sheriff’s cruiser sits idling in the street, fifteen yards behind us.
Bolstered by the confidence of being on my father’s property, I set the .45 in Sam’s lap, climb out of the Hummer, and walk toward the car. The passenger window whirs down into the door frame. It’s the black deputy who followed me before. I put my hands on the door and lean into the window.
“Can I help you?”
The deputy says nothing. He has a bald, bullet-shaped head dominated by black eyes set in yellow sclera shot with blood. He’s at least fifty, but he fills out his brown uniform like an NFL cornerback. Even at rest he radiates coiled energy.
“You were following me earlier tonight, right?”
The black eyes burn into mine with unsettling intensity. “Could have been,” he said in a gravelly voice.
“Ten seconds after you passed me, somebody shot up my car. You stopped. Why didn’t you help me?”
“I didn’t hear no shots. I saw you stop. I waited to make sure you started again. Why didn’t you report it if you was shot at?”
“What the hell is this about, Deputy? Why are you following me?”
He purses his lips and taps the steering wheel. “Get rid of your friend. Tell him I warned you off the Payton case, then go inside. After he leaves, meet me back out here.”
“Look, if this is about Del Payton—”
“This is about you, Penn Cage.” He spears me with a chilling stare. “And unfinished business.”
Unfinished business? A needle of fear pushes through my gut. Could he be talking about Ray Presley? Could he know something about what happened in Mobile in 1973? “Do you know a man named Ray Presley, Deputy?”
His jaw muscles flex into knots. “I know that motherfucker.”
“Does this have anything to do with him?”
“It might. You just be out here when I get back.”
He presses the accelerator, spinning me away from the car. After regaining my balance, I watch the cruiser disappear, then walk back to the driver’s window of the Hummer.
“What the hell was that about?” Sam asks.
“How many black sheriff’s deputies are there?”
“Nine or ten, I think. That was one of them?”
“Yeah. Fiftyish, but tough. Bald-headed.”
“Had to be Ike Ransom. You know him.”
“I do?”
“Ike the Spike. Remember?”
I do remember. Ike “the Spike” Ransom was a legendary football star at Thompson, the black high school, in the mid-sixties. He was so good that his exploits were trumpeted in the pages of the Examiner despite his skin color, and the records he set had held until Sam and I played ball ten years later.
“What the hell did Ike Ransom want here?” Sam asks.
“Same as everybody else. Warned me off the Payton case. I can’t believe Ike the Spike is a deputy. I figured he played pro football or something.”
Sam shrugs. “He was a cop first. After he put in his twenty there, he went to the sheriff’s department. He’s a bad son of a bitch, Penn. Even the blacks don’t like him.”
“What do you mean? He was a hero.”
“Ransom was one of the first black cops. I heard those guys had to prove they’d be tough on their own people to keep their jobs. Some people say Ransom was worse than white cops.”
“Great.”
Sam cranks the Hummer. “Forget Del Payton. Take care of your own. And if somebody fucks with you, give me a call. I can still pull your slack if you need me.”
I squeeze his shoulder. “Sounds like a plan. Thanks.”
He backs out of the driveway and roars away, the echoes reverberating off the houses on the silent street.
I walk into the garage and lean against the trunk of my mother’s Maxima. The high whistling cheeep of crickets rises to a manic drone, overpowering the buzz of the streetlight overhead and giving me a strange sense of peace. Our street looks almost exactly as it did thirty-five years ago, when we moved in. A few houses have changed color, some trees have disappeared, others have grown. But for the most part it’s the same.
In the corner of our yard stands a huge oak. When I was a boy, a wisteria vine grew around its trunk, spiraling around and around until it reached the high branches. My friends and I used to splay our bare feet on that vine, spread our arms wide around the trunk, and see how high we could work our way up and around the tree before we fell. I never won those contests; I had too much imagina-tion to successfully block out my fear. Back then the vine was the thickness of a boy’s wrist. Now it’s thicker than my thigh and looks as though it will soon strangle the old oak like a boa constrictor.
The drone of an engine cuts through the hot night air. As promised, Ike the Spike’s cruiser turns the corner and rolls to a stop at the end of our driveway.
I push off the Maxima and walk toward the street.
The inside of the cruiser smells like a black man sweating. I know the odor from summer jobs digging ditches and riding in trucks with men who gave off a different scent than I did—no worse but harder somehow, distinctive enough for me to know it forever. I pull the door shut, closing myself into an oppressive square completed by the dashboard, a wire mesh screen, and Deputy Ike Ransom.
“Let’s take a ride,” he says.
“How about you tell me what I’m doing here?”
“You want the neighbors asking everybody what the sheriff’s department was doing at your folks’ house?”
I look up the street. There are still lights in a few windows. “How do I know you’re not in with whoever shot at me tonight?”
“If I wanted you dead, your mama would be at the funeral home right now.”
This is easy enough to believe. “Okay. Ride.”
Ike Ransom drives up to the bypass and heads south. Most of the traffic is eighteen-wheelers bound north for the interstate junction sixty miles away, or west for the bridge over the Mississippi.
“What’s this about, Ike?”
He glances at me. “You know me?”
“My friend did. What’s the big secret?”
“It’s about Del Payton.”
