruby-red carpet, he noticed the lit floor lamp, which he didn’t remember leaving on. Other than this slim shaft of amber light, the room was completely dark, including the hallway that led to the king-size bed, the bathroom, and the walk-in closet. Somewhere in that darkness, a body was moving. Darren had no idea how they’d gotten in or how long they’d been waiting for him. He pulled his .45 from his holster and a penlight from his pocket. He started down the hallway, safety off, raising his gun as the door to the bathroom swung open and Greg Heglund stepped out, squinting against the laser-like white light shining in his eyes.
Darren aimed the gun away from his best friend and cursed his name.
Greg found this infinitely more amusing than Darren did. He chuckled as he flipped the switch for the hallway light. He reached out to embrace Darren, who rolled his eyes and ducked Greg’s touch. “You didn’t wash your hands.”
“Did you know that urine is mostly sterile?”
“Mostly.”
“Come on, man,” Greg said, comically holding his arms out for a hug.
“How’d you get in here?”
Greg flashed his pocket badge. “And you add white on top of this, I can get in pretty much anywhere except Diddy’s White Party. Ironic, right?”
Darren rolled his eyes. Greg was a white guy who’d had an affinity and an affection for black folks his whole life, and he often took certain liberties when it came to his sometimes questionable sense of humor. But he was a solid dude whose heart and politics had always been in the right place, even before he joined the Bureau. Darren was happy to see him, but he felt a little ambushed. “When you sent me that text, you didn’t say anything about being in Jefferson.”
“I thought I’d surprise you.”
He was wearing a black suit and a black tie, and with his boyish good looks and bright, eager green eyes, Greg looked like a Mormon or a particularly cheerful funeral director. “And anyway, I was supposed to be gone by now.”
Greg had parlayed his limited role in the double homicide this October in Lark—namely, those four minutes on camera discussing hate crimes—into a spot on a task force that was documenting a rise in hate crimes since the election. He echoed the same fear as Lieutenant Wilson, that no one knew where the Justice Department’s priorities would lie on the other side of Trump’s swearing-in. And before the current administration turned off the lights on its way out, the feds wanted all of this written down. They wanted history to remember. Greg had been traveling through counties in East Texas, from Houston up to Dallas, documenting every church and mosque defacing, every black doll hung from a tree as a joke, and every real black body found the same way. There’d been two in Texas this winter, one out near Waco and the other up in Bowie County, where Bill King was currently incarcerated. Greg, it turned out, had even been to Hopetown. He’d met and talked to Mr. Page, to Margaret Goodfellow and her extended family. There were reports that intimidation and threats had been coming from the newer residents out there, the folks in the trailer park. And then, of course, there’d been the explicit vandalism. “The n-word,” Darren said, nodding.
“Among other things.”
“Page said something about a church.”
“Not a church like you or I understand it, but a house of worship, yes,” Greg said. “It’s a hut, a round hutch-looking thing Margaret Goodfellow’s people built.”
“They’re Indian, Caddos.”
Greg nodded. “Some of the only ones left in this state. The rest settled in Oklahoma, forced out along with every other tribe under the sun.”
There were rumors of Caddo in the Mathews bloodline, but Darren had never met a Caddo Indian until today and knew nothing about the tribe except what his seventh-grade Texas History teacher had seen fit to share, which was not much.
“What happened to the church?” he asked.
“Couple kids tried to burn it down. Levi King was a little shit.”
Darren sighed from the weight of trying to mitigate. “He’s nine.”
“And then he’s nineteen,” Greg said. He sank onto the edge of the suite’s living-room sofa. “Right now, he’s just playing out what he sees around him on a level he can handle; he takes out his anger at the world on anybody different, repeats what he hears in his house. But ten years from now, I guarantee that boy’s gon’ be jumping into the Brotherhood just like his daddy, and then he won’t be just spray-painting the old man’s house; he’ll be killing Leroy Page.”
“Sounds like some ISIS shit,” Darren said. “Mix an unhappy home life with few legal economic opportunities, shake and stir, then let ferment—”
“And in a few years, you got a homegrown terrorist.”
For a moment, Darren saw the whole thing play out as if it were a reel from a nightmare, saw how likely it was that, given time, Levi would be a racist as dangerous as his father, who’d choked a black man to death behind a gas station and lit his body on fire. Darren had a furtive, almost painful thought of putting down a sick puppy, of turning his back on Levi completely. He knew it was wrong. He had to allow for the possibility that none of this would happen—his badge required it. Levi was a nine-year-old whose future could not be divined from the leaves of his family tree. Plus saving Levi gave Darren moral cover for framing Bill King. He didn’t have to like the fucking kid, but he still had to look for him, he said.
“Oh, that kid’s dead.” Greg said it so matter-of-factly, he very nearly followed it with a yawn. He glanced at his watch and looked up at Darren, who’d felt a jolt of something when Greg said the kid was dead, the whisper of truth in it and the press of responsibility. Greg wondered if Darren had eaten yet, said he’d not had a proper bowl of gumbo since he’d been here, and now that he was staying for a while, he might as well get some Creole food. Darren tensed, every muscle prepared for a blow, when he asked Greg why he was staying. Some part of him already knew the answer, knew the shit show that was coming. “We think this is a hate crime,” Greg said. “The FBI wants me to stay.”
Part Three
10.
GREG WANTED to drive the twenty miles or so across the border for the real shit. But Darren didn’t feel comfortable leaving the state, not while he was on a job. Nor did he want to chance running into his would-be minder Deputy Briggs, at the riverboat restaurant, so they ended up at a bar called Froggy’s, the o
nly place in downtown Jefferson where Darren could get a real drink in peace. The gumbo was a roux-less embarrassment—thin as soup, with bland sausage and hard pieces of okra floating in an oily red lake that had been peppered to death—but the liquor was top shelf. Darren ordered a Knob Creek neat and Greg lined up two beers on the bar top so they could talk uninterrupted for the next half hour. They cut quite a sight, the two of them. Darren had removed his badge and looked like a black cowboy who’d wandered into the wrong bar; Greg, with his tailored suit and wing-tip shoes, stood out like an Easter Bunny at a Santa Claus convention, an oddity that even his race couldn’t close the gap on. The other white men in the bar were dressed in T-shirts, Wranglers, and work boots.
Greg liked Mr. Page for the homicide.
A homicide that Darren had to remind him hadn’t been established.
“Three days, no one’s seen or heard from the kid, and you said yourself the grandmother doesn’t know where he is. But what we do know, by his own admission, is that Leroy Page was the last one to see the kid Friday night.”
“A weird admission if you killed the kid.”
“Or genius,” Greg said. “Make himself seem honest and cooperative.”
Darren remembered being brusquely escorted out of the old man’s house this evening when he’d asked to search the place. Cooperative is not the word he would use to describe Leroy Page. “What’s the motive?” Darren said, attempting but coming up short at making this all seem absurd. He shivered to think how casually he’d contemplated the kid’s demise himself. He glanced at his face in the red-tinsel-framed mirror behind the bar. Either the mirror was warped or the bourbon was moving at light speed because the man he saw was grotesque to him: skin the color of tree bark on a dying oak, ashy and gray, and a hunch in his shoulders that had settled in he didn’t know when. He hadn’t been himself since the thing with Mack had fucked with his lens on the world, making him unsure when he was on the side of right and when he was dead wrong.
You’re losing yourself, son, he heard his uncle William say. Don’t let anybody steal your grace.
But why, he wanted to ask, is the weight of grace always on us?
“Do you know somebody left dog shit on Mr. Page’s doorstep?”
“The kid?”
“It’s bigger than Levi, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Do you know a man broke into Margaret Goodfellow’s home, stood over her bed in the middle of the night, and threatened to rape her? An eighty-year-old woman? Do you know somebody shot through the stables? Lucky they didn’t kill the old man’s horses. They broke into his boathouse, stole a two-hundred-dollar motor.”
“And all this started after the election?” It fit a pattern of racial violence that had emerged over the past few weeks, Darren thought, like a ghostly relative in a daguerreotype who had always been there but was now impossible to ignore.
“That’s coincidental, not causal, in this case.”
“Thought you don’t believe in coincidence,” Darren said. He nodded to the bartender for another drink, even though Greg wasn’t through his first beer.
“This all jumped off when Page decided to sell the land.”
“Who’s he selling to?”
“Some developer out of Longview, man named Sandler Gaines.”
“Developer?” Darren said. He grabbed a notepad from his front pocket and wrote it down. “What, he’ll tear it all down and build lakefront condos?”
“Who knows?”
Darren thought about Margaret Goodfellow’s and her family’s homes on the lake. How did Leroy Page imagine they wouldn’t be razed along with everything else? He thought of the friendly trade of eggs and pecans, greens out of the garden, the offers of daily meals and fellowship, and he felt rather acutely a loss of something that he didn’t have a real claim to, hadn’t known existed twenty-four hours ago. The sale of Hopetown, its utter demolishment, seemed a spiritual impossibility. Could Texas, which left standing monuments to its own defeats and embarrassments, really destroy the history of Hopetown, a community that had thrived against all odds, even the arrival of the ABT?
He asked the girl behind the bar if she’d ever heard of the place. “Slave settlement, out on the northeast shore of the lake?”
She was in her twenties with thick black hair and skin as pale as moonstone and as luminescent too. But that was makeup, probably. Her nails were painted and too long for this line of work, but she was on display here, her small-town stage. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” she said with a faint smirk as if she thought Darren was putting her on and she liked proving she wasn’t a sucker. “My maw-maw used to talk about runaway slaves and ghosts on the water, but I never known one black person to live on the lake. They can’t swim,” she said, not so much missing who she was talking to as using him as proof. “You know.”
Greg, disappointed, shook his head as she moved on to another customer, wiping the countertop with a rag as she went. “There go my plans for the night,” he said, revealing he’d had designs on the girl, plans that had now soured. Of course, he took a second look at the girl’s cornbread-fed ass. “Maybe not.”
“No shame,” Darren said.
“Plumb out, I’m afraid.”
“Marnie’s boyfriend, Gil Thomason, was he involved in any of the harassment in Hopetown, the threats against Mr. Page and the Caddo Indians?”
“Of course. He’s HCIC out there. Head cracker in charge.”
“Jesus, Greg, keep your voice down.”
But nobody could hear them over the George Strait that was thrumming through the overhead speakers. Didn’t stop their stares, though. Darren kept his eyes on two white dudes sitting at a table by the door. One of the men—eyes black beneath the brim of a red ball cap whose white lettering Darren didn’t need to read to catch its meaning—was watching Darren a little too closely. Slowly, Darren pulled his badge from his pants pocket, held it so it caught the amber light of the neon signs behind the bar, then set it on the oak-lined bar top. The guy with the red cap leaned across his table and whispered something to his drinking buddy, and Darren turned his body so that his back wasn’t to the man and his holster was more clearly visible. Greg saw all this and gestured for the check. Darren told him to put his hand down and instead ordered another bourbon to show that he wasn’t going anywhere.
Greg knew what he was doing. “Ain’t worth it, D.”
“I’m still thirsty.” Darren shot a look of cold rebuke to the other table.
“Thought you quit anyway,” Greg said, nodding at the third glass of bourbon that had found its way to Darren. He looked at Greg and made a face, somewhere between mild irritation and confusion. He and Greg had spoken only twice since they’d seen each other in Lark, and his drinking hadn’t come up either time. Greg seemed to feel that he’d said something wrong, that he never should have opened his mouth. He ordered another beer to show he wasn’t judging. Then, with a pinched look on his face, he said, “Lisa told me.”
“When did you and Lisa talk?”
It wasn’t unheard of. In fact, there was a time when the triangle of their friendship was equal on all three sides. In high school, Lisa and Greg were as close as Greg and Darren were. They were all part of a junior bar association that competed in mock trials with kids from across the state. And when all three were in law school, Darren knew that Lisa and Greg had stayed friendly while they were both at the University of Texas and Darren had flown the state for school in Chicago. But over the years Greg and Lisa’s connection had thinned to nothing more than the slim filament of their mutual connection to Darren. To Greg, Lisa was his wife. To Lisa, Greg was his friend. They no longer socialized together. Darren couldn’t remember when the pattern had cemented itself, but neither had he complained. He’d been happy to have each of them to himself. So it made him unexpectedly jealous to think of the two of them talking without him.
“We crossed paths at the federal courthouse in Houston.”
“What were you doing there?”
face. “Maybe the old man had had enough.”
“But murder? A nine-year-old?”
“Who knows what happened out by the boathouse that night. Maybe the kid attacked him, made some threat about what his mama’s boyfriend would do—”
