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Delta drive like fools, dead fast and all over the road. I was in my lane when I passed her, both hands firmly on the wheel, and if I was going over eighty it was only by a click or two.
    When I looked in my mirror and saw that cruiser whipping around in the road, I thought it was probably Kendell wanting to fill me in on something. So I pulled off and waited. I was leaning against the hood when that Grand Marquis pulled in behind me and stopped.
    We were alongside a massive soybean field down around Hollandale. The pivot irrigator had just started up, a monstrous, mechanized thing. It was hooked at one end to a wellhead in the field and rolled slowly in a circle watering scores of acres at once. The tires on it would fit a tractor. It was hundreds of yards long and probably thirty or forty feet high. The water shot out in majestic arcs and rained down iridescent on the beans.
    The sheer scale of agriculture in the Delta was a thing you could become blind to. The huge combines, and the crop dusters, and the satellite-guided tractors. The robust emerald green of the fields, the rich blackness of the earth. It was good to get out and just look at it sometimes instead of racing by with the radio loud and your head full of other stuff.
    I had a question for Kendell about the wells they’d bored all over the place. What they drew. How deep they were. It was something I could stand to know, but before I could shout out to him (I heard him on the cindered shoulder), somebody else entirely told me, “Sir, let’s see your hands.”
    It was a woman’s voice. I swung my head around, and there she was. Her uniform crisp. Her hair drawn back. She had a hand resting on her Glock.
    â€œLet’s see them,” she said.
    I uncrossed my arms and showed her both my palms.
    â€œLicense and registration.”
    I was going to say, “You’re kidding,” but she clearly wasn’t kidding. Everything about her told me that. I checked the tag above her pocket flap. T. Raintree.
    â€œWhat’s the problem?” I asked her.
    â€œLicense,” she told me. “Registration.”
    I fished out my wallet. I was still driving on a Virginia license that hadn’t yet expired. I’d been in the Delta maybe eight or nine months by then. My tags were Mississippi, though, which was kind of a contradiction.
    She studied my license. She asked me of my Ranchero, “This thing yours?”
    I nodded and stepped around to the passenger door, reached into the glove box. I brought out the registration and gave her that as well.
    â€œIs this a current address?”
    My license had a central Virginia P.O. box number on it.
    I shook my head. “Been down here a little while now.”
    She gave me a little nod. I watched her. I couldn’t help but watch her. She’d gone to some effort to look stern and pinched and tough, but that couldn’t really hide the fact that she was exotic and lovely. Choctaw, I had to figure. Dark eyes. Raven hair. A café au lait burnish to her. I tried to look without her knowing I was looking.
    â€œYou staying?”
    I shrugged like we were there just making small talk. I can’t say I knew exactly what she meant.
    â€œDo you intend to stay here,” she said, enunciating each word crisply.
    â€œOh,” I told her. “Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”
    â€œGo to the DMV and get relicensed.”
    â€œBeen meaning to.”
    â€œDo it.”
    â€œRight. First thing.”
    I figured that essentially wrapped up our business, so I moved on to the personal.
    â€œYou know Kendell?” I asked her. “Kendell Fairley. He’s a sergeant or something.”
    She nodded. Not a dent otherwise. She still had my license and registration both.
    â€œI’ve got you at eighty-two in a fifty-five.”
    I’d been in the Delta long enough to know that the proper response was “So?” Instead I pressed my lips together and managed not to