Quinn took a deep breath and stood, stretching his arms and back. Being in the truck for most of the day was making him more stiff and sore. He needed to get back on the fire roads even earlier tomorrow. “We both know Uncle Hamp was pretty good at looking the other way when he thought justice was served,” Quinn said. “What he did wasn’t legally correct. But he surely thought it was right.”

“He turned his head from something bad?”

“Diane Tull thinks so,” Quinn said. “Some men around here killed the man they believed hurt her and she’s having some trouble with that part of things. I don’t think she ever wanted that part of it to come up. She believes the man they killed was innocent.”

“Good Lord.”

“Took him out to Jericho Road where it all happened and hung him from that old oak,” Quinn said. “It’s still there but dead, black and charred. I think it was hit by lightning. Our uncle just sat off on the sidelines and let the whole thing go. She came to him later when she spotted the real killer and our uncle ignored her.”

“So who was the man?”

“Nobody ever knew,” Quinn said. “He’s buried in an unmarked grave.”

“Jesus God.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

•   •   •

After supper, Quinn picked up Boom and drove south out of Jericho down to Sugar Ditch, an old black community of shacks and hovels. Most of the people there lived in the bottomland along a creek that flooded with every rain. The buildings weren’t up to any sort of code—the county had no building code at all—and many of them didn’t have indoor plumbing. Most people didn’t own the houses, if you could call them that. They paid rent to the man who ran the district, a former pimp and car thief by the name of Dupuy. There weren’t a lot of places you could complain, as Dupuy also represented the district as county supervisor and conveniently fought against any building code proposals as “government interfering with our rights as property owners.” He drove a big white Jaguar, smoked Newports, and Quinn didn’t think he’d ever seen the man without a cell phone screwed tight to his ear.

Boom suggested they start off at Club Disco 9000, a place where Boom used to hang out before he quit drinking. One night, he’d beaten the hell out of four men—after the loss of his arm—because of a slight to his honor.

“Don’t have much reason to come here anymore,” Boom said.

Quinn pulled his truck into the gravel lot by the old cinder-block juke house. It was Wednesday night and there were six or seven cars and trucks parked outside. The music was loud, but since the place was set way back from any houses or trailers, no one ever complained. Most of the time the music came from a jukebox, but on weekends there’d be a band who’d play blues or Chitlin’ Circuit soul.

“They still pissed at you busting the place up?”

“I made good on it,” Boom said. “I paid off what I broke.”

As soon as they entered, the owner and chief bartender, an old black man named Spam, looked straight at Boom and then to Quinn and just started shaking his head. He leaned against the bar as they took a seat, Spam just taking his own sweet time walking down the bar, towel over his shoulder, before saying, “Please don’t start some shit tonight. I can’t take it.”

“I paid you for that table,” Boom said.

“What about the chairs?”

“Money should’ve covered the chairs, too,” Boom said.

“Hmm,” Spam said. “Thought part of our deal was that you didn’t come down here no more. People afraid when they see you, Boom. They don’t know if you’re gonna hug ’em or kick the shit out of ’em.”

“That was a while back,” Boom said. “This ain’t about that.”

“What’s this about?”

“Sheriff got some questions for you,” Boom said. “Appreciate if you help him out.”

Spam looked to Quinn and raised his eyebrows. “You fucking with me, man? You bring Boom Kimbrough down here to give me that gotdamn fist bump and tell me you’re cool. I know the damn sheriff. And you ain’t exactly the Good Housekeeping Seal, Boom. Got damn.”

“How long you been living in Tibbehah?” Quinn asked.

“Since I popped out of my momma,” Spam said. “I left for Memphis. I came back. Man, you know.”

“Were you here in 1977?” Quinn asked.

“What the fuck you saying I did?”

“Man’s not saying you did shit,” Boom said. “Calm the hell down, Spam. Just listen. He needs some help.”

“Mmm,” Spam said.

“You remember a man drove a black Olds,” Quinn said. “Probably new. Had shiny wheels and black leather inside.”

“You got to be shitting me.”

“Fella was a black man but had some kind of scarring on his face,” Quinn said. “Like he’d been burned.”

“Like Boom?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, “like Boom. Only Boom hadn’t been born yet.”

Spam shook his head, both palms flat on the bar. The jukebox playing a song with a woman singing “You Got to Lick It to Stick It.” Some of the folks in the bar laughing at the refrain, drinking some big quart Budweiser with a side of illegal moonshine that Spam made special. A few of them would glance over at Boom and then away, Quinn used to the stares about his buddy’s arm but also knowing these people were probably scared of the old Boom, the one who first came out of Guard damaged and beaten and into just tearing shit up.

“Man, Sheriff,” Spam said, “I don’t know. You talk to Dupuy?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Y’all ain’t friends?” Spam asked.

“I don’t think much of how he treats folks around here,” Quinn said.

“Before him, it was his daddy, and before his daddy was a white man named Bertrand Sinclair. And he was the worst of them all, ’cause he didn’t just give folks a shitty place to live. He made them work for it, pay for it, and end up dying for it.”

Boom looked up from the bar. A man walked past Boom and offered his hand. Boom offered his left and the man wandered off.

“I got it,” Spam said. “Fucked-up face. Cool car. Hadn’t been around these parts for almost forty years. Ain’t nothing to it.”

“Can you ask around for me, Spam?” Quinn said. “I’d consider it a favor.”

“Sure, man,” Spam said, offering his hand. “I’m just fucking with you. You’re all right, Sheriff Colson. You ain’t your uncle. Nobody can say that the law don’t care about the Ditch.”

Quinn looked at the man and shook his hand. “I do need to ask you something else about that time.”

“Hold on,” Spam said, heading down to the other end of the bar and popping the tops of two quart bottles of Bud. He gave the men two jelly jars filled with a shot of shine on the side. Spam didn’t have a business license, alcohol being illegal in Tibbehah County outside the city limits, and he was operating what would be known in the dusty statutes as a beer joint. “OK?”

“A black man was killed that same summer,” Quinn said. “Some men got together and took him out and hung him from a tree on Dogtown Road. Nobody claimed the body, but I was thinking he might have been from the Ditch. Maybe his people too afraid to claim him?”

Spam reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He thumped one free and screwed into his mouth, lighting up with a disposable Bic. “Shit, yeah,” Spam said. “I do know something about that. Everybody remember that day. Jericho went back to being a goddamn sundown town. You know? White folks thought this man had killed that little girl. But that man didn’t do nothing but get in their way.”

“Who was he?” Quinn said.

Boom watched them from his seat beside Quinn. There was laughter and good conversation and a very large woman on the dance floor with a very skinny man. With cold drinks in hand, they looked to be having a pretty good time in the low, soft neon light. A slow soul song came on and they embraced each other, moving smooth and easy. The woman wore the uniform of a maid from the Choctaw casinos.

“Man was crazy,” Spam said. “Just showed up that year with a bag. He stayed with some woman he know and then she kicked him out. He slept out in the woods for a long time. You know, out on the Trace. I don’t think he had a real job, people just called him Echo. Call him Echo ’cause he ended up only repeating you. Not answering you back.”