He was giving them a goddamn police escort.

There was a campground set off from the main road with picnic tables and barbecue grills. But few people used this place, especially on the Fourth when it was too hot to camp unless you were near some water.

The cruiser stopped in a gravel lot. He shined his headlights onto a single tent set off from the picnic tables. It was Army, a one-man. A clothesline strung from the opening, where pants, shirts and socks had been strung to dry. There was a small fire, out and smoldering, and then there was a black man crawling out, holding a forearm across his eyes to block the bright light. He moved toward them slowly, shirtless, with a pair of ragged cutoff pants and unlaced Army boots.

He held his big hands wide in an open gesture, confused at all the headlights aimed his way. Hank Stillwell was on him first with a lead pipe and the skinny black man was down on the ground, a crew of the Born Losers taking their turn on him. Jason sat on his bike as the lawman, Royce, wandered over with a plug of tobacco in his mouth.

He eyed Colson with some suspicion.

“Ain’t you gonna have some fun?”

“Where’s the sheriff?” Jason said.

“Transporting a prisoner to Tupelo.”

“Aren’t you gonna stop this?” Jason said.

Royce looked at him, spit, and shrugged. “Stop what?”

The man no longer looked like a man but some kind of ragged, bloodied creature. His eyes had swollen shut, teeth knocked from his head, and he was limping, bent at the waist, unable to take in a breath, as they dragged him to the patrol car and tossed him in the trunk.

Chains circled his index finger in the air, got on his bike, and they rode south again. The air felt good and cool on Jason’s sweating shirt, him thinking again some sense had come to Royce and that they’d had their fun, taken out their rage, and they’d leave the man at the county jail.

They’d done what they wanted.

But at the town square, the patrol car turned, headed west, away from the sheriff’s office and the jail and heading straight down Jericho Road where those girls had been taken earlier that night.

The city turned into the county, crossing a creek, and then there were wide stretches of cleared land and pastures and farms. All along the road, there were a few trailers, some old houses, but a lot of blackness and green rolling hills empty except for the cattle and crops.

The car stopped several miles into the middle of nowhere. The bikers parked on both sides of the highway, everyone dismounting, waiting for Royce to pop the lock so they could hoist the man from the trunk.

Jason would ride away. He’d ride away now and be done with this.

Hank Stillwell walked up to him. He was still not Hank. He was white-faced and speaking so fast it was hard to understand much of what he was saying other than “Gonna hang him.”

“They can’t.”

“They are,” Stillwell said. “I wanted that man to bleed. But I don’t want this. I can’t talk to Chains. You talk to Chains. He’s power-crazy. He got the law with him and everything.”

They were parked off road, by an endless stretch of barbed wire on cedar posts. There was half a moon, enough light to see the bikers pulling the black man through the cow field toward a big dark farmhouse set off from the road. There was no light in the house and the windows looked to be boarded-up.

But there was a tree. A single thick oak that had probably been there since Reconstruction.

“He won’t listen to me,” Jason said. “Let’s just go.”

“Big Doug,” he said. “Talk to Big Doug.”

“Let’s just go,” Jason said.

Stillwell was shaking as if it were winter, arms around himself. Big Doug sat on the cop car, smoking a joint. He held a coil of rope in his hands, coolly looking out at the pasture, joint in his big, thick fingers, taking in the whole scene as if it were a beautiful night.

Stillwell and Jason walked to him. They asked him to stop it all.

“Too late, brothers,” Big Doug said, thick and strong, shirtless under that leather vest flying the colors. “It’s been decided.”

“‘It’s been decided’?” Jason said. “Jesus, this isn’t Dodge City. Give him up to Royce.”

“Royce wants him hung,” Big Doug said. “The deputy said if we don’t get it done now, white folks will make a big deal of his innocence. He ain’t innocent. He had the cross. That cross was a fucking sign.”

Jason left them and hopped the barbed wire and grabbed Chains hard by the arm. The look in the biker’s face was beyond wild and mean, it was ecstatic. His gray eyes shined with such excitement and pleasure that he grabbed Jason back by the arm and pulled him in for a hug. “This is it,” LeDoux said. “Get the booze.”

They brought out the jelly jars of birthday cake moonshine taken from Dupuy in the Ditch, passing around hits of the bright yellow stuff. More cigarettes and joints were lit, men told jokes and laughed.

The condemned sat bloodied and beaten, Indian-style, under the tree. The man could not see, eyes completely closed.

Jason walked over to him and knelt. “Did you do this?” he said. “Did you rape that little girl, kill her friend?”

“Sir,” the black man said, “I just found a purse in the trash. That’s all I did. I ain’t even from around here.”

“You a soldier?” Jason said.

“Yes, sir,” the busted man said.

“My father was a soldier,” Jason said. “I’ll get you out of here.”

Jason caught the eye of Hank Stillwell and they moved over to where LeDoux stood with Big Doug and Royce. Big Doug had fashioned a noose and had tossed it over his own head, laughing and sticking his tongue out sideways.

“This isn’t what Hank wants,” Jason said. “That man is a drifter. A soldier like you. He just found that girl’s stuff in the trash.”

Chains didn’t say a word. Royce, plug still in his jaw, just stared at him as if he were speaking in tongues.

Jason touched Royce’s shoulder and said, “Do your job.”

He hadn’t noticed the deputy had his pistol out, cold-clocking Jason on the temple, sending him to the ground. Stillwell bent down to help him. “Y’all stop,” Stillwell said. “You got to stop. My baby is dead. My baby is dead.”

“Then be a fucking man,” LeDoux said.

“Not like this.”

“This is the old way,” LeDoux said. “The old way.”

Big Doug removed the noose from around his neck and walked to the ancient tree, tossing the rope up high over a fat branch. Some of the bikers had ridden their Harleys out in the field and lit up the trunk of the oak. More followed, as Stillwell knelt down to Jason, helping him to his feet. More Harley engines gunned and bumped up and over the rolling hills to that old tree, lighting it up bright in the early hours.

Chains rode up last, taking his chopper across the cow field to the tree, turning around and rolling the bike back by digging his boots into the earth.

Jason and Stillwell walked to the black man. Stillwell asking, “Did you kill my Lori? Did you push her into your car?”

Blind, the man just muttered, “You see me with a car? I don’t have nothing.”

Big Doug, fat-bellied and serious, walked over to the black man, tossed the noose around his neck and tugged on it to find the proper fit. All the engines gunned and gunned around the big lone oak. Lights now shined high up into the branches, the old house dead and silent on the hill.

The end of the rope was tied to the sissy bar on back of Chain’s Harley.