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station wagon and heading toward Fort Benning on Victory Drive. On Victory, there were dry cleaners and pawnshops and liquor stores and churches of redemption. Little trailer parks and workingman’s diners and drive-ins that pulled you in with neon arrows. The rain hardened and fell in long, endless sheets, and I heard little else but the drumming on the cab, until I spotted the big flashing marquee for the Victory Drive-In and another long, sweeping neon arrow that pointed past an empty box office and through an open chain-link gate. There was supposed to be a Creature Double Feature tonight and a special showing of The Robe on Sunday. But the customers had already gotten a weather refund and had pulled out of the lot.
    The screen was big and concrete and seemed like an ancient monolith in the endless gravel lot pinging with rain. I slowed by the bleachers covered by a corrugated tin roof and parked close to the lighted overhang, and we made a run for it.
    Soaked, Britton wiped the drops from his pressed slacks and shook his straw summer hat. “Damn it.”
    Moments later, a rusted Ford pickup stopped short of us and a little man came running for the overhang, a newspaper held over his head. No one shook hands, and the little man, now out of breath, nervously wrenched off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his blue coveralls. When he sat them back on his face, he looked like a bug.
    “Anyone follow?” he asked.
    “No,” Britton said. “We’re fine, Quinnie.”
    “You sure?” Quinnie asked.
    “Sure we’re sure,” Britton said. “We did what you said. Now, what’d you know?”
    Quinnie Kelley was a little man, not much more than five feet, and wore enormous Coke-bottle glasses and a short little fedora. He still had on some dirty blue coveralls from his work as the courthouse janitor. As he looked out into the rain and watched little rivulets forming and tilting toward a long, narrow ditch, he wiped the rain from his neck and put his hands on his waist.
    “Heard some talk ’round the place,” Quinnie said. “Not much, but some.”
    “Who?” I asked.
    “I don’t know who. Some peoples is sayin’ that Mr. Shepherd called in a killer from Chicago. And others say Miss Fannie Belle. I cain’t be sure. You heard the name Tommy Capps?”
    “You said you saw something?” I asked. Everyone knew about Tommy Capps. He was a thug and a killer, but not dumb enough to shoot Mr. Patterson on Fifth Avenue on a Friday night.
    “I don’t want this known. You hearin’ me? I got a family. I got kids. But when I was locking up last night, I heard them shots and seen this man run across Fourteenth and back behind the jail.”
    “Who?”
    Quinnie froze. “I didn’t say who. I don’t know nothin’ about who. I’m just sayin’ I seen a man.”
    “What did he look like?” I asked.
    “If you say I saw somethin’, I’ll deny it. And I didn’t see his face. He was runnin’ back in the shadows and I didn’t have on my glasses.”
    Hugh Britton looked to me and then back at Quinnie.
    “That’s all you got?” Britton said. “Well, good God Almighty. You call up Lamar at supper and have us driving through roadblocks and the rain for somethin’ that you ain’t even gonna admit to? And then you tell us that it may be Hoyt Shepherd or Fannie Belle who had him killed. Well, thanks, Quinnie. That’s some fine work.”
    “Hold the damn phone,” Quinnie said, balancing up on his toes. “I know a man and I ain’t sayin’ his name because that sure as hell is a one-way ticket to the river. But I’ll tell what he told me. He heard someone, an officer of the court, say he wanted Mr. Patterson dead. This man said Mr. Patterson wouldn’t live if he won that election.”
    We looked at him as he shifted from foot to foot.
    Quinnie Kelley shook his head and looked out in the rain, the neon sign, the long sweep of the Victory Drive-In arrow. “I’d keep my eye on Mr. Arch Ferrell, if I were you. That’s the