Hours later, despite my exhaustion, I find it almost impossible to sleep. When I do, I dream of helmeted men on black horses pursuing me through dense fog. After I can stand no more of lying restless in the dark, I get up and go down to the kitchen, where I fix a bowl of raisin bran and watch the second half of To Have and Have Not with the volume set low.
As I watch Humphrey Bogart and his alcoholic first mate suffer through a hellish fishing charter, a dark memory rises into my mind. It wears the face of Lincoln Turner, my half-black half brother. I’ve only seen Lincoln three times since he confronted me in the Adams County jail, where I was being held on suspicion of murdering Forrest Knox. Twice from a distance, without him seeing me—not that I could tell, anyway. But the third time I realized he was following me across town in his truck. With the confidence imparted by the pistol under my seat and the bodyguard in the car behind me, I called Tim Weathers and told him what I planned to do. Then I pulled into a barbershop parking lot on Homochitto Street and waited to see if Lincoln would follow me.
He did.
He pulled his Chevy F-250 alongside my Audi, rolled down his window, and waited for me to do the same. In the truck, he was three feet higher than I off the ground, and his eyes smoldered with anger. My right hand gripping my pistol in my lap, I lowered my window with my left as crazy scenarios swirled through my brain. For some reason I was thinking of Cain and Abel, only I had no idea which of us was Cain and which was Abel. Maybe that would depend on who fired first—for I was strangely sure that Lincoln, too, had a weapon in his hand.
“You have something to say?” I asked, searching, as I always did in his presence, for my father’s face in his—or even for traces of my own. I saw none, and once more, I could not get over how dark he was. Passing him on the street, I would never have suspected a high percentage of Caucasian blood. But my skepticism was moot: a DNA test had proved Dad’s paternity beyond all doubt.
“So they let you out of jail,” Lincoln said in his deep bass voice. “You killed a state police officer with a spear, and they let you right out. So sorry, Mr. Mayor, all just a misunderstanding. It must be nice to throw that kind of weight.”
“I’m late for an appointment. If you have something to say, say it.”
The dark eyes regarded me with discomfiting intensity. “We got the same blood running through our veins, Penn Cage. So answer me this. How come you got everything and I got nothing?”
My half brother’s face was hard, but his curiosity seemed genuine. How could I answer his question? Summarize five hundred years of tragic history? Or would that simply be an evasion? Was the fault my father’s alone? I thought back to the report I’d received from the Chicago private detectives I’d hired three weeks before. Their information was sketchy, but what it revealed sobered me. In almost every way, Lincoln Turner and I are mirror opposites. While I was reared as the son and heir of a highly respected physician and a mother who could have modeled for a poster from the Eisenhower era, Lincoln grew up in government-subsidized housing on Chicago’s South Side, with an alcoholic mother and a brutal con man stepfather always in trouble with the law. Statistically speaking, my success and Lincoln’s failure were practically foreordained. While I was striving for a baseball championship and attending American Legion Boys’ State, Lincoln was scrapping in the streets and running from the Chicago PD. When his stepfather—whom Lincoln had believed was his real father—wasn’t in prison, he was gambling away his wife’s salary. It was a miracle Lincoln made it through law school without being convicted of a felony himself. And while I was transitioning from a successful legal career to a more lucrative one as an author of legal thrillers, Lincoln was slaving in a small firm, chasing small-time cases until he was finally busted for embezzling escrow funds from a client trust account. According to my sources, he did this in a desperate attempt to save his “father” from a long prison term, but that didn’t stop the Illinois State Bar Association from suspending his license.
Was it any wonder, then, that the eyes watching me from the truck window burned with such resentment? What galling rage must eat at his insides every time he thinks of the married white Mississippi doctor who impregnated his mother and abandoned her to the frozen Chicago ghetto? What must he see in my soft white skin and expensive clothes? In my reputation and my political power, however modest? In my lovely daughter with her blessed future? What did he feel, I wonder, when he heard that Caitlin had been murdered? One atom of sympathy? Or did he revel in unexpected schadenfreude and see Caitlin’s death as a gift in his quest to tear down all that my father has built in the years since he abandoned Viola Turner?
“You got a mama,” Lincoln said bluntly. “My mama’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
Contempt curled his upper lip. “Sorry don’t help her. Sorry don’t help nobody.”
“Are you sorry that my wife is dead? Or my fiancée?”
“I didn’t know the ladies. They were both rich, though, from what I hear. They had their time.”
“You think money takes away the pain of life?”
He barked a laugh, harsh and derisive. “Only somebody who’s got money could ask that.”
“Is that what you want out of all this? Money?”
“Everybody wants money. But there ain’t enough money in the world to take away my pain.”
“What do you want, then?”
“Justice.”
“That’s a big word. It means different things to different people.”
Lincoln shook his big head. “Only means one thing to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Payback.”
“You want our father to suffer the way your mother suffered.”
Lincoln smiled then, and his smile was more frightening than anything he’d ever said to me. “The Bible says the sins of the father will be visited upon the sons, even unto the seventh generation. You and your little girl ain’t but two generations. But that’s a start, I guess.”
My hand tightened on the pistol in my lap. “Are you threatening my daughter?”
“Man, I don’t have to threaten nobody. Karma’s on its way around, all by its own self.” He glanced away, at the cars passing on the road beside us, then behind my Audi at the big Yukon. “Got your muscle back there, huh? You keep on paying him. He can’t protect you from what’s coming.”
“I wouldn’t go back there and test him.”
Lincoln’s laugh was deep and jolly. “You know, most of our lives, you and me didn’t know each other existed. But it’s like I told you in that juke joint out by Anna’s Bottom. We’ve been tied together as sure as twins separated at birth. We come from the same pair of balls, but you got blessed and I got cursed. Maybe you come from the left nut and I come from the right. What you think?”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“You’re wrong, bro. Hey, you ever been diving?”
“Diving?”
“Scuba diving.”
“A few times.”