Louis seemed to tighten beside me. “To the prison?”

“That’s right.”

“I ask why?”

“Faulkner requested my presence.”

“And you agreed to see him?”

“They need all the help they can get, and Faulkner is giving them nothing. They don’t think it can hurt.”

“They’re wrong.”

I didn’t respond.

“They may still subpoena Angel.”

“They have to find him first.”

“If he testifies, maybe he can help keep Faulkner behind bars until he dies.”

Louis was already moving away.

“Maybe we don’t want him behind bars,” he said. “Maybe we want him out in the open, where we can get at him.”

I watched their car as it drove down Black Point Road, across the bridge and onto Old County, until they were lost from sight. Rachel stood next to me, holding my hand.

“You know,” she said, “I wish you’d never heard from Elliot Norton. Ever since he called, nothing has felt the same.”

I squeezed her hand tightly, a gesture that seemed equal parts reassurance and agreement. She was right. Somehow, our lives had become tainted by events of which we had no part. Walking away from them wouldn’t help, not now.

And we stood there together, she and I, as, in a Carolina swamp, a man reached out to his darkness mirrored and was consumed by it.

THE MAN NAMED Landron Mobley stopped and listened, his finger resting outside the trigger guard of his hunting rifle. Above his head, rainwater dripped from the leaves of a cottonwood, staining the massive gray trunk of the tree. The deep, resonant calls of bullfrogs came from the undergrowth to his right while a reddish brown centipede worked its way around the toe of his left boot, hunting for spiders and insects, the pill bugs feeding nearby seemingly unaware of the approaching threat. For a few seconds Mobley followed its progress, watching in amusement as the centipede put on a sudden burst of speed, its legs and antennae little more than a blur, the pill bugs scattering or rolling themselves into gray, plated balls to protect themselves. The centipede curled itself around one of the little crustaceans and began working at the point where its head and metallic lower body now met, seeking a vulnerable spot into which to inject its venom. The struggle was short, ending fatally for the pill bug, and Mobley returned his full attention to the matter at hand.

He shifted the walnut stock of the Voere against his shoulder, blinked once to clear the sweat from his eyes, then placed his right eye close to the aperture of the telescopic sight, the blued finish of the rifle gleaming dully in the late afternoon light. From his right, the rustling sound came again, followed by a shrill clee-clee-clee. He sighted, pivoting the gun slightly until it came to rest on a tangle of sweet gum, elm, and sycamore from which dead vines hung like the discarded skins of snakes. He took a single deep breath, then released it slowly just as the kite burst from cover, its long black tail forking behind it, its white underparts and head strangely ghost-like against the blackness of its wing tips, as if a dark shadow had fallen over the hunting bird, a foretelling of the death that was to come.

Its breast exploded in a flurry of blood and feathers and the kite seemed to bounce in midair as the.308 slug tore through it, the bird tumbling to the ground seconds later and coming to rest in a clump of alder. Mobley eased the stock away from his shoulder and released the now empty five-round magazine. With the kite added, that meant that his five bullets had accounted for a raccoon, a Virginia opossum, a song sparrow, and a snapping turtle, the latter beheaded with a single shot as it lay sunning itself on a log not twenty feet from where Mobley had been standing.

He walked to the alders and poked around until the corpse of the bird was revealed, its beak slightly open and the hole at the center of its being gleaming black and red. He felt a satisfaction that had not come to him in the earlier kills, an almost sexual thrill bound up in the transgressive nature of the act he had just committed, the ending not merely of a small life but the removal of a little grace and beauty from the world it had inhabited. Mobley touched the bird with the muzzle of the rifle and its warm body yielded to the pressure, the feathers bending slightly in upon themselves as if they might somehow close up the wound, time running in reverse as the tissue fused, the blood flowed backward into the body, the breast, now sunken, suddenly became full again, and the kite soared back into the air, its body reconstituting itself as it rose until the moment of impact became an instant not of destruction but of creation.

Mobley squatted down and carefully reloaded the magazine, then sat on the trunk of a fallen beech tree and removed a Miller High Life from his knapsack. He popped the cap, took a long pull, and belched once, his eyes fixed on the spot where the dead kite had come to rest as if he did indeed expect it to come to life, to ascend bloodied from the earth and take once again to the skies. In some dark place inside him, Landron Mobley secretly wished that the kite wasn’t dead but merely injured; that he had pushed back the leaves and found the bird thrashing on the ground, its wings beating vainly at the dirt, blood spreading from the hole in its underside. Then Mobley could have knelt down, placed his left hand against the bird’s neck, and inserted his finger into the bullet hole, twisting against the flesh while the creature struggled, feeling the warmth of it against him, the meat tearing as his finger probed, until finally it shuddered and died, Mobley, in his way, becoming almost like a bullet himself, exploring its body as both the instrument and the agent of the kite’s destruction.

He opened his eyes.

There was blood on his fingers. When he looked down, the kite’s remains had been ripped apart, the feathers scattered across the ground, the sightless eyes reflecting the movements of clouds in the skies above. Mobley absently touched his fingers to his lips and tasted the kite with his tongue, then blinked hard and wiped himself clean on his pants, both embarrassed yet aroused by this sudden conflation of act and desire. They came to him so quickly, these red moments, that they were often upon him before he could even register their approach and over before he could enjoy their consummation.

For a time, he had found an outlet for his cravings in his work. He could take one of the women from her cell and let his fingers explore her flesh, his hand over her mouth as he forced her legs apart; but those days were gone. Landron Mobley was one of fifty-one guards and prison staff who had been fired that year by the South Carolina Corrections Department for having “improper relationships” with inmates. Improper relationships: Mobley almost smiled. That was what the department told the media in an effort to cloud the reality of what took place. Sure, there were inmates who participated willingly, sometimes out of loneliness or pure horniness, or so they could get hold of a couple of packs of cigarettes, some pot, maybe even something a little stronger. It was whoring, nothing more than that, no matter what they told themselves, and Landron Mobley wasn’t above taking a little pussy as a thank-you for a good deed done, no sir. In fact, Landron Mobley wasn’t above taking pussy, period, and there were inmates at the Women’s Correctional Institution on Columbia ’s Broad River Road who had reason to look at Landron Mobley with more than a little respect and, yes sir, fear after he had shown them what they could expect if they crossed good old Landron. Landron, with his bleak, empty eyes seeking to fill their void with the reflected emotions of another, her lips drawn back in pleasure or pain, Landron making no distinction between the two extremes, the feelings of the other inconsequential to him but his preference, truth be told, lying in resistance and struggle and forced surrender. Landron, roving from cell to cell, probing for weaknesses in the curled forms beneath the blankets. Landron, filled with venom, leaning over a slim, dark shape, working at the head, drawing it away from the woman’s chest, paralyzing her with his weight as he descended upon her. Landron, amid the water dropping from the leaves and the calling of the bullfrogs, the blood of the kite still warm upon his fingers, growing hard at the memory.