AS WE DROVE OUT, the evening sky was a beautiful purple. The whole of Shonus County was more rural than I’d imagined, and we moved through an area where a grouping of giant oaks formed a canopy over the road. It cut out the city lights almost entirely and blanketed us in darkness.
“It’s up here,” Beaudin said, motioning as we crossed over a small bridge. I slowed and parked where he told me to, along the side of the highway. From there, we walked on foot.
A line of Leyland cypress trees was planted, about fifty feet from the highway. Beaudin moved ahead of me, along the road. “You married?”
I figured where he was going. It was two days before Christmas, and here I was, wandering rural Georgia with him.
“I was,” I said. “No longer.”
“Kids?”
“Not at present.”
“It was right there.” Beaudin pointed at an area about thirty yards off the road. “But it’s private land.”
I smiled at him. “Well, we’re just looking right? Not gonna steal anyone’s fruit.”
I walked over to the tree-lined area, and Beaudin followed me. I have the build of a tight end—tall but stocky—and I lowered my head under some of the smaller trees.
“This boy Junius wasn’t the only one who went missing that summer, P.T.” Beaudin flicked his eyebrows. “There was a girl too. Also black and around Junius’s age.”
“What happened to her?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged. “Police eventually called it a runaway. I think the bigger concern was if she was sick. Infected with something. She’d been to the hospital the day before.”
“For what?” I asked.
Behind us, I heard a noise. A truck moving through brush.
“She’d had bloody noses,” he said. “Some pain in her chest.”
The bloody nose detail popped for me. I thought of the kids in Mason Falls with typhoid.
I turned to ask Beaudin about this, but the truck accelerated, kicking up dirt as it cut through the tree line. It had fog lights mounted on top and came at us, fast.
The truck slid to a stop about twenty feet away, and the lights were blinding. A dirt cloud laid thick in the air.
“Put your hands up high, yo,” a voice said through a bullhorn.
“Jesus,” Beaudin said. “Damn rednecks.”
Then I heard a shotgun cock, and we raised our hands.
“I’m a police officer,” I said.
“And I’m an American,” the voice came back. “Y’all know you’re on private property?”
The headlights shut off, but through the fog lamps, I could see a Bushmaster AR-15 mounted to the top of the pickup. The Bushmaster is a semiautomatic, and mounting one to your truck is illegal in Georgia.
“I’m gonna pull out my badge real slow,” I said.
I did this, and a skinny guy in a tank tee jumped down from the truck. He was no more than nineteen.
As he put his hands on my wallet, I spun him around, pulling out my Glock and shoving it against his temple. I had him down on the ground in two seconds. “If there’s any more of you,” I hollered, “I got a gun to his head.”
“It’s just me,” the skinny guy said.
“You’re under arrest.”
The kid started laughing then, his whole attitude a half-bubble off plumb.
“What are you giggling about?” I said.
But the kid just kept it up, even as his head was shoved in the dirt.
“You got no clue who you’re messing with,” he said.