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“You want a beer?” Lillie asked.

“Yep.”

“Aren’t you still on duty?” she said, walking into her kitchen.

Quinn loosed his tie and yanked it off his neck, tossing it onto a chair. “Kenny and Dave Cullison are on patrol,” he said. “They’ll call if they need us.”

“You want a Coors or a Bud?”

“Long as it’s cold,” Quinn said.

He sat in a chair in Lillie’s living room, her daughter Rose, now almost two, watching him with suspicion from a big overstuffed sofa. The little girl turned her head to Dora the Explorer, a personal favorite since the little girl found some kind of kinship with the character. They were both brown-skinned girls with brown hair and brown eyes who spoke Spanish. Lille had rescued her from a filthy trailer in north Mississippi in a human-trafficking case and later adopted her as an infant. It had been important to Lillie the girl learned her native language, along with some choice English expressions that were pure Lillie.

Lillie handed him a beer and sat down next to Rose. Lillie had a beer, too, and took a swig. It was nearly 1700. Quinn had to be at the county supervisors’ meeting in an hour to present the monthly crime stats and the budget for the New Year. He would’ve been more excited about a visit to a proctologist.

“When I came home, after my mom got sick, I told myself I’d never stay,” she said. “I had friends and a life in Memphis. This was a job and temporary. But then Sheriff Beckett died and you came home. And now there’s Rose.”

“Lots of ungrateful people.”

“I should have had Sonny Stevens cataloging everything in my home,” she said. “We should have tagged everything in the house so they couldn’t pull that shit.”

On TV, Dora had just befriended a magical talking llama. The llama was apparently also friends with a Spanish-speaking flute.

“They would’ve found another way,” Quinn said. “They would’ve searched the SO’s office and thrown it down there. They had the gun and would have made it work.”

Lillie put her hands over Rose’s ears. “So these goddamn shitbags,” she said, “are working with and knew that sniper.”

“Yep.”

“That sniper not only shot back at me, he was trying to punch your lights out, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said. “He continued to shoot after I got Caddy and Jason in the truck. He was there to tie up loose ends.”

“I hate this,” Lillie said. “But they sure got us beat.”

Lillie took her hands off Rose’s ears. Rose was so intent on the cartoon that she’d barely noticed they’d been talking. The evil Swiper, a bandito fox, lurked in some bushes, waiting for Dora, the magical llama, the flute, and Dora’s monkey.

“How’d you like to attend the county supervisors’ meeting with me?”

“That’s tonight?”

Quinn nodded. He drank some more beer. “Maybe if I keep on drinking for the next hour, I can show up drunk. And they can fire me.”

“They’re going to try and do that anyway.”

“They’re going to try and embarrass me tonight,” Quinn said. “You, too.”

“They may wait for the charges to come.”

“No,” Quinn said. “It’s tonight. Boom heard a couple those sonsabitches conspiring at the County Barn. They have a quorum to ask me to step down until the investigation of us is completed.”

“They can’t do that.”

“Nope,” Quinn said. “But this is the official launch of the mudslinging.”

Lillie tipped back her beer. Her home was a small cottage with beaded-board walls and clean, spare rooms. She had a lot of antiques from her mother, lots of old photos of people who’d lived in Jericho a long time before Quinn and Lillie. Men with big mustaches and boiled shirts and women in thick, ruffled, uncomfortable-looking clothes and tall lace-up boots. On a side table was a framed picture of Lillie and some woman Quinn had never met, dressed-up and seated in some nice restaurant.

“They’re hoping you’ll turn,” Lillie said. “That’s what the talk of manslaughter is about. They want to get me for killing Leonard’s stooge, Burney, and probably try and make that convict my accessory.”

“That’s something,” Quinn said.

“How so?”

“That they are so goddamn stupid, they think I’d sell you out,” Quinn said. “I can’t imagine what they’re hoping to accomplish. What’s their objective here? Just to get us both gone?”

“That seems like a done deal.”

Lillie leaned back into the sofa and reached for a throw to cover Rose’s small body and bare feet. The girl was bright-eyed and beautiful. As she grew, her Indian features became more pronounced. The large black eyes, the nose and high cheekbones. She’d been a miracle for Lillie, even with the tantrums and the night terrors and the screaming that came out of nowhere and grew more intense. Sometimes, Lillie said, she seemed completely detached, trapped inside her own head. They had seen specialists from Jackson to Memphis, everyone realizing whatever abuse and trauma the girl had experienced, even as an infant, wasn’t done with her.

But now, in front of the television, cuddled with Lille and watching Dora, she was happy.

“I got to go,” Quinn said, rising.

Lillie looked up at him, her eyes meeting his, and said, “Give ’em hell.”

Johnny Stagg always hated having to conduct his business in public, once a month, center stage, in the Tibbehah County Building, spending hours talking about things already been decided. But this was the law, had been the law for a hundred years or more, and, as he looked out into the seats, he was surprised to see them filled. The Board of Supervisors meeting wasn’t exactly a hot ticket in Jericho unless you planned on getting your road paved or wanted to complain about logging traffic. Most of the time, folks just asked for an improvement in public utilities, which didn’t have a damn thing to do with them. But here they were, country-come-to-town, wanting to know just what was going to be done about their sheriff killing a fellow lawman in cold blood.

Stagg waited for things to begin, taking center seat on the dais, right next to that fat old Chuck McDougal, who represented District 3, and Mr. Dupuy, who represented District 4 down in Sugar Ditch. Sam Bishop, Jr., ran things within the city limits of Jericho and was the son of a Boy Scout troop leader. Bobby Pickens ran things out toward Drivers Flat, District 5, down into the bottomland that was white, all the way to the border with the Choctaw Nation. You couldn’t rely on Bishop or Pickens. Pickens’s mind could be swayed, but Bishop thought his opinion mattered two shits.

“Call to order,” Stagg said. “Glad to see so many interested faces with us tonight. Mr. McDougal, would you please lead us all in the pledge and a short prayer?”

Dupuy was on his cell phone, talking to some woman he was courting. McDougal had been clipping his fingernails under the dais straight onto the floor. His daddy had been the biggest crook this county had ever seen and he’d have been the same if he’d had half a brain.

McDougal stood, pig-eyed and porky, and put his hand to the American pin on his chest. He gave a lot of effect to saying “under God,” as that had always been his election platform. He told people in Tibbehah that the government wanted to take the Lord out of schools.

Stagg stood, hand on chest, spotting Quinn Colson in the center row. He was in uniform and sitting with the county coroner, a nice-looking piece of tail that the sheriff was fucking. He looked right at Stagg. Stagg nodded to him. Quinn’s expression did not change.