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flowed so extravagantly that Patty went a little daft, and I had to take Dale’s pistol from her before she could shoot me with it. Then I flung open the back door of the cruiser and told Dale’s Mexicans, “Adios.” It did the job, judging by how they scrambled.
    “Not quite the day I’d hoped for,” I said once I’d met Desmond at the Geo. “Sure you want to do this?”
    Desmond told me, “Doing it already.”

FOUR
     
    Of course, Desmond needed a Coney Island just to settle his nerves, but we both doubted he could Obi-Wan us out of this mess, so we passed up the Indianola Sonic for the branch on the outskirts of Greenville, twenty miles west, and backed up to the Mississippi River.
    We got takeout and carried it over the levee to a weedy, trash-strewn park with a view of a flooded cottonwood grove and a derelict casino barge.
    By then I’d studied K-Lo’s invoice and knew what we were up against. That boy wasn’t just a shithead with a shovel anymore. He was a Dubois, a name they couldn’t be bothered to Frenchify in the Delta. Dew -boys—front loaded and hick specific—was good enough for them.
    Duboises were notorious unprincipled rubbish, and the region was filthy with them. That boy could have been an O’Malley in Dublin for all the sifting we’d have to do.
    “Percy Dwayne,” I said, reading it out. “Know him?”
    Desmond shook his head. He drew open his shirt at the collar to show me a leathery scar on his shoulder. “Luther Dubois, down by Yazoo.” Desmond said. “Him,” he told me, “I know.”
    Desmond had a buddy, Kendell, who was reliable police. He’d worked all over the Delta, from Clarksdale clear to Vicksburg, and was always getting laid off and rehired as the books and the budgets permitted. The last Desmond had heard, he was doing traffic stops out in Leflore County.
    There’s a spa hotel in Greenwood people come to for a treat, and the bulk of them get there on Route 7 off the interstate, through Leflore County. Like most Delta roads, it’s flat and straight, and you’ve hit ninety before you know it. A vindictive lawman can empty a summons book in an afternoon.
    “Kendell’s got no use for Dale,” Desmond told me. “Might help us run that Dubois down.”
    We were soon back in the Geo driving though downtown Greenville. It’s a hard place to be inconspicuous because there’s nobody much around, and Greenville’s a town that was grand once and sprawling and overrun with people. The boulevards are wide. The vacant buildings are ornate, Romanesque piles. When steamboats still called and cotton left the Delta on the river, Greenville had an opera house and a full-time chamber orchestra. It had hotels and restaurants and ladies’ boutiques, was invested with cachet and bustle, which had all drained away well past the point of exhaustion over the years.
    Now Greenville had empty storefronts and intermittent renewal projects that never got beyond bricking the crosswalks and changing out the lampposts.
    There were a couple of cars parked slant in at the diner near the levee, but otherwise the place was desolate except for me and Desmond. Anybody looking for two fellows in a Geo could have seen us from three hundred yards away.
    Desmond chose to dodge the truck route on a back way out of Greenville that would loop through open farmland and bring us to Highway 7 after a while. The road we were on had been house-lined at first and then shack-plagued and hovel-dotted before we passed beyond people entirely into an unbroken sea of green.
    We went from weeds and trash and leggy gardenia bushes and drowsy mongrels to luxurious jade green soybeans stretching as far as we could see. The transition was stark and instructive, a sort of Delta affirmation that the people could go to shit if they pleased, but the crops would go to market.
    We’d rolled in an instant out of food stamps and into agribusiness. There might have been chicken fingers and government cheese for the two-legged