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server, collection agent, security guard, investigator, and at one time or another had tried virtually every job at the lesser levels of the legal profession.
    “Not bad,” Ray said.
    Forrest started a tale, this one involving a shoving match in a hospital emergency room, and Ray began to drift. His brother had also worked as a bouncer in a strip bar, a calling that was short-lived when he was beaten up twice in one night. He’d spent one full year touring Mexico on a new Harley-Davidson; the trip’s funding had never been clear. He had tried leg-breaking for aMemphis loan shark, but again proved deficient when it came to violence.
    Honest employment had never appealed to Forrest, though, in all fairness, interviewers were generally turned off by his criminal record. Two felonies, drug-related, both before he turned twenty but permanent blotches nonetheless.
    “Are you gonna talk to the old man?” he was asking.
    “No, I’ll see him Sunday,” Ray answered.
    “What time will you get to Clanton?”
    “I don’t know. Sometime around five, I guess. You?”
    “God said five o’clock, didn’t he?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    “Then I’ll be there sometime after five. See you, Bro.”
    Ray circled the phone for the next hour, deciding yes, he would call his father and just say hello, then deciding no, that anything to be said now could be said later, and in person. The Judge detested phones, especially those that rang at night and disrupted his solitude. More often than not he would simply refuse to answer. And if he picked up he was usually so rude and gruff that the caller was sorry for the effort.
    He would be wearing black trousers and a white shirt, one with tiny cinder holes from the pipe ashes, and the shirt would be heavily starched because the Judge had always worn them that way. For him a white cotton dress shirt lasted a decade, regardless of the number of stains and cinder holes, and it got laundered and starched every week at Mabe’s Cleaners onthe square. His tie would be as old as his shirt and the design would be some drab print with little color. Navy blue suspenders, always.
    And he would be busy at his desk in his study, under the portrait of General Forrest, not sitting on the porch waiting for his sons to come home. He would want them to think he had work to do, even on a Sunday afternoon, and that their arrivals were not that important.

CHAPTER 4
    The drive to Clanton took fifteen hours, more or less, if you went with the truckers on the busy four-lanes and fought the bottlenecks around the cities, and it could be done in one day if you were in a hurry. Ray was not.
    He packed a few things in the trunk of his Audi TT roadster, a two-seat convertible he’d owned for less than a week, and said farewell to no one because no one really cared when he came or went, and left Charlottesville. He would not exceed the speed limits and he would not drive on a four-lane, if he could possibly avoid it. That was his challenge—a trip without sprawl. On the leather seat next to him he had maps, a thermos of strong coffee, three Cuban cigars, and a bottle of water.
    A few minutes west of town he turned left on the Blue Ridge Parkway and began snaking his way southon the tops of the foothills. The TT was a 2000 model, just a year or two off the drawing board. Ray had read Audi’s announcement of a brand-new sports car about eighteen months earlier, and he’d rushed to order the first one in town. He had yet to see another one, though the dealer assured him they would become popular.
    At an overlook, he put the top down, lit a Cuban, and sipped coffee, then took off again at the maximum speed of forty-five. Even at that pace Clanton was looming.
    Four hours later, in search of gas, Ray found himself sitting at a stoplight on Main Street in a small town in North Carolina. Three lawyers walked in front of him, all talking at once, all carrying old briefcases that were scuffed and worn almost as badly as their