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got released from the hospital. She’s hurt bad.”
    “She had two sisters,” I said in a monotone. “The mother was named Rosabel.”
    “ Sí . Rosa, she goes by now.”
    It all came back to me then. Dominic was a talented bricklayer, not some poor schlub fresh over the border who barely knew his trade. A white contractor had been paying him peanuts to do jobs in River Oaks and Tanglewood. Nobody liked the contractor much, but everybody loved Dominic. So the next time they had a job, they tracked him down, not the contractor. Dom resisted at first, but the money was too good, so he started taking the jobs. This contractor was a mean son of a bitch named Cole. Cole told Dominic he was taking food out of his kids’ mouths, and threatened to hurt him if Dom didn’t stop taking jobs in those neighborhoods. Dominic tried to keep his head down, but he needed that high-end work. So one day Cole showed up drunk at a job site and went after Dom with a hammer. Dom defended himself. Cole went back to his truck, got a .45 from under the seat, and blew Dom’s brains out in front of five Mexican workers.
    Two miracles made that case different from so many I’d seen before. The first was that the homeowner’s wife had walked outside right before the shooting. She’d heard the yelling, and she saw the murder. That wiped out any wiggle room the jury might have had to take the word of a white shooter over the testimony of some illegals who could barely speak English. The second miracle was that Dominic Avila had been an American citizen for eleven months at the time he was shot.
    “How do you know all this detail?” I asked Vargas. “You didn’t hear that in the crime lab.”
    “I reached out to one of the cops who worked the rape scene,” he said. “Then I visited the Avila family.”
    “Christ, Felix. You’re trying hard to get fired, aren’t you?”
    “I couldn’t help it. I knew Dr. Kirmani had screwed up bad, and not for the first time. I had to put a face on the victim to get up the courage to do something about it.”
    “That’s what put me in your mind, isn’t it? When you found out about my connection to the Avilas.”
    Vargas shrugged, but any sense of guilt had left him. He’d already transferred much of the burden of his knowledge onto my back. “Señora Avila wanted to come to you herself, but when she heard how sick your wife was, she said she couldn’t bother you at a time like this. ‘We must all bear our misfortunes,’ she said. ‘The Lord tests us all.’ ”
    “Goddamn it,” I said, angry that he’d told me. I’m a sucker for nobility, humility, stoicism. And Rosabel Avila had it all, in spades. “There couldn’t possibly be a worse time for this, Felix.”
    At last a little guilt showed in his eyes. “I know.” He looked back at his car as though he couldn’t wait to leave. “Was I wrong to tell you?”
    I got up from the swing, walked up and down the porch, still thinking of Sarah and my duty to her. “No.”
    “ Gracias, Mr. Cage. So . . . what are you gonna do?”
    “Talk to Mitch Gaines, I guess.”
    “Shit. Is there any way you can leave my name out of that?”
    “I can try. But in the end . . .”
    Vargas sighed. “ Sí . I know. Fuck.”
    I made Felix give me his cell number, and then he got out of there like he wished he’d never come. And he was right to wish it.
    “I’ve got the distinct feeling this story doesn’t end well,” Jack says from his seat beside me. “And I want to hear the rest of it. But I need a quick intermission. That coffee’s hit my bladder. I’m going to take a leak in the river.”
    “Jack, that might be danger—”
    Before I can finish, he’s out of the BMW and making his way down the tumble of gray rocks with surprising agility. At the water’s edge, he unzips his fly, takes a stance, and starts urinating into the Mississippi like Patton pissing into the Rhine. When the proud arc finally diminishes to nothing, he zips up, then